Crayon Sky Music

Kicking out the jams with the Gibson SG Special electric guitar is both a thoroughly modern exercise in guitar playing and a kind of homage to the 1960s, which is when the SG first got its start as a hoped-for update to the classic Les Paul. Fortunately for guitar players everywhere (especially blues-based rock guitarists) Gibson has kept the SG – with various models and updates – in production the whole time.

The SG body, which is where all other pieces hang from, has that famous double-cutaway feature that makes it exceedingly easy to get to the very highest notes way down at the start of the neck, which is also made of the same wood. Additionally, the body and neck are beveled and thin, which is great when it comes to weight savings (play a 3-hour set and see how difficult lugging a heavy guitar around can be) and for ease of play up and down the neck.

For guitars in this price range – which is in the middle of the SG lineup, between the Special Faded and the SG Special VOS (the highest priced of the three) – the SG Special has a one-piece body and neck combination, which means that both are of a single piece of mahogany and not glued or bolted together, which is what you’d usually see in guitars costing what this SG does (list, 1800 dollars).

As with almost every piece of musical equipment nowadays, list price doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what you should be paying, though. The Gibson SG Special can be found for just under a thousand dollars in my many cases, after discounts and from the right online or discount seller. Regardless, the features that come with this guitar are usually only found on axes costing much more.

For starters, there’s a 22-fret rosewood finger board that overlays that mahogany neck. It has classic dot inlays that allow the fast-flying fingers of any guitar player to find the right note on the neck with relative ease. Also, the guitar body comes with 2 double-coil humbucking pickups. These units make the guitar one that can really deliver a piercingly loud rock or blues-rock blast at the twist of one or both volume control knobs.

Controlling the way in which those two pickups “pick up” the sonic vibrations emanating from strings when they’re plucked or struck with a pick (“plectrum, ” in the old-style vernacular) is a three-way switch which allows one, both or a mix of pickups to “pick up” and process sound.

This gives the SG Special a wide range of sonic versatility that isn’t found in a guitar with two single coil pickups, for example. The effective neck length is twenty-four and three-quarters-of-an-inch long, with a one and eleven-sixteenths-of-an-inch wide nut. The nut sits at the very farthest end of the neck, between it and the head, where the strings enter the tuning heads.

The Gibson SG Special occupies a memorable place in the rock world, especially among heavy metal and heavy blues rock-based bands, especially those who came out of Great Britain in the late 60s and early 70s, whose modern-day adherents continue to shred and wail as hard as their ancestors did way back then. It combines relative light weight with piercing sonic ability to make any rock song come to life.

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