When one thinks of an SG Custom, certain things might come to mind, like three humbuckers, Maestro Vibrola, a bound neck, gold hardware with a creamy white colour, like the ones Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Jimi Hendrix played. How much more flash can a guitar get? Well, Epiphone has managed to make an SG Custom for the modern era. If you’re in the market for a psychedelic-looking SG that isn’t your grandfather’s one from the 60s, then the Epiphone Futura SG Custom is the guitar for you.
Let’s address the finish straight away. This has to be one of the coolest on any guitar, period. Unzipping Epiphone’s premium gig bag, you’ll be welcomed by one of three mind-bending colour-shifting finishes: Dragonfly Shift, Midnight Ember Shift and Nitro Shift. Epiphone describes these finishes as a chroma shift colour-shifting gloss finish, which does not give much detail on what to expect. The best description would be an abalone shell at max saturation. The number of colours one can see slightly moving the body is remarkable. On the Nitro Shift finish, one can see purples, pinks, golds, silvers, reds, oranges, yellows and greens and everything in between.
Epiphone Futura SG Custom in Nitro Finish
Epiphone Futura SG Custom in Nitro Finish
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This SG is what one would expect at its foundation: a 24.75in/628.65mm scale length with an all-mahogany body and set neck with a Rosewood fingerboard consisting of 22 stainless steel medium jumbo frets with classic Super 400-style Pearloid split-block inlays and a Graph Tech nut. For an all-mahogany guitar, it is surprisingly light. Like most SGs, it carries a slight neck dive – something players familiar with the SG will already know how to manage with strap positioning.
The profile of the neck is a modern C with a compound radius of 10in. to 14in./254mm to 355.6mm and is surrounded by white binding. The neck feels comfortable, especially above the twelfth fret and does not have any stickiness problems as some painted necks do. Out of the box, the frets all feel nice and polished and don’t have any sharp ends.
The guitar’s hardware is all chrome, which is a nice juxtaposition to the Nitro Shift colour. Locking Grover Rotomatic tuners make string changes quicker and keep tuning stable under heavy use. A nice inclusion is the Posi-Lok diamond-shaped strap button, which acts as a somewhat sturdy strap lock without making necessary modifications. The bridge is Epiphone’s standard two-piece LockTone Tune-O-Matic. The control knobs are knurled, which adds a good bit of grip when engaging the coil split/phase. The output jack is conveniently located on the side instead of the front, giving uninhibited access to the neck pickup’s tone control.
The Futura series has one of the most versatile control layouts, allowing the player to go beyond the classic Gibson-style neck and bridge pickup with corresponding volume and tone controls. Known as a modification associated with one of Jimmy Page’s Les Pauls, this wiring allows the player to coil split both pickups and reverse the phase of the neck pickup, which gives an out-of-phase sound when both pickups are selected. All up, this style of wiring offers 21 different combinations. Both pickups are Epiphone’s ProBucker Ignite, which are slightly hotter than Epiphone’s standard humbuckers.
When I first plugged in this guitar, I found it to be somewhat dark, leaning towards a traditional jazz tone rather than an aggressive rock sound. The neck humbucker is one of the darker pickups I’ve encountered. The bridge humbucker, however, provides the classic SG sound: bright, punchy and aggressive. This guitar wants to be used by tone chasers and tweakers because of its wiring. Yes, it does the SG thing, but all these split coils and out-of-phase sounds are where the true magic lies with this guitar. If you’re looking for a versatile guitar to have in the studio, then this is the perfect candidate. This guitar has most, if not all, the bases covered by humbuckers, from Peter Green’s out-of-phase sound, Frank Zappa’s mid-humped tone, to some of BB King’s Varitone sounds.
For a guitar of this price, the Futura SG offers an outstanding feature set. The control scheme alone is well worth the price point, as it is rare to see on any guitar that is not an artist’s signature or several thousand dollars more than this series. The feature set is deep enough that players will keep discovering new tones the longer they spend with it.
The finish is a bold statement, so may not suit players after something more traditional. I’m intrigued to see how this SG would react under stage lighting from an audience perspective. The kid in me, however, who’s just learnt about a wiring modification that Jimmy Page did to his Les Paul to get different sounds outside the standard humbucker sound, truly is excited to have finally played a guitar with it installed and would have felt lucky to own a guitar like this. So many cool tones!
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