Best Wide Neck Electric Guitars (1.69” +) – Personally Tested!

For example, I love playing around with the tone knob half-way and the bridge pickup. It gives the guitar a soaring lead tone that’s perfect for rants that can sound more melodic, mellower, and closer to a vocal melody. Furthermore, going from a tone-in-3 scenario to a tone-in-10 scenario can mean unleashing the beast at the turn of a knob.

You might be saying “Sounds cool, man, but why don’t you just use your neck pickup for that?” Well, you have a point there, but with volume and tone knobs for each pickup, I like dialing my front pickup a little lower in gain and tone to get more of a dark, inviting sound that mixes perfectly well with the SG’s natural midrange bite and honk.

I can flip the switch and be in one world or the other, it’s like rocking magic.

If you’re not familiar with the SG but are a Les Paul player, the SG is a very different flavor sonically. It has a much more pronounced midrange and cuts the mix without ever being boomy. On the contrary, it might seem a little too bright if you’re a LP person.

The SG is one of those guitars that I always just have such a great time playing. Its smaller, lightweight frame compared to the Les Paul makes it very comfortable to play.

It also has a tighter, snappier sound compared to the Les Paul. The tone is also a touch brighter. The clean tone is also nice and warm, with some added sweetness.

I played this guitar with distortion first. It was some “Ironman”, “Paranoid”, and “War Pigs” because, when rocking an SG you have to pay Tony Iommi his dues. I did some “Back in Black” and “Roadhouse Blues” to keep all my idols happy. I have to tell you rock is this guitar’s happy place.

The cleans were nice too, I won’t say they were glass-like clean like a Stratocaster, but it did clean up very well. It’s also a very responsive guitar, so if you strum instead of arpeggiating, you’ll notice the audio also changes. It gets dirtier, it barks and bites.

But beyond sound experiments and cool things you can do with the SG sonically, let’s address what we came here to address: the neck.

This guitar came out in ‘61, a moment in which Gibson was making instruments with thin necks to satisfy the demands of an increasing number of rock players. The neck on this guitar is what you’d call a slim-taper neck and is very fast, thin, and flat. Yes, the 12” radius makes it comfortable to play next to the nut but also close to the neck joint.

Furthermore, the neck is super comfortable, and with a 1.695” nut width, those with larger fingers will have an easy time playing this guitar. Yes, fingering difficult stuff like an A major in the open position with three fingers was easy.

Things got even better when I moved up on the fast and smooth neck. I was able to play scales, bends, licks, and riffs easily and it all felt quite effortless. Also, I’ve always been a fan of the smooth neck joint these guitars have. It’s beyond the fretboard’s end which makes it a great guitar to have fun playing up there nailing those high notes.

The SG is one of those guitars that I always just have such a great time playing. Its smaller, lightweight frame compared to the Les Paul makes it very comfortable to play. I had it on for a couple of hours and hardly realized it.

The frets and strings are also spaced nicely, making chords easy to form. Melodies, licks, and long runs are also super easy to pull off, with ample space for your fingers to move.

The neck is also a D shape. This makes for some fast and smooth playing, while still giving you more than enough grip at the back of the neck. I enjoyed the way the guitar neck feels at the back, my palm was fully in contact with the wood, which gave me a great organic experience with the instrument.

The SG is a very versatile guitar, as shown by the types of guitarist that play it. You can easily go from classic rock, to blues, to metal, and even modern hardcore.

If you’re after a rocking axe that can help you propel your favorite rock chops forward, then this is a great contender. If, on the other hand, you want to play clean and mellow, this might not be your instrument.

We’ll talk about the technical and sound differences, which are many, in a bit. For now all I’m going to say is that, although Epiphone is kind of a cut-corners made-in-Asia version of Gibson, the difference in the price tag doesn’t make this a cheap guitar. I would say it’s a great mid-price axe that can give you a lifetime of playing joy.

Speaking of the fancy appointments that Epiphone gave this guitar, the all-mahogany body and neck combination gives it a nice weight but also a low-end growl that’s just… well… very Les Paul. Yes, you’ll find this guitar packs the quintessential punch.

If you’re a Les Paul Standard player, though, there’s a big difference between this custom and a Standard. This guitar doesn’t have a maple top, it’s a full mahogany build with a carved mahogany top. The snap that’s present in the upper midrange and the furious mids come from the ebony fingerboard. Yes, folks, this guitar has a real ebony board.

The combo is complete with the ProBucker pickups, which are not so gainy but try to resemble the output and tone of the Holy Grail of all humbuckers, the original PAFs. Those could cost you well into the thousand. Luckily, Epiphone makes affordable, high-quality versions of their Gibson cousins. Alternative pickups, like the ones this Epiphone Les Paul Custom features, are made to pursue that tone. They're not hot or too gainy, they're classic-sounding.

The Epiphone Les Paul doesn’t sound exactly like a Gibson, but I think it comes pretty close.

That same attitude and growl are present on this guitar. This Epiphone sounds fantastic both clean and with the gain cranked up.

The one thing I can say sonically about the difference between this guitar and its Gibson counterpart is that, if you go back and forth from one to another, you’ll notice there’s a difficult-to-tame mid-high and high frequency coming from the Epiphone that makes it lack the depth and the harmonic complexity of a Gibson.

Also, well, they vibrate differently, this isn’t as resonant.

Luckily, build-wise, this guitar is very close to the real deal. I mean, it doesn’t go through a PLEK machine at the factory, but the neck shape and the comfort of the 12” radius does feel perfect, smooth, and Gibson-like.

If you have played a Gibson Les Paul, the neck on the Epiphone version will be familiar. It has pretty much the exact same neck, with a 1.693” nut width, and a slightly thinner SlimTaper shape.

Plus, the medium-jumbo frets, the binding, and the ebony make it a comfortable, fast, responsive neck to play. I had to play some Zakk Wylde on it and “Gets Me Through” sounded great. Also some The Darkness was quite close as well.

If you clean it up, you can play anything on it, from neo-soul to funk to some righteous ska. It all gets a shot of bottom-end to fill the sound in the lower frequencies. I especially loved the middle position for its sweet, dark tone.

If you put me in the tough position of having to choose between this guitar and the Les Paul Standard, I would say that I actually prefer this neck shape. I think that the ‘60s Slim-Taper neck is Gibson’s finest. Also, I find it is a bit more comfortable to play chords, and moving up and down the neck is a bit faster.

If this guitar is within your budget and under your radar (and you own a tuxedo), you should give it a chance. Not everyone can afford a Gibson, and Epiphones are a fantastic alternative.

Tonally, I like to think of the Les Paul Junior as a sort of mix between the Les Paul and the SG. How so? Well, it features a thinner all-mahogany body, closer to an SG, just a little bigger, but nowhere near a Les Paul Standard or Custom body. But since it doesn’t have a maple top or ebony on the fretboard, its tone sits somewhere in between.

The Junior’s tone is tighter and snappier than a standard Les Paul. But it is also a bit fatter and fuller than an SG. The one thing we tend to say about these guitars is that they “bite” a lot because of the midrange bump. This is something that comes partly from the P-90 (Gibson’s version of the single-coil pickup) and partly from the guitar’s build.

Yes, this axe is all mahogany except for the fretboard that’s made of sweet-sounding and great-looking rosewood. You can feel it resonate and vibrate evenly when you’re playing it unplugged. I did the “chest test” (AKA put the guitar flat against your chest and strum an open chord) and it was a beautiful experience.

Although that’s a great test for a guitar’s organic vibrations this is a rocking machine and it needs to be plugged in to enjoy it fully. So, going straight into my Sovtek MIG-50 with some generous volume, I had to close every studio door because this guitar is FIERCE.

The P90 pickup also gives it a dirtier tone. The Junior’s tone leans more to a vintage sound as well in my opinion. It loved dirt boxes, fuzzes, overdrives, and I was able to get a particularly soaring tone by killing the tone knob and turning on the fuzz along with some delay. The signal got thick and I felt I was a menace to humankind.

I played some Gary Clark Jr., some Jack White, and some Bon Jovi. Yes, Mr. Sambora is a big Les Paul Jr. fan. This is a brief example of how a guitar like this can fill up the entire Madison Square Garden with ferocious tones.

Cleaning the sound up is very easy if you know how to work the guitar’s controls but it’s never a crystal-clear clean setting. The P-90 always pushes some dirt on your signal because it drives the front of the amp very hot.

My Deluxe Reverb sounds closer to a Marshall Plexi than to a clean platform.

But beyond tones and such wonderful things, we’re here to talk about necks and this guitar has one of those old-school ‘50s style necks that’s round and fat and sits right at the palm of your hand. It sits on the opposite side of the road with a slim-taper neck but it features lots of room for fingers all the way to the neck joint.

The nut width is at a very comfortable 1.695” while the radius is 12”. This makes the neck a very spacious platform to play chords, scales, solos, riffs, and anything you want anywhere on the fretboard.

I even tried adding some reverb, playing with the tone in zero and the volume in 4 and got some decent jazz tone from this guitar too. Again, not crystal-clear, but low and biting with personality and power.

If you’re going to be playing mostly dirty blues, rock, and you want a minimalist, straightforward instrument that won’t break the bank and will get the job done night after night, this is an amazing choice. For more versatility and a cleaner, more transparent tone, you should go looking somewhere else.

Many people like to describe the Standard as sounding somewhere between a Les Paul and a Strat. I tend to agree, although I think it has a more modern sound compared to the more classic tone of the Les Paul and Strat.

In the PRS world, the Custom models feature a maple top, the Standard models are fully mahogany, and this Swamp Ash special features a swamp ash body which makes it highly resonant and with that snap and attack that’s so common in swamp ash guitars. It is a Standard because it has no maple top.

The body is highly resonant and passed the “chest test” very well. If you have played a swamp ash guitar before, you know they have a razor-like midrange and generous upper-mids to cut any mix.

Combining that with a maple neck and bolt-on construction gives you a guitar that’s responsive, snappy, and that can play country as well as metal and everything in between. The SE Standard is already one of the most versatile guitars in this price range in my opinion.

Since this is an electric guitar, how it sounds unplugged is only a small part of the story because when you plug it in, this guitar turns into a roaring beast. Yes, the dual humbuckers, a cheaper version of the brand’s flagship 85/15, can drive an amp, a pedal, and a song at ease. I love distortion on guitars with this higher-mid power because there’s a nastiness that comes out of the speaker you can only find in maple-neck guitars.

Although it’s an HSH configuration, which is already a lot to play with, the addition of a coil tap pushes that versatility even further. Yes, you have 6 sounds to choose from and they’re not traditional, on the contrary, each position does a different thing.

• Position 1 - Bridge humbucker only
• Position 2 - Bridge and Neck humbuckers on
• Position 3 - Neck humbucker only
• Position 4 (coil tap up) - Bridge humbucker + middle single coil
• Position 5 (coil tap up) - Bridge humbucker + middle single coil + neck in single-coil mode
• Position 6 (coil tap up) - Middle single coil + neck in single-coil mode

So, going from position 1’s ripping, full, round, and aggressive tones to position 6’s instant bluesy flavors make this guitar a single-stop solution for all your tone needs.

What I missed that’s something I love about PRS guitars is the sweetness of the rosewood + mahogany combination. Nevertheless, what this guitar lacks in sweetness it makes up for in aggressiveness and snappy midrange.

I feel like this is one of those rare guitars where you just pick a genre, and this guitar can do it. Everything from jazz, blues, rock, metal, you name it.

The neck is what PRS calls a wide-thin neck. This means it’s wide enough to fit your fingers and thin enough to be fast and comfortable. It’s finished in matte lacquer which is great for your hand, especially on humid days and places.

I felt it does sit on the lower end for wide neck electric guitars. The nut width is 1.6875”. But I think most large-handed guitarists will still find it to be more than comfortable. This is mostly because the 25” scale matches the 10” radius and this neck gives you plenty of meat to grab on and enough space to finger chords, riffs, and leads.

Finally, if you add the proprietary PRS tremolo to the combo, you have a fast guitar that’s fun and easy to play and has tone for days. I can’t think of anything that you can’t play with this guitar pairing it with a decent amp and pedalboard.

To sum it up, the SE Standard 24 is just a fantastic guitar and an absolute joy to play regardless of your playing style or musical preference.

I can’t think of a more menacing-looking guitar to get the job done with big hands.

Everything about this guitar is metal. From its all-black matte finish to the black hardware, every part of it is black and heavy-oriented, including its sound.

Speaking of heavy-oriented, the Seymour Duncan Black Winter pickup is as hot and aggressive as guitar pickups will ever get. The brand describes them by saying they’re “as extreme as Scandinavian winter”. So, you get an idea of what they can do in the right hands. Moreover, it’s mounted straight on the body of the guitar which enhances resonance and presence.

Beyond its uncanny stage appearance, this guitar is perfectly balanced in terms of sound. The heaviness you get from the chugging and the gain from the amp is met with a powerful midrange and snappy mid-highs. The alder body, maple neck, and Macassar ebony fingerboard add their part to the mix and you can cut even the densest mix with this guitar in your hands.

I tried it with obnoxious levels of distortion, and, while the pickup gives it this very chunky, fat sound rich in the low end, it all sounds crisp and defined as well. The combination of woods and pickup make this an HD-like guitar to play metal. You’ll sound big and menacing but your lows will be tight, your mid-range rocking, and your leads will cut through. Oh, and adding the Floyd Rose tremolo to the equation, you can go wild with your ‘80s solos.

Plus, riffs sound thick and heavy, while melodies and runs sound smooth and crystal clear.

Even the clean sounds great. It’s dark but also full and with generous midrange, perfect for those clean intros and interludes.

I just had to play Metallica classics with both sounds like “The Unforgiven”, “One”, and “Until it Sleeps”, one of my all-time favorite Metallica songs. The results were very powerful and the whole thing was kept perfectly in tune and sounding great with the double-locking tremolo and the heavier-than-life pickup.

Now that we’ve talked about the sounds, let’s address the matter that brought us here today: the neck. The neck is extremely comfortable. The extra-thin U shape is smooth and fast, while the Extra Jumbo frets and 1.692” nut width make it ideal for those with larger hands.

Adding to that, the guitar has almost 14” of radius on the fretboard, which means it is almost as flat as it gets (the Ibanez Jem goes to 16”). This makes spacing for your fingers generous not only close to the bridge but also close to the headstock.

Riffs and solos sound just as powerful and are also just as easy to play.

I also like that the LTD logo is a physical piece attached to the headstock and not just painted on. It is minor, but a nice touch that adds to the guitar's style. Plus, you know, the devil’s on the details, and we love those details!

This is definitely not a versatile guitar, though, but that is by design. You won’t be playing anything other than metal on the M-Black Metal. Moreover, if you get on stage with such a menacing axe and play anything other than metal, people will think you’ve mistaken stages (or guitars).

The M-Black Metal is a fantastic choice for metal guitarists with large hands.

But beyond all the gimmicks, lights, smoke, and pyrotechnics, Vai represents, for many of us, the pinnacle of guitar playing mixing impossible-to-get sounds and speed with heartfelt melodies and a kind of sound that is uniquely his.

The Jem plays a big part not only in his stage appearance but also in the way he plays. It’s one of the most comfortable and versatile instruments I have ever laid my hands on. Although I’ve played the high-end models now called Pia (seven times the price of the Jr.), this guitar packs a similar punch with minimal corners cut.

To begin with, the wood choice is meranti for the body, maple for the neck, and jatoba for the fingerboard. These are inexpensive alternatives to the classic woods used for the Pia, alder, 5-piece maple and walnut, and rosewood.

As you might expect, this guitar, despite the different woods, still sounds like a Super Strat on steroids with an amazing midrange that can cut anything and enough low-end to fill the mix when you chug or play heavy riffs or chords.

Speaking of which, the HSH pickup configuration is as versatile as it gets. You can use this guitar to play soft blues, heavy rock, clean neo-soul, or metal and it will respond perfectly. I loved the intermediate positions to play funky and bluesy and the extremes to go well… to the extremes.

When we talk about extremes on a guitar like this we talk about a radius of 15.7” and 24 jumbo frets on the Wizard III neck. This is one of the thinnest, fastest necks in the business today. It’s only 0.74” at the first fret and 0.82” at the 24th fret. But that’s not all, because neck width being this flat is absolutely amazing. You get 1.69” at the 1st fret and 2.28” at the 24th fret.

Yes, I tried it all and then some but I couldn’t make this guitar tremble or fail at anything I played with it. I have to say it’s not as powerful and defined as the Pia but it’s a lot of guitar for the price tag.

The neck is one of the flattest in the business and your fingers will have no problem finding their way to play open chords, scales, riffs, power chords, and anything else you want or need.

For those with big hands who want an instrument that can do it all and don’t mind borrowing Steve’s looks on stage, this is a fantastic guitar.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Godin is a Canadian brand. This is not a minor detail because I don’t remember any other brand using silver leaf maple as the main wood for the body. This is like a center-block guitar but comes with solid wings made of poplar. On top of that, the company added a maple or koa veneer.

It also has a mahogany neck and a richlite fretboard. Richlite received a lot of attention a few years ago. Gibson started putting it on their otherwise ebony fingerboards and it became a very controversial move. To my ears, though, it sounds snappy and great.

The bolt-on neck is what the company calls a Godin Ergocut and it does feel fast, smooth, and it’s one of the flattest and most comfortable necks on this list. The Tusq nut being 1.72” wide makes it very comfortable but the 16” radius transforms it into a highway. Too bad it doesn’t have more than 22 frets because this thing flies. The 25.5” scale also helps tuning stability and string tension a lot.

But enough with the technical mumbo jumbo, let’s get down to business. This guitar is made for the most cutting-edge demanding players, the Reeves Gabrels, the Adrian Belews of music. I’m not au pair with those monsters but I could get a plethora of sounds from this thing.

First, I tried one cable.

Plugging it into the socket labeled as “Electric” gives you just a capable, great-sounding, very comfortable guitar that growls, purrs, sings, and screams. I would love the midrange to be more defined but I shouldn’t ask this guitar to sound like a $3,000 one.

Plugging to the mix output I could now add the piezo sound. It sounded amazing playing clean through my Deluxe Reverb with the reverb in 3. The sliding knobs on top of the guitar are a 3-way EQ and a piezo volume. The piezo sounded believable and hi-fi and I was even able to tame the highs to prevent going into the feedback zone.

I played everything from “Hotel California” to “Working-Class Hero” to “Folsom Prison Blues” and it all sounded great.

Plugging the 13-pin cable and going into the Roland GR-55 I was able to access the synth part but going from the GR-55 to the guitar amp I could access also the other two sounds. I was mind blown and used it to add all kinds of layers and background sounds to my playing. Don’t even get me started with looping, because it was hours of fun.

You can even change banks on your GR-55 with one of the mini-toggles. The second one allows you to choose either electric/piezo only, all three, and the synth only.

This Godin XTSa is a great guitar if you’re into synths but is also a great guitar if you play acoustic and electric, and is a great guitar if you play only electric. The neck is comfortable, you can play it for hours and it doesn’t feel cramped or small.

The true jack of all trades has arrived.

The Striker comes with an all-mahogany body (looking at the price tag again?), bolt-on maple neck, an original Floyd Rose double-locking tremolo unit, and three Kramer original Alnico pickups (a humbucker and two single-coil pickups).

The five-way switch works just like you think it does, and the single volume and tone are enough for this minimalist guitar to bring mayhem to the world.

The moment I plugged this guitar in, I automatically just started playing Van Halen and Motley Crue. I just had to put on my Phase 90 because you can’t play uncle Eddie’s bombastic leads without a little phaser, right? Well, I even played “Wanted (Dead or Alive)” the Bon Jovi classic. Yes, that is how ‘80s this guitar is. That is the sound you get with this guitar, that gritty, biting, completely scooped, ‘80s hair metal sound.

This guitar also plays like something from the 80s. Its K-Speed SlimTaper C neck wants you to play fast. It also has a 1.693” nut width, so even if you have larger hands, you will be shredding comfortably on this neck.

I made quite a believable attempt at Hendrix on the neck and neck-and-middle positions. The middle pickup just screams Clapton and Mayer. Finally, the bridge-and-middle position was really cool to play some Chili Peppers, some SRV, and even some Daft Punk.

The humbucker at the bridge is a whole different deal. I could pull off some nice clean tones using the volume knob but it tends to drive anything you put in front of it really hard.

Did I say this is an ‘80s metal guitar already?

The clean tone is quite nice, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it exceptional. It does its job and not a ton more. I will say that the clean tone with the pickup selector on the second position, so bridge and middle, was definitely my favorite position.

But believe me, you aren’t going to be spending a lot of time playing clean on this guitar. The spirit of Eddie Van Halen will visit you and Spinal Tap will play on a loop inside your head.

This guitar is meant to have the gain turned up all the way, with the volume at 11.

For the retail price, this guitar is a total bargain, you get much more guitar than what’s indicated on the price tag. If you’re a pro, just a pickup switch and a good setup and it’s a great guitar for any stage.

The Striker is an affordable shredder’s dream.