Are you saying this in terms of just the fingerboard material, or the rest of the neck wood not including the fingerboard? Because I’d have to say (and I’d guess many would say) that a rosewood fingerboard does indeed sound different than a maple fingerboard, regardless of the neck material.
Also, the style of the neck - bolt on or through neck, with or without a hard-tailed bridge would make a difference to the sound even if the neck material were the same in all those designs.
Gotta disagree. If anything, with solidbodies, neck play a much bigger role in tone generation.
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This assumes you are playing a classic rock guitar - relatively low-output pickups played through an overdriven, preferably tube amp. If you take the nickname for a Telecaster - a “plank with a microphone stuck in it” - sorta literally, then the mic (the pickup) is amplifying the basic vibrations of the guitar.
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In my experience - and I have had a lot of guitars and have specifically dug into neck materials and profiles to figure out my preferences - that if you have a big-necked guitar and a solid, well-made neck joint - bolt on or set neck - with plenty of wood-to-wood contact, you get a better sounding guitar. The whole solid-bodied-and-big-necked guitar vibrates better as an overall unit.
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neck materials and fingerboards matter in my experience. The harder the material of the fingerboard, the brighter the response. Finished maple and ebony are hard and bright; rosewood is softer and takes a bit of edge off the highs. This has been my experience across these varieties.
There is much geekery on neck joint construction, neck beefiness, neck importance, etc., all over teh interwebs at message boards, etc. Try searches at the biggies like The Gear Page, Acoustic Guitar Forum, TDPRI (for Telecasters), etc…
Hey, Wordman, I just sent you an e-mail about the Creamsicle.
So, how do you feel about tuners and guitar sound? I’m hearing all kinds of weird stuff about mass there.
I have a very nice sounding American Standard Strat. I replaced the stock tuners with Fender locking versions. I think it killed the tone a little. Makes stringing it a lot easier, though.
I focus on tuners for functionality; never encountered any that made hear a big tone difference. They need to be accurate tuning-wise and help deal with string ends. I like Fender split post tuners; you trim the string end down in a hole and then wrap it around. But heavy tuners and tone? Nah…
EtA: and thanks for the email; just replied…
I fully agree with this. Maple and Ebony fretboards are basically the same thing with a different colour scheme, and sound the same. Rosewood tends to be a little less bright. I’d say Rosewood has more of a midrange emphasis, while maple/ebony have a higher emphasis, upper mids and high end. I find that the low end is pretty similar across fretboard types, or at least I’ve never noted any particular differences.
The other main difference is that almost all bolt necks are maple. I don’t have any direct experience of non-maple bolt necks, but what I hear is that maple is brighter than most other common neck woods.
With set necks, the cheaper ones are usually maple-necked and the more expensive ones are usually mahogany-necked. (I’m talking about the neck itself, not the fretboard, which is almost always rosewood or something meant to approximate it). Cheaper Les Paul style guitars with maple necks are generally brighter and lack a bit of the warmth of mahogany set necks. More clarity, less warmth. Which may or may not be a good thing depending on taste.
All of these differences are subtle, and you can’t expect the sort of night/day differences that people who hear with their eyes talk about. But the neck has a much much bigger effect on sound than the body. People who talk about body woods and the finish thereon affecting the sound of a solid-body electric are delusional, but the neck does have an effect.
I’ve heard that headstock mass can have some effect on sound, and that specifically it can bring out more low end and contribute to sustain. So, theoretically, different tuners can make an audible difference. However, more weight at the headstock would also cause more neck-dive, and contribute to the overall weight of the guitar on your shoulder, which can be a big deal.
I do not subscribe to the current “wisdom” that lighter guitars sound better, any more than I agree with the “wisdom” of the 70s and 80s that claimed the exact opposite. I will say that I’ve played some very heavy guitars that sounded great, and some light ones that sounded great, and plenty of dogs of all varieties. The lighter ones are certainly more comfortable to play, which is a worthwhile thing in itself.
I mostly agree with this. I think necks, neck mass, and neck joints are critially important to a solidbodies tone (if you aren’t overriding their influence with high-output pickups, etc.), and agree that many distinctions made over body woods and weights are way overblown on line.
The legend is that Jimi picked Strats made new at the time because he liked the (then) newer, bigger headstocks. Meh; whatever. If you are at a point in your playing where you can get that last % of improvement by switching to a neck with a bigger headstock or heavier tuners, you are a better player than me. I can see where it could have more of an effect on an acoustic guitar - open-backed, lightly-built tuners can sound very different from a set of sealed, heavier, better-machined Grover tuners on a well-made acoustic; i have experience with that. What is interesting is that the change is not always for the better - e.g., a bit more sustain on the wrong acoustic can make the notes clash harmonically a bit more. So, different - but not always better.
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I agree. Weight is a factor to tone, but there is no hard and fast rule. Again, I find this to be different with acoustics - I prefer Martins and Gibsons, and as a rule, lighter=better for those particular acoustics (in the 70’s when Martin reinforced their guitars more to avoid paying Warranty repairs, the guitars got heavier and the tone died). Having said that, other acoustic makes - I believe Guild is one - have designs that sound great with a heavier guitar.
Bottom line is that you have to invest time, learn what you like and go from there. Hard to do for casual players - but the rules of thumb are just that - at best, rules of thumb…
I just dropped a pair of Seymour Duncan 59 humbuckers into my dirt cheap Epiphone Dot Studio (the new pickups cost almost as much as the guitar did).
That made a way bigger difference than the mass of the headstock, or just about anything else.
But having said that, I do find that lighter guitars make for a better sound… because you won’t hear me bitch and complain about how much my back is hurting.
My 150.00 Galveston bass. It looks like a greenish-blue in the sunlight, more blue indoors.
Sitting behind it is some goof I hired to hold it for 50 cents. 
Q
Some of Les Paul’s gear is going up for auction:
http://guitarsquid.com/Latest/sweet-auction-alert-les-pauls-estate.html
Not the Log or any early tape echo or multi-track units (there better be a museum for those), but one of the first Gold Les Pauls from 1952.
The one that caught my eye:
If that is an accurate description, then the estimate is woefully undershot - something Leo Fender GAVE to Les Paul, and would likely be worth that estimate amount or more just on its own as a '51 Nocaster? I wouldn’t even want to guess…
I take it you swapped those in to replace the “Duncan Designed” stock pups, right? I have the same guitar with the stock pickups; how would you compare those with your new ones in that guitar?
For the purposes of discussion, let me simplify my original post. I don’t see how a one piece maple neck on a Stratocaster would sound any different than a maple (or whatever type of wood is used) neck with a rosewood board, all other things being equal.
That is a YMMV thing, then - in my experience Strats with RW fingerboards DO sound different vs. ones with a maple fingerboard, in the ways that I and **Shakester **describe above. This assumes that that other features are more or less the same…
Are you basing this on thinking it through or have you played a ton of both types of Strats and drawn this conclusion?
I’m certainly not basing this on actual experimentation. I have done no head-to-head comparisons. The mass, weight, density, whatever you want to call it, to me, just doesn’t seem to be different enough in the two neck types I mention to be noticeable to the human ear.
Okay; cool. I can definitely attest to the fact that fingerboard materials matter - that’s been my perception after living with a RW Strat for over a decade and a maple-necked Tele and a RW-necked Tele that I built (but which has a different fingerboard scale length, so isn’t directly comparable).
My comment/hypothesis/belief - you are mentioning mass, weight and density. I don’t think those are the right factors - I think it is the “efficiency” of the fretted note. Meaning: ebony and maple are relatively harder, so your fretting finger is squeezing the string against a harder surface - so more high frequencies are retained = brighter tone. RW is relatively softer, so when you fret you are pushing the string against a surface with slightly more “give,” and a few of the highs get absorbed.
The new ones are a little bit hotter (but not high gain, by any means).
Other than that, there are two things I’ve particularly noticed so far. I always had trouble recording this guitar, because the stock pickups made this kind of whiny noise when you boosted the treble. With the 59s that’s gone – and I don’t have to boost the treble so much anyway, because it already sounds a bit brighter than stock.
The other thing is that the bass is way tighter and much less woolly. That really stood out when I took it to band practice. For the first time, I was actually able to use the neck pickup on this guitar playing in the band. With the stock pickups, it would almost entirely disappear in the mix. It also made a much more impressive sound through the high gain channel on my Marshall amp.
So yeah, buying the new pickups was well worth it. It’s made the Dot Studio one of my best guitars (although it’s a slightly more conventional sound than the quirky original).
Thanks for the rundown. I totally hear you on the bass response – weird and boomy, or “woolly” as you said. I think I’ll try the same set, your experience is encouraging. I assume you got these, right?
That’s something I never thought of, since I generally think of the string touching the fret, and not the fingerboard so much. This gives me a great excuse to swap my maple neck on my Strat for one with rosewood. 
Yup, those are the ones.