ove the wine studio just decided color of one on bench
View attachment 321113 love color of that wine studio just decided color of one on workbench
I stopped in at a Music store in Warner Robins one day back in the late 90s and the owner was selling out and retiring. He had a couple of new LP Studios left and was selling them for $525 each. Alpine White or Wine were the last two new ones he had. I picked the Wine model. To this day, it's still stock and has been out of the house only a few times.
My love for Epiphone goes back to my first days taking guitar lessons in a local music store. The owner and guitar teacher carried all the Epiphone line and I really wanted one. My parents bought me a Harmony dual pickup solid body!
Epiphone is a guitar that's well made even with the the Chinese origin. I don't mind ripping them apart and customizing. It's a working man's guitar for the masses that looks and plays as well as a Gibson, IMO. I haven't changed a thing in the Gold Top, but on the Flame Top I ripped out the pickups and installed Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates pups, a new bridge, and did a fret job in the basement using the masking tape and magic marker method. I have a jointer-planer and was able to make a perfectly flat sanding block for leveling the frets. It played better than the Gibby afterwards and become my go to guitar after that.
My last addition was an Epi SG Custom with push pull pots that converts back and forth from dual to single coil. It's uncanny how much it sounds like a Strat in single coil mode. It does take a little getting used to on stage because you need to adjust the volumes to run slightly backed off in dual coil mode, leaving a little head room for the switch to single coils. It loses just a little output in SC mode, but it's worth having to do a 1/4 turn volume flip back and forth just to have both sounds.
I owned a Gibson SG back in the 80s, but it was a thin line body that had virtually no sustain. This one has sustain that's nearly equal to an LP and that's really good.
The Epi SG

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