EPIPHONE DAVE GROHL DG-335
The Colour & The Shape
Epiphone has delivered a cut-price replica of Dave Grohl’s Trini Lopeztinged DG-335. Let’s see if it can punch above the logo
Since Dave Grohl made his postNirvana debut with Foo Fighters in 1995, there have been multiple eras of his favoured onstage guitars, with the common thread being that they’re more often than not an iteration of the classic Gibson dual-humbucker format –from the Les Paul Standards and Customs, Explorers and SGs, to the occasional Firebird. One of the few breaks in this chain came in the early Noughties around the band’s fourth album, One By One, where he briefly became associated with his Ampeg Dan Armstrong, temporarily introducing a whole new generation to the revered see ‐through Lucite model before moving back to his familiar Gibsons.
In 2007 came the biggest constant for Grohl: the Gibson DG-335. It’s this guitar that we’ve seen him playing most often –in fact, pretty much exclusively –since its introduction. Gibson issued it in a limited run of 200 the same year and it’s subsequently seen further runs periodically since, including an all-black and a gold version. On the used market, these guitars command high prices (or, at least, high asking prices), with current listings pushing upwards of £15k.
For those of us who can’t drop part of a house deposit on a signature guitar, however, comes the Epiphone DG-335. First, there’s a little more to the backstory of how an ES-335 came to be the backbone of one of the biggest rock bands in the world. You might be aware that back in 1992 Dave Grohl was the drummer in another Biggest Band On The Planet. While on tour with Nirvana, he picked up a 1967 Gibson Trini Lopez Standard (Gibson also produced the fully-hollow Trini Lopez Deluxe, which was based on the Barney Kessel). The Standard was ES-335-like in design, but here the semihollow body featured diamond-shaped soundholes, split-diamond inlays, a sixin-a-line headstock similar to a Firebird, and the strings were anchored by a trapeze tailpiece, rather than a stopbar.
Grohl’s Cherry Trini Lopez became, and remained, his go-to studio guitar. Indeed, when Lopez passed away in 2020, Grohl paid tribute to his unlikely inspiration saying, “Every album we have ever made, from the first to the latest, was recorded with my red 1967 Trini Lopez signature guitar. It is the sound of our band and my most prized possession from the day I bought it in 1992.”
