I love my ES 339, in fact it's my go-to guitar for playing at home, but it's the basic plaintop model and I've been tempted to upgrade to something a little more refined.
A couple of used Collings have really caught my eye recently - they generally seem feather-light, slightly smaller than a 335 (which is all to the good) and beautifully finished.
However I tend to prefer a slim neck and jumbo frets. The Collings neck is described as medium fat and the frets as medium 18% nickel silver. Anyone know what that actually means? Will the neck be significantly fatter and/or the frets smaller than the Gibson (it's the 30/60 neck). I don't want to buy a guitar of that calibre if I'm immediately going to want to rip out the frets.
“To a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail.”
Comments
I have no doubt the Collings will be beautifully engineered guitars; whether one would give you more than your Gibson is debatable. Though modern Gibson build quality tends to be 'okay' rather than 'perfect', the one thing I alway find myself having to accept is that their guitars sound good.
Collings/Suhrs et al will always beat Gibson & Fender in the perfection stakes; if you want a guitar that sounds like a classic Gibson or Fender, you may well find the boutique guitars 'miss' something....