I just visited a couple of local music stores, and since my Prophecy SG has been my fave guitar for a while now, I checked out every SG they had. Coincidentally all they had were Gibson standard SG's or similar models, I didn't check the nominations but I'm guessing they were all STD's...no, wait, some of them had dots and some trapeze inlays so they can't have all been the same. Most had those plastic Kluson style tuners. Anyway. All were $1000 plus.
They all looked good, most were in wine red, some black...all had the same very thick neck which means I'm not interested...I like a bit more slim taper neck than these baseball bats which make the guitars terribly neck heavy too...hell they seem thicker than the SG body is
The finishing just isn't as good as on even Epis. All of them for instance had this quite clear 'step' on the side of the neck, meaning the fretboard was a hair narrower than the actual neck wood, generating a slight but quite easily felt ridge there. Furthermore some fret ends were also tangibly a hair too long...all this indicated to me the fretboard wood has likely dried more than the neck wood.
The fretboards were all very pale for rosewood too, more like yellowish than deep dark brown. The lacquering was nice and looked good, and buffing for the most part good, but when looked against the light, there were some spots in hard-to reach places like the side of the near the body that had a clear orange peel bumpy surface.
And to top the experience off, all had too much bow to the neck and waaayyy high action. Still playable, but, whoa, at least for me insanely high, like you could slide a pencil between the string and the last frets. The neck seemed good so that's likely just an adjustment issue but I'm amazed nobody had adjusted them fore putting on display & sale.
On the wine red transparents, body & neck woods looked good quality, and one-piece body even, but both had a smallish dark knot on the back. Nothing bad, but still quite visible from even a distance, as the wine red is quite transparent indeed.
So all in all, I could not find a single thing exceptionally good about them, except they all did sound good unamplified. No fret buzz at least
but as to how much difference that makes amplified, well...
The verdict is that those axes offer nothing for me. Nice looks, but I want a clearly thinner neck, and I'd swap the pups anyway, so I don't see why would it make sense to pay the premium when I can get a more playable Epi or most any copy SG at one third the price. Hell if they were the same price I'd still pick the Prophecy over these STDs.
