Re: It's come to my attention that...
I don't know what is hip, but i do think that it is more important how a specific piece of wood is structured/weighted than what specific type of wood it is.
You can have an 8.5lb Les Paul or a 15lb one. They will not sound the same. They will have a certain less pauliness to them, but that has more to do, imo with the way a les paul is built and outfitted(a huge slab of wood with a set neck and a pair of humbuckers with a solid chunk of bridge posted deeply and solidly into very nearly the center mass of the guitar).
Anyhow, you can have a widely spaced board with wobbly grain lines 1/2" apart and all kinds of resinous knots or heartwood, or you can have a supertight, superstraight grain totally clear of knots made of the best most solid section of the tree. They will not sound the same.
You can, as i have, totally get away with carefully choosing your wood to get for instance, a too-thin piece of pine from the cheapo hardware store, or a section of hemlock(not generally a guitar wood) to sound like a good telecaster.
Granted there are some oddball woods that are unique enough to be difficult to replicate with a different species. Ebony, for example is extremely dense and kind of i guess almost greasy. There aren't many alternative woods that do what it does.
IMO, most of the traditionally accepted "this wood sounds like _____" stem more from what kind of structure
is more typical for a specific variety, rather than some inherent sound nature of the wood itself. Maple is generally hard and heavy with a tight grain and few knots. But it isn't always. Mahogany(the real stuff) is usually light and straight grained with a very consistent structure. But sometimes it is heavy or with a crazy wavy grain structure. Ash really varies an awful lot between the different types but some are almost like maple in weight and grain(but not in hardness) and some types are almost like pine in weight and grain(but not always, but sometimes, in hardness).
All trees are sort of unique though, depending on where they grew and what they experienced over the years. So it is totally, IMO possible to look at massive amount of wood from different types of trees and hand pick different species wood that will sound very similar to each other.