Well, I was looking pretty seriously at those a while back. As has already been mentioned, they seem to have problems with the frets being dressed properly. In fact, the construction quality overall is just plain poor for the price that Gibson charges for them. This is just another example of Gibson's famous "quality control" problem. (In fact, there are those who would claim that "Gibson Quality Control" is an oxymoron.)
But, the real problem that I have with them is that they seem to be built to a
lower quality standard than the Epiphone version of the very same guitar. Epiphone ALSO makes a model that corresponds (approximately) to the faded SG and, quite frankly, it's a better guitar. I played a Faded Gibson SG back to back with a
Epiphone G-400 "classic" (or whatever they called it, I don't remember for sure what Epiphone call their "faded" version). The quality of fretwork was just much, much better on the Epiphone. I thought it even SOUNDED better. Just to make sure I hadn't picked up a lemon, I picked up
another Faded SG and
another faded Epiphone SG, and tried them out. The results were identical. The Gibson had a price tag of $650, while the Epiphone went for $399. After that, I went on Harmony Central and read some reviews, and found that other people had reported the same experience.
The problem is that you can't hardly FIND any of those Epiphone G-400 classics anywhere. And I'm sure that the reason that they are so scarce is that they made the Gibson faded series look so bad, that Gibson is purposely making them almost entirely unavailable.
