Lilith! - Epiphone Faded G-400 • 2008 • Worn Cherry

❤️ Meet Lilith! ❤️

Epiphone Faded G-400 • 2008 • Worn Cherry

Some guitars have curves.

Lilith has horns.

Born in 2008, Lilith comes from the era when Epiphone’s take on the SG was still known as the G-400, and she has spent the last 18 years doing a remarkably good job of proving that a guitar doesn’t need to be complicated to be thoroughly entertaining.

The recipe is gloriously simple.

Take a lightweight mahogany body, carve some extremely pointy horns into it, attach a set mahogany neck, add two humbuckers and four knobs, then finish the entire thing in a shade of red that makes behaving responsibly seem rather unlikely.

Lilith wears Epiphone’s Worn Cherry finish, a thin satin treatment that allows the grain of the mahogany to remain visible and gives the guitar a beautifully natural, played-in feel.

It has aged particularly well.

Her set neck leads to a rosewood fingerboard with pearloid trapezoid inlays, 22 frets and the familiar 24.75” scale length, while the deep double cutaways provide exactly the sort of upper-fret access you would expect from a guitar equipped with two actual horns.

A pair of Epiphone humbuckers provide the noise.

At the neck is an Alnico Classic, delivering the warmer, rounder side of the equation, while the hotter Alnico Classic Plus at the bridge is rather better suited to proceedings involving gain, palm muting and complaints from adjacent properties.

A traditional three-way toggle selects between them, while independent volume and tone controls for each pickup provide considerably more flexibility than Lilith’s beautifully straightforward appearance might suggest.

At the other end you’ll find an Epiphone LockTone Tune-o-matic bridge and stopbar tailpiece, while a full set of Grover machine heads keeps tuning duties reassuringly sensible.

Lilith has now been through the workshop, where she has been thoroughly cleaned, inspected and serviced before receiving a complete setup ready for her next human.

We’ve treated that Worn Cherry finish sympathetically rather than trying to turn satin into gloss, and the result has come up beautifully. The grain remains visible, the finish still has that lovely soft sheen, and there are only minor signs that she has spent the last 18 years actually being played.

Which is exactly how we like them.

The older G-400s occupy a particularly nice little place in Epiphone history. They’re old enough to have developed some character, but modern enough that owning one doesn’t require a degree in archaeology and a suspiciously large collection of obsolete capacitors.

Lilith is light, comfortable, easy to play and capable of everything from warm blues and classic rock through to significantly less polite territory.

Or, to put it rather more efficiently:

Two horns. Two humbuckers. No excuses.

Lilith is ready to misbehave again. ❤️😈

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