This is my guitar today. As you can clearly see, it's a 2018 model, no weight relief (which 2017 has) honey burst. I removed the pick guard as an experiment and found I liked it better without it, brings out the burst color more. I also removed the PCB board and put in 50's wiring with Bourns 500k pots and orange drop capacitors. I'm going for the EVH brown sound, reason why I removed the pickups and installed the Duncans. As one person pointed out on here with the link, Gibson's website (at the time), said the pickups were 490R/498T, and I was told 498T has a much brighter sound to them than the 490T. I've been making adjustments for two years on my sound with no results until I researched the pickups and PCB board. The changes I made were night to day. I even had a bone nut put on by the luthiers I go to. Everything else I did myself. It took two years cause of money constraints and time, but it was worth it. This guitar is now perfect and love it. My setup is a Blackstar HT 40 with a new WGS Retro 30 speaker I put in using a Friedman BD-OE distortion pedal as my main sound, with MXR EVH flanger, MXR phase 90 (not EVH) and an Ibanez tube screamer. Lexicon MX200 into FX loop for other sounds.