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Classy design extras, ultra-buttery playability, and sweet, growling pickups distinguish this excellent ES alternative.

Faultless construction. Very nice PAF-style tones. Exceptional playability. Beautiful visual presence and cool vibe. Comes with a hard case.

The extra 200 bucks you’ll pay over the price of a more modest Epiphone ES-335 might be too much for practical players.

$899

Epiphone Noel Gallagher Riviera
epiphone.com

4.5
5
5
4

Whatever your opinion of Oasis—and they have a way of engendering opinions—there’s little arguing that Noel Gallagher has an ear for a tune. And like many contemporary British indie guitarists and forebears like his hero, Johnny Marr, Gallagher also understands the romantic and iconographic power of a great tune played on a classic guitar—particularly as a means of asserting difference from the pop and hair metal tribes that came before.

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Ola Englund’s merry band of guitar builders serve up an affordable shred gem.

A killer, ultra-playable guitar with top components at a nice price.

The EverTune bridge and Fluence Modern pickups are very niche-specific components that could turn some players off.

$1.349

Solar GC1.6AFAB
solar-guitars.com

5
4.5
4.5
4.5

Ola Englund, YouTube sensation and guitarist for the Haunted and Feared, started Solar Guitars, his own line of high-quality instruments, in 2017. The company is based in Sant Gregori, Spain, and their guitars are made in Indonesia. But as the marvelously decked-out GC1.6AFAB reviewed here reveals, this collaborative formula is yielding killer results at relatively affordable prices.

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Gibson’s archives give up lost treasure.

Delicious smooth-to-silky P-90 sounds. Awesome chunky neck. Pretty, unusual-for-Gibson body profile.

Holy cow, it’s expensive.

$4,999

Gibson Theodore
gibson.com

5
4
4.5
3.5

Gibson has had a lot of time to evolve as a guitar company. But that doesn’t make the breadth of personalities among their instruments any less astonishing. A Firebird, an ES-150, an ES-330, a Les Paul Standard, and an SG Jr. can each inspire very different paths for a given musical idea—or different ideas altogether. Each has its own musicality, attitude, and energy.

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Idiosyncratic pickups pull this slimline Gretsch along unexpected tone trajectories.

Unique, idiosyncratic pickups. Tidy construction. Top-notch playability.

Some tuning instability with Bigsby use. Some players will miss classic P-90 trebles.

$649

Gretsch G2622T-P90 Streamliner
gretschguitars.com

4
4.5
5
4

Gretsch’s new Streamliner guitars—like the 1960s Streamliners before them—are great instruments living in the shadows of the company’s most iconic shapes. Where guitars like the 6120, Country Gentleman, White Falcon, and others are either quite thick, very wide, or both, the Streamliner is slim and relatively light—in the fashion of the Epiphone Casino, Gibson ES-335, Fender Coronado, Rickenbacker 300-series, and various Voxes, Hofners, and Hagstroms that ruled the ’60s. They are exceptionally comfortable, engaging, and ultra-fun to play, particularly when fitted with a Bigsby, like the Gretsch G2622T-P90 Streamliner reviewed here.

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Maple makes the dread grow mellower.

Exceptional playability and intonation. Sweet midrange focus. Records well in dense mixes.

Some will find the maple voice quirky. Not a lot of low-end resonance for a dread. Satin finish doesn’t suit a $2K-plus instrument.

$2,199

Taylor AD27e Flametop
taylorguitars.com

4
4.5
5
4

One of the nice things about designing guitars for a company like Taylor is that you’re less burdened by tradition. Even though the builder is now nearly a 50-year-old institution—not to mention one of the biggest guitar makers in the world—to many acoustic traditionalists they are still very much the new kid on the block. While such fresh-faced “newness” may mean flattop classicists look askance at your every move, it also means you can introduce a design departure like the company’s V-Class bracing without risk of rebellion from your consumer constituency—or, for that matter, build a dreadnought with a top fashioned from big leaf maple.

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