I know my way around solid body guitars nowadays - can pretty much identify a ‘good’en’ in 10 seconds flat, based on how it resonates (sustain, harmonic balance and complexity) when I strum it acoustically.
My track record with 335s isn’t so hot - they all resonate strongly and with a different frequency response to an LP for example and I can’t get a read on them .. I’m thinking that I need a different set of measures to assess them by?
So has anyone got any tips / methods to identify a great ES? ..do they differ from what your looking for in a solid body?
cheers
Baz
The answer was never 42 - it's 1/137 (..ish)
Comments
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Good tip @ICBM - I’ve pretty much sworn by judging electrics unplugged (seems to work quite well with acoustics too!) , so it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was a flawed approach with semis
Changing pickups and controls in a 335 family guitar is considerably less straightforward than in a solidbody. Thus, it is a good idea to find a guitar that sounds the way you want without recourse to modifications.
That is pretty much the raison d'être of the Gibson thinline series.
Ted McCarty's original idea was to present the advantages of an electric guitar with a solid centre block to buyers who wanted the traditional "jazz box" aesthetics. The coincident arrival of the P.A.F. humbucker was the icing on this particular cake.
Under high gain, the onset of feedback from hollow and semi-hollow guitars is reached sooner. Your options are either to learn to control/exploit this or to grumble about it until you sell the guitar on at a loss.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Very good point.
Exactly like the OP, I'm pretty good at telling if I'm going to like a solidbody by playing it unplugged. But when I do the same with my CS-336 it sounds, frankly, dreadful - louder but sort of "dead", rubbery and thuddy on the wound strings, thin and plinky on the plain strings...
It's quite unnerving. I'm not used to having to play electric guitars plugged in.
Justifiable in many cases in my opinion... just don't cut the old wires too close to the pickup if you can avoid it, or it's difficult to rejoin them if you want to put them back.
I know it's not the 'proper' way, but frankly sometimes fishing the whole loom out of the guitar is a massive time-consuming pain in the backside for no benefit, especially if you have to undo a well-made braided-cable loom that's soldered to all the pots like in a Gibson ES, and replace it with plastic-covered cables.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Don't always assume lighter is better and if you can, try one with maple and one with mahogany necks.
This what I did .As long as you do it properly it is as good as any other method .The only thing is on say Epis and others Asian types often the wiring.pots, switches fails anyway so you end up fishing it all out . It certainly works on pickups though .I call it cut and shut .