The part of the neck that fits your palm is also made from mahogany while the fingerboard is our old pal, rosewood. The AJ-500M VS has a solid Sitka spruce top and solid mahogany back and sides. Right, let's get back to talking about wood. OK, that's still a lot of money, but it does mean the dedicated acoustic guitarist has a real chance of getting their hands on something great. These days, it's just a few hundred pounds. The thing is, the price gap between G.L.O's and quality guitars, like this Epiphone, used to be wider than the Grand Canyon - we're talking a £1,000 plus. These items will service the needs of the beginner, but they're a stopgap until something better can be afforded.
Insiders call these instruments 'G.L.O's' or 'guitar-like objects.'īasically, this is a mass-produced product that looks like a guitar, produces a fairly decent tone but is not expected to last a lifetime, and in some cases not even until the next General Election.Īnd crucially, it won't age well. There's a term used in the guitar industry to describe some budget instruments made in the Far East. It also allows the tone of the guitar to mature with age, producing a sound that'll put a tilt in your kilt for years to come. Solid wood fl exes and vibrates and well, it just sounds alive. Solid wood is different: it's sliced from the tree and turned into parts for the guitar and the only glue used is to stick the parts together. What's so great about solid woods anyway, we hear you ask? Many affordable acoustic guitars are made from sheets of wood laminated together with glue. You can get all-solid wood guitars for half the price of this Epiphone these days, but it always delights our eyeballs when we scan the specification sheet and see that we're getting real chunks of lumber. The dead tree bits of the AJ-500M VS are all-solid. The round-shouldered body looks classy with that vintage sunburst finish. Whether or not this guitar turns out to be any good, you have to admit it's pretty.