• Specs

This is guitar is the Epiphone’s budget-friendly version of the Gibson Standard SG, a guitar that’s known to have been used extensively among classic rock and blues guitarists like Eric Clapton, Angus Young, Pete Townsend, as well as one heavy metal’s most praised icons, Ton Iommi. It’s got 22 medium frets on a rosewood fretboard with trapezoid inlays, and it has a 24.75 inch scale length. The guitar has a set-neck construction with both the body and the neck made of mahogany with a cherry red finish. It has a tune-o-matic with bridge with a tail piece, two humbuckers, and individual volume and tone controls for each pickup along with a 3-way pickup selector. The tuners are generic Epiphone tuners but they seem pretty sturdy.

  • Sound

The tones this guitar is capable of delivering are pretty good in general. Although this guitar is commonly associated with rock, it can handle metal well enough to a reasonable extent. The guitar doesn’t produce any noise even on the high-gain settings. The bridge pickup is great for getting a good rhythm sound on the distortion settings. Palm-muting is tight and full of punch, and the neck pickup gives a very warm sound for soloing but it won’t really satisfy satisfy a shredder’s taste that much. On the clean channel I like to use both pickups for strumming chords, and for mellow blues the neck pickup is great with tone knob rolled back a bit, which makes the sound darker but not muddy at all. For a classic rock sound I like using the bridge pickup for soloing, it has more bite and gives the desired excess of treble.

  • Feel and Finish

The neck is very comfortable for me because I prefer medium necks over paper-thin necks found on most modern shred guitars. The medium frets allow for a lowering action more than on an guitar that. Blues players well find this better since they tend to have a heavy touch, so things won’t come out of tune when playing as they would on guitars with jumbo frets. The finish on this guitar seems durable, since it seemed unworn on the guitar I tested which was pretty old.

  • Reliability

I doubt it’s necessary to have a backup for this guitar in a gig because it has a fixed bridge which makes string-changing, in case a string brakes, easy. The tuners are a bit unstable, so replacing them with a Grover or Sperzel set would be a wise choice.

  • Overall Impression

To sum it all up, this guitar best suited for blues, classic rock and heavy metal, when it comes to heavier styles like, it’s not that good of a choice, unless the pickups were exchanged with ones that have higher output. As I mentioned earlier, this is a more affordable variation of a Gibson SG, and it definitely comes close to it. It’s definitely worth a try.