This guitar is awesome!

I have been playing a Gibson S-G special for about 5 years now. It has been through many gigs, and has never given me a problem yet. Well...the only problem that I came across was the tuners, but I replaced them with Grovers and now the guitar is pretty much perfect. It is very light, which is great for long gigs.

You can get many different tones with this guitar. The bridge pickup is great for crunchy power-chords, and the neck pick-up is great for warm, slash-like leads. When you have the pick-up switch in the middle position, you get a crystal clear sound which is useful for clean passages especially. Also, using the tone knobs can get you interesting tones. Roll the tone knob back and put on the distortion and you get a smooth, Santana tone. Many guitarists tend to ignore the volume knobs for the pickups. I find that when you roll the volume knob back to 1 or 2, you can really clean up the distortion and achieve unique tones with this guitar. All of the frets are easy to access, so you won't have any trouble playing those high leads.

If for some reason I didn't have this guitar anymore ( stolen/broken/ ) I would definitely buy another one. The S-G specials are significantly cheaper than the S-G standards, and there really isn't a big difference. Replace the tuners, and it's pretty much a Gibson S-G Standard with different inlays. I highly recommend this guitar.