Larry Mal wrote: ↑Sun Sep 25, 2022 4:00 pm
I never understand people's knee jerk reactions against Gibson.
Well, I say it half-jokingly, but I arrived at my Gibson aversion quite naturally. Growing up, there were several distinct camps of people making horrible music on Gibson and other humbucker-equipped guitars.
There was the whole world of cheesy 80's and 90's hard rock - Guns n Roses and Bon Jovi etc. There were the burgeoning genres of rap-rock and Nu Metal. And there was the long shadow of the Boomers that still had people my age playing Stairway to Heaven in every fucking guitar store you walked into. Les Pauls were the Slash guitar. SGs were the Angus Young guitar. Flying Vs and Explorers were Metallica guitars. Admittedly, I had nothing against the ES series other than the fact that I was a teenager who couldn't fathom ever affording one, but also, they sounded nothing like the guitars or artists I really enjoyed.
But as for the solid bodies, the image they projected in the"guitar zeitgeist" was just plain unappealing, and it induced a two-decade-plus sense of nausea whenever I thought about them.
In fairness, Strats and Teles kinda did the same thing to a certain degree. I found Offsets very early on and that bright, snappy sound just became my thing. It didn't hurt that some of my favourite bands played them too, but they were like a corner of the guitar market that had been unmolested by blues lawyers, power-stancing men in leather pants, scooped Dual Rectifiers and the other various groups that had turned me off of Gibsons and Fender's dynamic duo.
Of course, I'm finally getting over those biases. But so many of those associations are deeply ingrained. You can't watch a YouTube review of pretty much any Gibson guitar without hearing the same boring 60's-80's rock riffs over and over, which doesn't make it any easier to separate these things on an emotional level.
I guess that's the nice thing about this weird blinged out 3-pickup banana creme SG. This is not a guitar I associate with anyone, though I'm sure there were inevitably some famous users of this model.
But you're right. It's world class, and I may never come across one again in the flesh. But it's probably the most expensive/valuable electric guitar I own that isn't actually vintage, which leaves me feeling a little hesitant. Like, of all the types of guitars I like, an SG is not the one I'd pick to have the nicest example of.
But that might be looking a gift horse in the mouth. I didn't buy it, I traded for it, it's here now, and it's really nice.
So I'm certainly not in a hurry to get rid of it. I'm still very much getting to know it, and there's plenty about it to like.
As for the frets, I don't think they're the "fretless wonder" kind. They're certainly not big, and I've never actually played those famously tiny frets, but I think they're a bit more modern than that.
The artist formerly known as mbene085.