« Another new Silverburst guitar »

There are many guitar colors that have come and gone many of them have been forgotten and for good reason. Silverburst went away but was always popular because of its cool look. Recently with more artists playing vintage Silverburst guitars Gibson always looking to make some money has brought back Silverburst and now you can pretty much get any guitar in their line up with the Silverburst paint job either in full production or limited models. The modern Silverburst paint job is pretty different from the original. The original wasnt very popular because the silver paint they used would turn green after a while and gave the guitars a pretty sad look. This is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom with the Silverburst paint job. The Custom is bascially a dressed up Les Paul standard. It has more binding on the body neck and headstock and has larger block inlays. I think the large block inlays give the guitar a classy look. The guitar has s 22 fret rosewood fretboard with the large block inlays. The headstock is fully bound. The body is solid mahogany. Customs do not have the maple top on the body. The color is matches well with the silver hardware to give it class. It has dual humbucking Epiphone pickups in the standard Les Paul configuration. There is a volume knob and tone knob for each pickup and a 3 way switch to switch among them. The bridge is your standard tune o matic and stop tail like you would find on most every Les Paul nowadays.

UTILIZATION

Other than the finish this is a normal Epiphone Les Paul. Its pretty bad that they can charge more for this guitar just for a different paintjob. The way they paint guitars now they can paint like a dozen of them in 5 minutes so it shouldnt really make a difference. The upper fret access on this guitar is typical for every Les Paul. Since the body joins the neck at the 17th fret you will have to reach around the body of the guitar to get to frets higher than this. This strong joint helps with tone and sustain but limits upper fret playability greatly. The neck binding on this guitar and generally helps to limit the amount of sharp fret ends you feel when playing. With any guitar made overseas you will want to get it professionally setup if you cannot do it yourself because the environment changes during shipping can cause the setup to go out of wack.

SOUNDS

The pickups could be better. They are pretty muddy and dead. You do not get much attack with these pickups. Since these pickups do not have much definition the neck position can get really muddy. With a high gain amp the sound might get muddy due to the lack of definition. With some types of music these pickups are great. If you want a bluesy sound these pickups will do really good and you will be able to get a smooth tone out of them. With a pickup swap this guitar can sound great so I would recommend to anyone who has one of these Epiphones to try it out with some after market pickups. A set of Seymour Duncans would liven this guitar up greatly. Epiphone makes some models that come with EMG pickups from the factory. Tone should be more important than looks so if you are looking for a metal Epiphone you should check out those first.

OVERALL OPINION

The quality on these guitars is pretty good. The quality on the top end Epiphones is better than the low end Gibsons. There are still better guitars out there for the price. In my opinion Silverburst is getting a bit played out now. It was only cool when they were rare but now that they arent rare it is just another finish out there. If you are looking for an Epiphone in specifically Silverburst this is probably your only choice.