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The beater won out.


ksdaddy

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I had the good fortune to be able to compare the 08 SG faded I rescued from junk to a pristine 04 Standard with the plastic still on the guard. The 04 was a dream come true for anyone with SG lust.

 

The 08 is bare knuckles balls to the wall. The strings feel like rubber bands, it's brighter, more transparent and chimey, and just felt like a well broken in leather jacket.

 

The 08 stayed: the 04 got sold to a guy in Moscow.

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I have a 2005 Les Paul Vintage Mahogany, my first Gibson, and despite having "nicer" guitars even an R8 I have not been willing to sell that guitar, all mahogany, thin finish, great sustain and bite, for what I could get for it I am not selling it ever.

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Never much noticed the weight. The Standard may have been a little heavier but not enough to notice. The Standard had less treble and clarity. Was that due to covered versus uncovered pickups? Dunno. The faded definitely has a chunkier rounder neck but has a nice full feel as opposed to uncomfortable baseball bat. It just seems alive and full of... I don't know, just a vibrancy and resonance the Standard lacked. Was it the mostly nonexistent finish? Maybe. Was it partly psychological knowing the 08 has already seen all four corners of Hell and is just flat broken in? Could be. A bond between me and it because of the labor of love I went through with it? Another possibility. The Standard was also basically brand new, sterile, untouchable. That worked against it.

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I'm not surprised; you did a great job on that guitar and - stickers or not - it obviously has been imbued with some 'character' or whatever you like to call it.

This is something I always notice whenever I visit a guitar shop; there are the brand new shiny goodies with all the tags, waiting to be played and stamped with some sort of identity or character or whatever, and in a corner there are the old, battered s/h guitars which may have been modded, bent, repaired etc but have been well used and that's what you pick up on.

I live in UK and my nearest guitar shop, Guitar Village, is a classic example of this; rows and rows of new Gibsons but the really interesting ones are the old s/h ones. Here is the link to their SG page if you have time - very high prices over here, 5 grand for the Dickey Betts SG - the used guitars are at the bottom.

 

http://www.guitarvillage.co.uk/productlist.aspx?c=120&category=Solid+Gibson+SG's

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I had a feeling that the one that you poured over would be the winner. There's no question that the 08 SG special that I have is the cheapest of my 6 Gibson but it's the one I go to the most. I think that part of that reason is that I have altered it to fit my desires. The other part is that I am no real SG fan but I was drawn to the playability of this guitar. It just feels right and I have not gotten that from any other SG.

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I can relate to this. Disclaimer: I am a Gibson Fan Boy,

 

....But Out of all my electric guitars, and I have 3 Gibson LPs, 3 PRS models, 2 Epis (SG / LP), an Ibanez, Eastman Airliner map, 2 Teles (one is a thinline) and 1 strat. The 1989 MIJ Strat was the least inexpensive of the lot and has the best tone and playability. This is not just my opinion, I jam with a Pro and a semi pro on a regular basis and the strat is the goto guitar. The rest of my electric guitars are all excellent and anyone of them is gigable.

But the Strat has the best mojo and "voice'.

 

Tonights practice session will be on a MIA tele and a MIA PRS HB in the electric arena. The Strat is only used for recording and special occasions.

 

For us Gibby lovers, when it comes to hard crunching distorted rythym, the 2011 LP Classic Custom wins every time. Very toneful even on a nasty over drive setting.

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I think there are a number of factors that bond a musician to a given instrument or instruments.

 

Most of all, though, I think, is whatever it is in our heads that makes one instrument more "playable" than another. I think each of us almost certainly will have a different response to different instruments if we all were let loose in a candy store, even blindfolded, and allowed to spend a cupla days choosing "the" guitar the store owner would give to us when we found it.

 

I've a hunch that 10 of us chosen at random to do that "guitar candy store" thing, and each of us given our "best" guitar, we'd walk out with 10 very different instruments.

 

Laugh at this one, too, but I think our "most playable" guitar will quite often sound better than another simply because our comfort with it will affect technically how we play - the geometry, etc., etc.

 

Glad you made a choice for playing instead of wall art.

 

m

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