UPDATE, January 25, 2021 – If you did this two years ago, when this article was written, it would have worked. Now? Forget it. The cheapest neck/body on Stratosphere is $1,600. But maybe that will change at some point…
When I was a kid I was fascinated by a magic trick where you’d insert a dollar into a small set of rollers, and a five dollar bill would come out the other side. The trick was that the $5 was already inside the rollers. But today’s post is no trick. Well, yeah, it pretty much IS a trick, but it’s a good one. And it’s very simple.
The Stratosphere is a business that got its start buying Fender guitars and selling the pieces (for more money individually than the guitar as a whole) on eBay. It then got bigger and bigger and set up its own website. I’m not sure if it’s still on eBay, but just go straight to their site, if interested. I have bought from them a few times before, and was very pleased with what I got for the money. They are the real deal.
From time to time you can find really good deals on there, but they always have a good stock of Fender necks and Gibson Les Pauls with all of the hardware gone. Today they happened to have a 2019 Gibson Les Paul Studio for $499.99. If you were to buy this guitar and then move all of your parts from your Epiphone Les Paul, you’d essentially have a Gibson Les Paul. You’d still have an Epiphone Les Paul, too, with no parts. You could buy parts for it if you wanted to, or sell it for next to nothing to some other project person.
There are two downsides. One is that while the tuners used on Epiphone and Gibson Les Pauls are comparable (IMHO,) the rest of the parts are different. Some will argue that the bridge is much better on a Gibson, but in my own tests I’ve had a hard time hearing a difference. The pickups are another matter. Love or hate Gibson, no one should say that they can’t make good pickups. Epiphone is another matter. Some love the ProBucker pickups, but to me I think they sound like a midrange mudfest. But swapping pickups can be done over time, IF you feel the need. My vote goes to the Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates humbucker, for that classic Les Paul tone.
And the dragon in the room is that if you look at the featured image, you’ll see the fret inlay horror that the “new” Gibson has inflicted on the range – you now have to spend big bucks to get those trademark trapezoid inlays that we know and love. Some might not care at all about that, but it does immediately mark your guitar as “lower end American.” I’d hate that. But if I’m honest, yes, this is still a good quality American made Gibson Les Paul, and if I had $499 and didn’t already have two Gibsons of my own, I might take the leap.
