Sunday, February 17, 2008

We're a guitar family now

So I told you last year about my Jazzmaster purchase - well, now I'm not the only guitarist in the house. My wife suddenly began suffering from a bout of Guitar Acquisition Syndrome (otherwise known as GAS) about a month ago, and with her birthday coming up and my bonus coming in, we went out and bought this:

Still got the plastic on the pickups. Yep, the Gibson-Fender war has infiltrated our home! We plan on having a nightly wrestling match until a winner emerges.

It's actually an Epiphone Les Paul Standard - Epiphone being Gibson's low-cost brand these days. It's her first guitar, so it seemed a little strange spending $2,500 on a Gibson. Maybe someday. It's actually a really nice guitar for $400. I've always been a Fender guy - I like the full-range single-coil pickups, and specifically the dark tone of the Jazzmaster, and I like that you can easily take the neck off and adjust it or replace it and do all sorts of other things to the guitar yourself. And Fenders are tough, you can beat them up and they still work. Supposedly, Pete Townsend used to play a Strat on stage specifically so he could break it in one of his famous fits of rock rage at the end of a show, put it back together the next day, and then do the same thing again. Try that with a Les Paul!

But I gotta admit, this thing is pretty sweet for the price. It sounds like a Les Paul - fat and thick, which is why people who like Les Pauls like Les Pauls. I actually like the slightly thicker neck a little better than my Jazzmaster - I have really big hands. (Surprisingly, my wife likes it better too even with small hands.) And I'm totally jealous of the bound body and neck. I wanted a bound neck on my Jazzmaster but it was about $130 more and I couldn't justify that for a purely cosmetic thing. But you basically get it free on the Les Paul Standard.

The new Epiphone Les Paul Standards are made from real mahogany, not plywood like the older ones (and maybe still the cheaper ones), and they've got Grover tuners and Alnico humbuckers. Being a Fender guy, I really couldn't even tell you what separates an Epiphone from a Gibson. This is a well-made guitar.

More importantly, my wife's happy with it. She wanted that Les Paul sound and she got it. Took her a while to decide on a color, but now she's happy with black. It just seems to suit the look of the guitar.

Here she is playing it!

1 comment:

  1. Cool!
    You may play guitar together!
    About Epiphone.
    I have Epiphone G-400 (SG), but it's body not from mahogany, any white wood.

    ReplyDelete

About This Blog

This is increasingly not a blog about Alphabet City, New York. I used to live in the East Village and work on Avenue B, but I no longer do. Why don't I change the name if I'm writing about Japan and video games and guitars? Because New Yorkers are well-rounded people with varied interests, and mine have gone increasingly off the rails over the years. And I don't feel like changing the name. I do still write about New York City sometimes.

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