NGD: It's my birthday and I'll buy if I want to [Pink Les Paul Muse]

[MattK]

Wildkat? Too small for a Riviera. And happy birthday!

[Embenny]

I was worried that would be the answer. Narrows it down to almost anything out there

Epiphone Explorer Korina?

I was happy to answer the question since it provided no information at all

This isn't an Explorer, but Luau just got it down to a choice of two models.

Wildkat? Too small for a Riviera. And happy birthday!

Thanks! And those are pretty cool, but I don't think I've seen one in as interesting a colour as this guitar.

With everyone guessing Firebird...does this mean I have to go buy a Firebird?

Yes, yes it does.

Muse?

Well, maybe I'll get on that for my next birthday then!

You nailed the series. Now which model and/or colour?

I may or may not be stalling for time because I don't have a photo yet beyond the stock one

Here are the options:

[JSett]

Damn! I knew I was clutching at straws.

Either blue, as we all know that's your jam, or the pink as you were remarking how much you liked it just the other day.

[Embenny]

Damn! I knew I was clutching at straws.

Either blue, as we all know that's your jam, or the pink as you were remarking how much you liked it just the other day.

One of those is correct, and your reasoning for both guesses is sound.

But is it the LP or the SG?

[JSett]

Pink LP

[Biloxide]

"Grumpy asshole" is the translation in french of "vieux crouton grincheux"
She is very smart with you to offer the most expensive guitar like you want, eh eh it's your birthday!!!

[Embenny]

"Grumpy asshole" is the translation in french of "vieux crouton grincheux"
She is very smart with you to offer the most expensive guitar like you want, eh eh it's your birthday!!!

She gave me carte blanche, but I wasn't in a mood to spend much money on myself. My heart belonged to a budget guitar this time, which is not always the case!

Pink LP

Fuckin' right, it is. I thought this guess might come sooner given how I was actively ogling it in the GAS thread! But I knew I had to play it to be sure, and the nearest one was two hours away, so my wife proposed making a day trip out of it. It was in Kingston, where we lived together for a year during our residency before our training forced us into long distance for a year. I proposed to her during that year (although that happened in Kauai during a vacation), and we got our first pet together in our Kingston apartment, so we have a lot of intensely fond memories there.

So a road trip to our old stomping grounds to try out some Muses, and to stop and smell the roses (more like "feed the ducks we loved watching on our walks to the waterfront") was the "birthday weekend" plan.

This is basically how it looks in normal lighting:


My wife apparently snuck some photos of me while I was busy playing it and fiddling with the knobs, but the lighting obviously skews the colour a bit toward the intense side:



In short, I'm in love with it, and the whole experience was a fantastic birthday present, the best one I can remember getting.

Now that we've had the reveal, here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

Let's start with the bad. It was up on the wall for who knows how long, so there was one small ding on the top near the binding of the cutaway. It's not through the finish, and can only be seen up close in tangential lighting. So, "not that bad," but I do love a pristine finish on a new poly guitar. Fortunately, no buckle rash, no big dings from people knocking it around. I consider myself lucky in that sense.

Also bad is the fact that the knobs are all loose as all hell. It's got three push-pulls (two coil splits and a phase reverse) and the knobs pull off before the pots pull up! So that's definitely "bad," but also easily solved. The pots are splined split-shaft types, so pushing the two halves apart with a flathead screwdriver would probably be enough to make the knobs fit more securely.

But I wasn't crazy about the clear knobs to begin with, nor am I crazy about the split and OOP tones, so all in all I don't care that much. I'm currently either thinking of black knobs and black pickup rings to match the black back and neck, or cream knobs to match the cream pickup rings and binding. Nothing else on the guitar is clear so the knobs just kind of seemed out of place to me, though they're fun in that late 90's/early 2000s "let's make Game Boys and N64s and iMacs out of translucent plastic" kind of way.

So let's skip straight to the "ugly." There is ONE finish flaw from the factory, and it's in the spot I find most irksome on the entire guitar - the part of the binding facing you as you play, so you see it every time you look at your hands.

It looks like they got a little over-zealous with a
The sanding block as they were taking down the sharp fret ends, and took off a bit of the clear coat over part of the binding. Then, the exposed edge of the poly finish caught a bit of dirt or buffing compound, so there's a bit of grey-black discoloration that brings your eye immediately to the finish defect.

You don't feel it as you play, but it really irks me that the treble side binding is utterly flawless, but the bass side has this discoloration staring at you as you play. If it was the reverse, I wouldn't have cared at all.

In any case, my plan is to carefully sand the exposed edge smooth with some ultra-fine polishing paper to see if I can get rid of the discolored edge, and smooth it enough that nothing else will catch.

I'm probably making it sound worse than it is in reality. I'll post a photo later. And it can probably be improved upon from here. On a guitar this price, as the only finish defect from the factory (and only QC defect outside of the loose but fixable knobs), I can accept it. I've seen worse factory finish flubs on $3K USA Gibsons.

But now let's flip this around to the good, starting with the binding issue itself!

This guitar is normally $799 CAD. I guess they're selling poorly, because the music chain (Long & McQuade) put all the Les Paul Muses on sale for $649. The SGs didn't get marked down. $649 CAD is a fantastic price.

They had a green one in stock as well as the pink, and my wife was surprised that she liked the look of the green more in person compared to the photos she had seen. She liked it even more than the pink.

So I A/B'd them, and within 10 seconds, she said, "Nope, get the pink." The green one sounded absolutely awful in comparison. Muddy, flat...the pickups didn't appear to be set differently, so maybe it was just the different pieces of wood, or pots that happened to be at the far low end of the stated tolerance, but it sounded nowhere near as good. It had flawless binding and tight knobs, though!

But it was also a bit heavier, and the laurel fretboard was lighter and more washed-out looking.

The pink one (sorry, "purple passion," as though they were afraid they'd never sell to men if they admitted it was pink) is something special. Light, resonant...punching above its weight in every way. The green one felt and sounded very much like a cheap imitation of a good guitar. The pink one feels like a good guitar that happens to be cheap. The neck profile is a delightfully full-feeling C with no shoulder, the weight is light (haven't measured yet, but I'm thinking 7.5lbs or a touch less), there are no rough or high frets, no sharp fret ends...it's just a superb playing experience.

And the pickups! My goodness, has Epiphone ever stepped up their game. These are "Alnico Classic Pro" pickups, which apparently mean they're based on 57 Classics but with a brighter/hotter A5 magnet instead of A2. Demos online seem to clock them around 7.8k in the bridge and 7.3k in the neck - nice and low output.

And man, I like these things more than any humbuckers in any of the Gibsons I've had pass through during trades, which have included 57 Classics and every flavour of Burstbuckers. The very low wind and brighter A5 magnets, possibly combined with the lightweight and chambered Okoume/Maple construction, make for the first PAF-equipped Gibson style guitar I actually love the tone of. Seriously, there's absolutely no reason to even consider changing the stock pickups in this guitar, or to touch the coil taps. It's bright and clear enough as is, but still thick enough that you know you're playing a PAF and not a Firebird or Fender. Just delightful. I did not anticipate this. I thought that, if I was lucky, I'd like the bones of the guitar and just drop in some nice pickups. Completely unnecessary. It's staying stock.

But I got sidetracked - as I was saying, the binding issue turned strongly in my favour. The very nice senior sales manager who had been helping me came by when I was done comparing the two, and asked me what I was thinking. I told him, honestly, that I had my heart set on the pink one, but that I was a little disappointed that it had some finish damage. He looked at the binding, then at the green one, and said, "I know these are already marked down, but that's significant enough for me to enter it into the system as a 'demo'. Normally on this price of a guitar, that would knock the price down $50, but I can get away with $75."

I absolutely had not been trying to haggle. I had been thinking, "This is an inexpensive guitar that's already marked down, and that's just a defect I have to live with because it's so nice otherwise." But he offered, so I wasn't going to say no.

As he was boxing it up for me (they didn't have any rigid gig bags in stock, which I like way more than hardshell cases or soft gig bags these days), I perused the accessories. Since he had been so nice with the demo pricing, I figured I'd push my luck a little. I grabbed a pack of D'Addario 10s to replace the corroded stock strings, and noticed a pack of Ernie Ball 0.60 thickness picks that were colour-matched pink. I mostly have thicker picks at home, and had been meaning to get some thinner ones anyway since it's been ages since I tried any.

So I put them on the counter and asked, "If I tell you it's my birthday and this guitar is my present, can I talk you into including some strings and picks?"

He looked at me and my wife as if to decide if I was telling the truth, and said, "You know, I already took more off the guitar than they'd have wanted me to...so how about I throw in the strings, but ask you to pay for the picks?"

I told him that he had himself a deal.

So this awesome, sparkly pink, lightweight, killer-sounding Les Paul, which was already a good value at $799 CAD, ended up costing me $565 CAD.

Happy birthday, indeed.

I'll take some more photos of it once I get it on the bench to remove the dull, crusty stock strings, oil the fretboard, and set it up a bit better with the D'Addarios.

[JSett]

Because I watched Wayne's World at the weekend for the first time in about 20 years, all I will say is:

SCHWING!!

[Embenny]

Because I watched Wayne's World at the weekend for the first time in about 20 years, all I will say is:

SCHWING!!

Funny you should make that reference. There was another guy who started blaring cliché classic rock riffs at 90 dB about halfway through my test drive of the Muse (you might notice a capo and thumbpick in the photo, I was playing very much "not that"), and when my wife made a wincing face, I said, "Well, at least he isn't playing Stairway."





I can't remember the last time I made a Wayne's World reference with her. The music store just brought it out of me.

[Biloxide]

A new rose story beggin at a fair price with light cosmetics deffects, good pick!!! if in addition it warmly exalts and may your wife's ear confirm your preference, it's that one.
The colour is more burgundy mist/purplemetal/ shell pink than kitty flashy plastic look on epiphone list... can't see real finish on factories guitar since there isn't any shop in my town "La Rochelle france" filing for bankruptcy and no help from the town hall on the hotel of speculative real estate money and mass tourism. they screwed up everything...it has become hell

Wayne's world, wayne's world.. mega teuf or fête in french voice dubbing, it's all old

[Embenny]

A new rose story beggin at a fair price with light cosmetics deffects, good pick!!! if in addition it warmly exalts and may your wife's ear confirm your preference, it's that one.
The colour is more burgundy mist/purplemetal/ shell pink than kitty flashy plastic look on epiphone list... can't see real finish on factories guitar since there isn't any shop in my town "La Rochelle france" filing for bankruptcy and no help from the town hall on the hotel of speculative real estate money and mass tourism. they screwed up everything...it has become hell

Exactly, this was the one. There were many signs. My fingers, my ears, my eyes and her ears were all in agreement about this one, and the price worked out especially well in the end.

I empathize with your struggle to see any in person - we drove 200km to try this one! The only one in stock in my centire city was green, and I really wanted to see the pink.

And I agree, the stock photos on the Epiphone web site really don't flatter these guitars at all. I should have taken photos of the green - it was beautiful and much more unique than in stock photos. Most stock photos make it look too pale, and the one I linked earlier makes it look almost olive. In person, it was light green but with just a tinge of blue. Not enough to be turquoise or anything, but I never got that impression from online photos.

I think because it's a sparkly/pearloid colour, it shifts shades depending on angles and lighting, especially on the curved top of the Les Paul.

They had a pink Muse SG there as well, but I didn't like it nearly as much. The flat top makes the colour look less appealing, the neck was thinner and less rounded, and because it has no body binding, the whole body and back of the neck were pink as well.

I think the binding and black back/sides/neck of the guitar make the pink stand out much better on the Les Paul. The definition of the binding and the contrast of the black makes the pink seem "pinker" somehow.

On the uniformly-painted SG, it just kind of seemed like a lighter version of Burgundy Mist Metallic. And that's fine, but it's somehow much less "in your face" than the pink-top Les Paul.

Plus, it just plain sounded worse. The SG isn't chambered and doesn't have the maple top. It has the same pickups, but the whole guitar sounded much more dull and lifeless. I know the neck pickup on SGs is moved closer to the bridge because of the neck joint, which might have been part of it, but even acoustically, this pink Les Paul was much more vibrant and snappy.

[Biloxide]

You have traveled 200 kilometers even though it is far... also through your home, to find a pearl and it is an excellent opportunity. Just change the potentiometer buttons for gold ones like Gibson, make sure you have the USA or Euro/Asia format, don't mess with the slots with a screwdriver, it's fragile, it explodes at a moment's notice... I'm wary of studio colors or manufacturers, the factory epiphone green as you mention is an army olive green, it's misleading...
The Sg is the lottery, apart from hitting the high end, very expensive, I have a gib tribute natural tint walnut mapple neck 50's shape with SD 59 no more, I don't care. She's pretty but nothing endearing. bof...

[andy_tchp]

A1 thread, 11/10 , and happy birthday.

Not helping the GAS (which I haven't had a problem with for a decade or so) either, was just thinking yesterday "man I used to love the result I got double tracking complementary parts with a humbucker/hardtail guitar along with a Jazzmaster in a mix"...

[andy_tchp]

Mine will also be pink if I end up relenting...

[Larry Mal]

That's funny- I recently bought a bunch of marked down dress shirts in various shades of pink for $15 apiece because I guess men won't consider pink guitars or pink shirts. I like the color pink and will happily take advantage of whatever bias saves me money.

Nice guitar. I never thought you would have a Les Paul.