I was browsing around at Best Buy yesterday and found myself standing face to face with the Gibsons we've been reading about lately. The quot;Signaturequot; series LP and SG were there. And not to be outdone, Fender had their quot;Stratocasterquot; series, though I think it's really cheesy that they're using that name. I didn't get to mess around with them much, because I didn't want a salesman to come over and try to sell one to me (normally there's no fear of that at Best Buy, but for some reason, yesterday, they were constantly harrassing me).
The LP is the only one I really spent any time with. It's very light - almost definitely not mahogany. Therefore, it was much brighter than a Les Paul acoustically. The rosewood fingerboard was so light I'm not even sure it was rosewood. The ends of the frets were actually dressed better than the ones on the majority of the Gibson Les Pauls at Guitar Sinner. That's probably the only really good thing I can say about them. Playability-wise, it was about the same as a lot of Epiphones, and I'd say they're pretty equivalent to at least the lower end Epis. The price was about $160.
So, if you've got a Best Buy close, you might want to check them out. I will say that they're much better than the junk they were selling there before. They also started carrying GHS strings and Fender picks, so in a pinch you could get some there, but they only have .009s.