[DeafDumbBlind Kid]

some people never do. It depends on developing your ear. There are times when I wish I still had my ibanez les paul copy and never got any better. Life would be so much simpler and a hell of a lot less expensive.

you never know, you may have gotten lucky and got a good one right off the bat. But you made a common mistake, thinking just because a gibson is an expensive guitar, that it is automatically a great guitar. Gibson has rested on its laurels for so long, that I believe that if it were not for the internet, they wouldn't spend one thin dime trying to improve their quality if they didn't have to. I can't count how many les pauls i turned down because they just were not good guitars, or vastly overpriced if they were acceptable. I did finally buy one in 1989. I spend a fortune on it, and thought it was the cat's nads. Within a year, it got traded towards an amp, because it just wasn't that great.

It took me 30 years, plus the help of some really knowledgeable, experienced people, to learn the finer points. I've probably spent in the neighborhood of 75-80 thousand dollars in the past 20 years, buying and selling guitars, amps, pedals, mics, etc, to find the good ones. Some might say it was a fool's errand, they may be right. But I gave up drugs in favor of gear, and I can live with that. At least I had something to show for it, instead of scar tissue in my nose and lung and liver, and an empty bank account.