My first electric guitar was a 1961 Les Paul SG Junior. It was sold to finance a refinished 1968 Les Paul Custom in Tokyo after a couple of years. However, I got back to playing old SGs in the mid-'90s – first a 1961 Standard with a sideway tremolo and then a 1965 SG, which I loved the tone of. The 1961 SG was the more expensive of the two with the PAF pickups, etc., but I found that I preferred the tone of the 1965 that I picked up cheaply in Tokyo a lot more – maybe this was because of the way the strings were attached to the body via the Maestro tremolo unit. Alas, I don’t have either of those guitars any more (and didn’t I sell them so cheap….) but the 1965 SG is much missed for its very open sound. That guitar was acoustically quite loud, a real livewire. Someone told me that Carlos Santana played "Samba Pa Ti" on his early '60s SG Special. The harmonics on my SG sounded, to my ears, not dissimilar despite the obvious P-90 coloring of that tone. Eric Clapton said, when we were doing the research for the Christie's 2004 catalog, that the March, 1968, "Crossroads" on Wheels of Fire was played on his cherry-red 335 - but, to be honest, I am not convinced. To my ears, it sounds like a mahogany guitar – his Firebird or more likely the painted SG known as The Fool... Continue reading "The SG Sound"