And who can argue with a cool turquoise guitar?įew amps are love at first sight-or listen-affairs, where you immediately and effortlessly nail great tone. They’re cheap, they’re lightweight, and they have tons of potential. You can hear the sweet neck tones from the P-90, and the growl from the bridge mini-humbucker.īottom Feeder Tip #478: Despite my problems with the Epiphone SLs, I now have six because I think they are excellent guitars for projects-just like the old Melody Makers used to be. I now had it all: a guitar that played and sounded great. So, after putting everything back together, I plugged it into an amp and was finally satisfied. It was easy, because the pickguard and body were already routed out for a mini-humbucker. While that might be a challenge with most Gibsons and Epiphones, which typically have set necks, this model has a 4-bolt neck joint.
The key to improving the playability of the guitar Ray favored was to swap out the neck with its harder-to-play sibling. So I bought a generic alnico 5 mini-humbucker off eBay for $25 and installed it. After playing the new guitar for a week, I confirmed that the weak-sounding mini-humbucker had to go. One day I thought, “Why not just swap out the bad parts of both and make one sweet SL?” I took both guitars apart and decided that since the modified guitar already had the extra routing for the larger pickups, I would simply swap necks rather than pickguards. The neck had a lot of buzzing on the fretboard and the bridge’s mini-humbucker was weak and sounded terrible. This guitar’s headstock reveals its mixed Epiphone/Gibson lineage, with the angled ’stock and “Les Paul” lettering hewing to the historical build and look of the Melody Maker-the model that inspired the SL.īut when I received it, I was greatly disappointed.
So I set it aside for future mods, and my chance came a while later after I bought another turquoise SL on eBay, which had already been modified with a P-90 in the neck and a mini-humbucker in the bridge. It played great, but just like my old Melody Makers, the two single-coil pickups sounded pretty thin.
EPIPHONE LES PAUL SL ELECTRIC GUITAR FREE
Les Paul SLs were going for around $100 new, and I found a turquoise one for $99 with free shipping. It seemed so cool that I knew I had to get one, so I started looking around eBay. I became aware of the guitar when fellow PG columnist John Bohlinger featured it in one of his First Look videos. In 2017, Epiphone came up with what looks like its own version of the Melody Maker, called the Les Paul SL. One day I thought, “Why not just swap out the bad parts of both and make one sweet SL?”
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