justimprovise's Fender Custom Shop Music Gear Setup

This thing feels like it’s made of silk. I have to touch it when I look at it. The neck is so silky that I often will be walking past it on the wall and I’ll suddenly catch myself stroking the neck in a strange fashion 😂 Sonically, once I lowered the height of the pickups a little bit it sounds goosebumps good. Stays in tune like a saint as long as you use the locking tuners properly with 0 winds around the post. It’s nice and light at about 7 lbs. Once you get used to an SG it’s hard to go back to a Les Paul. If you’re coming from a Strat you’ll wanna lower the SG’s pickups down so that they’re almost level with their plastic rings to get rid of the muddyness. Use your amp for gain and lower those pickups down. This will let your strings vibrate harder and for longer also. This guitar sounds almost like an acoustic when you strum it unplugged. You can strum it unplugged and it rings out in a really pretty way and makes sound for quite a while. If you strike a chord unplugged it will keep buzzing in your hand for a solid minute or more, literally. I can’t stress the resonance enough- You could strum a chord unplugged and count to 80 and it would still be vibrating against your hand and body. It’s frankly disgustingly good. Neck dive is a pretend issue. You don’t have to hold the neck from dropping while you play it because your picking arm is pushed against the body lol. But if you play guitar with no hands, yes it will neck dive about 15 degrees. But I haven’t figured out how to play guitar with no arms so neck dive hasn’t become an issue for me yet lol. Also I don’t drop the guitar on the ground so headstocks don’t break for me. The neck on mine is super super slim, the fretboard is really fast. The thing just feels like silk. Bends are super silky and emotive. Frankly I don’t know why I didn’t put the 10lb les paul down sooner for an SG. If you’re coming from an epiphone SG to one of these no bones about it they might as well be different models, the gibson is gonna feel lighter, buzzier, more alive, more resonant, and better put together. Epiphone SG’s always felt cheap and rattly to me compared to a gibson which feels more solid, more buzzy, and more silky, just more premium feeling. Also they look a lot better with a gloss nitro finish than an epiphone does with thick polyurethane. I would recommend anyone who plays guitar to add a good one of these to the very top of the pile of set neck HH guitars. Lighter and more ergonomic than a les paul and dare I say a bit more emotional sounding once the pickups are lowered. Once the pickups are lowered this guitar really does it all. It could easily be an only guitar for somebody. It does the sparkly clean gorgous thing, it does the crying woman tone, and if you crank it or use pedals it definitely will do the Sabbath thing as well as the chuggy kind of palm muted thing. If you play one of these in anger it will scream and stay screaming. It can also play the most subtle delicate crystal clear kind of Jerry things very well even on a Marshall, as long as you lower the pickups down. It can do the country kind of pedal bend sounds very well too. It’s truly an adaptable freak of a guitar. I would say that if you could only have one guitar this would be the perfect one. However a great SSS strat still has a place next to this. If you did coil splitting stuff to it I’d still say it’s not quite stratty enough for strattin’, but I digress. A great SG kind of makes other HH guitars stop making sense. If you get one of these used I would do a full setup or take it for a full setup. For whatever reason used SG’s often have terrible setups on them from people who attempted to learn slide on them and had super high action. SG is the official guitar of “I think I’ll pay $2000 to be Derek Trucks and then keep it in the case and sell it a year later” Also make sure that the stop tail posts aren’t backed out, make sure the bridge isn’t upside down, make sure the neck isn’t adjusted funny. In other words get a setup done if you can’t do one step by step yourself. But once you get an sg set up nice and low idk if anything is as buzzy and light. A strat still has it’s place but for me the SG eradicated the ability to enjoy playing a Les Paul or Tele, or PRS.