I’ve had the guitar for over two weeks now and this is my honest opinion: the guitar is absolutely stunning, amongst the very nicest I’ve ever seen and so much fun to play. However, it is so painfully prone to marking just from simply being pressed against your regular clothing whilst playing. I noticed it doing this quickly, and to test out what was causing it I rested different parts of the back of the guitar up against my body for 30ish minutes and every single time new marks appeared. It is so bad that it genuinely makes it a worry to pick up and play and can spoil the enjoyment of playing it to a large extent. If it was a cheap guitar I wouldn’t mind, but for a premium guitar it’s just honestly a terrible thing to deal with. Some of the marks will disappear naturally over time, but a lot of them at least already appear permanent and I’ve not even had the guitar long. I did wonder whether the back being a shiny black colour made it worse because I tried a red 61 in a shop previously and didn’t notice anything like this on it (although maybe I would have if I’d bought and took that guitar home). But on the other hand for the front side the tobacco burst is a truly exceptional colour for the SG.
But the marking has obviously been an extremely upsetting experience and discovery, especially as it is the most expensive guitar I’ve ever been able to afford.
I will also add on top on this more issues with the guitar: the way the guitar rests on your leg and the strap positioning when standing puts the first three frets much further away from your body than other guitars and can add a considerable amount of extra strain/ache on your shoulder and wrist to reach for them. When standing you will have to have the guitar much higher on the strap than you’re used to and also tilt the neck much higher up to reach all the frets and even then I can feel extra strain on my shoulder. The second or third fret feels about where the first fret is on a Stratocaster, so it’s very noticeable every time I pick it up. The body and shape of the guitar is superb and I love how light it is, but unless you have naturally longer arms the long neck will likely be uncomfortable to some extent and force you to change your play style a bit (ie I’ve found myself hanging around the 3-7 frets much more just for comfort reasons).
I have also had the very frustrating experience of certain chords and notes being out of tune, and certain strings going out of tune every few minutes which is such a nightmare to deal with. I hope the latter can be resolved by changing to better strings, but the fact it’s primarily the G string that’s the worst (which after googling is a very common issue for some guitars) makes me think it has been badly setup and I’ll at some point need to take this expensive guitar to a luthier to be sorted. The G string is literally horrendous, you can tune up fully and play for two minutes and be out of tune again. Other strings also go out of tune quickly and often as well and occurs even with light playing to the point that I’m almost tuning as much as I’m playing. A third issue is that the strings are so close to the pickups to such an extent that you often have to play directly between the two pickups because otherwise your pick sometimes actually hits the pickup itself. To me these things are all entirely new issues that I’ve never experienced on another guitar and which I consider to be unacceptable on one that is so expensive, especially when I’ve had MIM and MIJ guitars in far more playable condition straight out the box (I’ve had guitars for years before ever taking one to a luthier whilst this one seems to require immediate fixing).
In summary: incredible looking and feeling guitar, unfortunately badly spoiled by how easily it marks and how poorly setup it was.
