Which Semi-Hollow Guitar Is The Best? (I Was Wrong)

I am not sure Guitar prices make a lot of sense if you look at it like this.

These are all instruments that I love play all the time,

and most of the difference is not about how they sound.

I’ll let you know which guitar it is later in the video. Do you think one guitar sounds 12 times or 4 times as expensive as the others? I can’t confidently say that, but the question is also whether that is where the difference is. I’ll get back to that, too. When I make videos like this, I always learn something new; the weight difference was pretty surprising to me.

Let me introduce the guitars to you.

Epiphone: The Early Test

The first semi-hollow guitar that I bought was my Epiphone Sheraton.

I bought this guitar 2nd hand on Marktplaats for 350 euros. Marktplaats is the Dutch Craigslist.

350 euros is less than the $400 I labeled it with, but it’s close, I tried 20 sherarons before I found one that I liked, it took me about a year.

At the time, getting a new guitar was a huge investment and it made more sense to get a cheap but decent model than immediately investing a lot of money.  It is a Korean-built Sheraton from 2000, so it is not very old, and it has had some upgrades over time. The most important upgrade is that I had the pickups changed from the original Epiphone humbuckers.

First to a set of BareKnuckle and then last year to a set of Ron Ellis humbuckers.

In terms of sound this would probably be the biggest upgrade that it has had. I also wore down the frets, and they had to be replaced,

so as you can hear, I have played this guitar a LOT, and it has done many gigs with me, among other things the TV appearance of my band back in 2012.

The Bareknuckle pickups were a lot less muddy than the original pickups, that really did a lot for the sound of the guitar, but it still felt a bit dark at times, which I always blamed on the amount of finish on it. I sometimes wonder if it is more paint than wood. Because it felt so much darker than especially my Ibanez guitar, then I wasn’t playing it that much for a few years, but once I had the Ron Ellis Humbuckers installed, it really came to life, and I have used it a lot the last few years both live and in my YouTube videos.

The other thing that matters, at least to me, about a guitar’s “quality” is how it feels to play, but now that I am comparing them, I have to say that my memory exaggerates these things. The fretboard on the Sheraton is very flat, and the neck is thin. It sort of feels like the fastest guitar of the three.

The neck is a bit flat and wide for my taste, I tend to want a rounder neck, which I also have on my Strat or the ES175.

I find that makes it easier to play stuff where I use my thumb to fret notes as well. With XXYY This guitar is pretty heavy compared to the other two guitars.

The Work Horse: Ibanez AS2630

Playing the Epiphone Sheraton, I could tell that Semi-hollow guitars worked very well with the music I play and the sound I hear in my head. Since I had tried to get the cheapest possible option with the Sheraton, I felt that I could explore upgrading to a more expensive instrument and see whether that would make a difference.

I live in the Netherlands, which, besides having terrible bread, has a tradition of being notoriously stingy. This tradition fits very well with the culture of Denmark, where I am from. So I didn’t immediately run out and try to order a custom shop Gibson ES335.

Instead, I started exploring what a next-level option might be. At the time, there were fewer options available than what you now have, like Eastman and Sire guitars, so I was mainly looking at Ibanez and Yamaha, sometimes Gibson. However, they were often expensive, and the quality was quite unpredictable.

The AS200 irony

While I was waiting for something to appear, I saw that a colleague of mine, Guillermo Celano, had put his Ibanez AS2630 up for sale. I was not familiar with that model, and at the time, I was also sometimes active on a forum called Play Jazz Guitar,

I remember asking about opinions on the guitar, only to hear that they were vastly overvalued. I still went over to Guillermo and tried the instrument, and I immediately loved how it felt to play, so I bought it.

This is the guitar that most people associate with me and what I have used the most in the past 14-15 years,

It is from 1977, so we are almost the same age. When I bought it, I was looking for an AS200, the model Scofield plays. Years later, I had a student who had one and was very happy to realize that I much prefer the neck of my AS2630. Guillermo replaced the tuners and switched the neck pickup out with a Seymour Duncan Seth Lover, which I recently learned is reversed.

This all falls in the category of “I don’t change stuff that is not broken or doesn’t sound bad”. The guitar is a tool for me, I use it to make music. A good friend of mine put a metal thing on the input jack because that was a place that broke a few times,

and recently, Richard from Heeres guitars refretted this with some steel frets.

For me, this guitar has the perfect neck, even if the ES335 is also great, but differrent. On the Ibanez, it is easy to reach the higher frets, and I it does everything I need it to do. This is quite a bit lighter than the Sheraton, and a bit better balanced as well when you play it, especially standing.

 

To be honest I thought the difference in weight between the guitars was much bigger than 400 gram which is a little under a pound. I was thinking it would be closer to two pounds, but as you can hear I NEVER weigh guitars.

The last guitar is my vintage Gibson ES335.

Thee New Heeres Guitar Project

‘In my ongoing exploration of semi-hollow guitars, I’ve covered three different instruments, each with its own unique character. But there’s an exciting fourth chapter on the horizon—a custom-built semi-hollow guitar from luthier Richard Heeres. This project is in collaboration with Richard Harris, and it’s set to be completed later this year.

I’m incredibly excited to see how this guitar turns out. Custom instruments always bring an element of surprise, and I’m curious to experience its feel, tone, and playability firsthand. If you’re interested in following along with this journey, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel or sign up for my newsletter—I’ll definitely be sharing more as the build progresses.

For now, though, let’s take a look at the last guitar in this video: my vintage Gibson ES-335.

The Royal Example: Gibson ES335

Around 2017, I decided that since the Ibanez was a success, it was worth exploring if there was something even better out there that I could try. At this point, I had tried quite a few ES335 and concluded that the new version of this guitar was not better, but I knew a few people who had vintage ES335:

and Adam Levy,

and they both swore by those guitars, so I was very curious if I could find something better than my Ibanez.

The problem with finding vintage Gibsons around here is that there is not a lot of them, so I put the word out that I was looking, plus checking Marktplaats, hoping to get lucky. I again tried a lot of guitars, and for some reason, the 335s were converted from 12 to 6 strings, and if I tried something, I wasn’t really feeling it. After a few tries with some 70s and late 60s versions, I was starting to give up.  Then I got a message from one of my friends about a 60s ES335 that was for sale pretty close to where I live, I quickly made an appointment to try it out.

The woman selling the guitar was a blues guitarist who had to stop because of arthritis. When I was there and trying the guitar, I knew almost immediately. It only took a few chords and a few lines. I was convinced that this was the best I would find, and I bought it pretty much on the spot.

The neck on this guitar is unbelievable. It is super narrow and super thin.

For insurance, I had the guitar valued by an expert, who said it was from ’69, original piclups which are super loud, not unlike the Ron Ellis humbuckers. The serial number doesn’t tell you 100%. It has been regretted. The electronics were a mess in the guitar, but I had that fixed. With a neck like this, it is very comfortable to play, but it also feels quite vulnerable, and I would probably never take a guitar like this on tour, even if I do take it to play concerts here in the Netherlands.

CONCLUSION

Let’s first go over the blind folded recordings from the beginning:  The first one was the Gibson, then the Epiphone and finally the Ibanez. I don’t think there is any meaningful difference that you will hear in a concert or with a band. I have used all 3 on recordings, and there is not one that is not good enough. So I don’t think the value difference is about how they sound. In reality, with the upgrades then the Ibanez and Epiphone are closer in price because Ron Ellis pickups are not cheap, but also do really add something to how it feels to play the instrument which I have to admit that I can’t explain.

———– video about the pickups

….But I did make a video when I changed from the Bareknuckles to the Ron Ellis plckups, you can check that out if you want to see that story in this video below…..

As you can hear, I pick instruments by playing them and deciding whether they vibe with me, whether I feel that they are special. Clearly this is not a scientific method, but it is the most reliable method I have. That is also why I don’t talk about the wood and construction of the guitars, I don’t know and I don’t really care, it is about how they play.  As I said, I love and play all 3, but I think the Ibanez is the one feels the best to play and that would be me favorite.

Whcih one do you prefer and why? And please try to limit the amount of ‘woody warmth’ and ‘natural resonance’ descriptions because trying to invent words that don’t describe anything but sound fancy is not helpful, I think that is a very bad habit.

if you want to know why I mostly use a digital amp and very rarely use normal amps then check out this video tells that story and shows what I use instead. As a bonus you can also read 1000s of offended “Blues dad with a tube amp” comments. You can never have too many of those

 

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