Epiphone Hummingbird Standard

Epiphone Hummingbird Standard - Cherry Sunburst

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Epiphone Hummingbird Standard - Cherry Sunburst

Some acoustic guitars become famous because of a clever feature or an unusual construction trick. The Hummingbird became famous by sounding fantastic while looking absolutely magnificent, and the Epiphone Hummingbird Standard in Cherry Sunburst keeps that combination alive in a seriously well-specced Inspired by Gibson acoustic-electric.

The first thing you'll notice is obviously that Cherry Sunburst finish. It's one of the defining Hummingbird looks, framing the solid spruce top beautifully while the tortoiseshell-style pickguard supplies the famous hummingbird, butterfly and floral artwork. Add gold hardware, multi-ply binding and split parallelogram fingerboard inlays and you've got an acoustic guitar that could hardly be mistaken for anything else.

More importantly, the current Hummingbird Standard is built with all-solid tonewoods. There's a solid spruce top paired with solid mahogany back and sides, giving you the classic Hummingbird tonewood recipe: strong projection and clarity from the spruce, with warmth, body and a pleasingly rounded character coming from the mahogany. It's particularly at home under a pick, where that square-shouldered body can deliver big, confident chords without losing definition, but there's plenty of responsiveness available when you soften your touch.

The neck is a one-piece mahogany design with a Rounded C profile, glued into the body using a tapered dovetail joint. It's substantial enough to feel reassuring without becoming cumbersome, and the 24.75" scale length gives the strings a comfortable feel beneath the fingers.

Epiphone has also given this updated model a genuine rosewood fingerboard, complete with 20 standard frets, a 12" radius and genuine mother-of-pearl split parallelogram inlays. A bone nut and bone saddle are welcome appointments too, while the rosewood belly-up bridge keeps everything looking suitably traditional.

When it's time to plug in, there's a Fishman S-Core under-saddle pickup feeding a Fishman Presys VT preamp. Rather than cutting a large control panel into the side of this lovely guitar, the Volume and Tone controls are discreetly mounted inside the soundhole. Plug your cable into the endpin output and you're ready for an acoustic amp, PA system or recording interface without interfering with the classic Hummingbird appearance.

Up at the gorgeous 60s Kalamazoo-style headstock, gold Epiphone Deluxe tuners with Keystone buttons handle tuning duties, accompanied by mother-of-pearl Epiphone and Gibson Crown inlays. It's another area where Epiphone has resisted the urge to tone things down. Good. Nobody ever looked at a Hummingbird and thought, “Lovely guitar, but perhaps it could be a little more anonymous.”

There's even an Epiphone Premium Gig Bag included, which makes plenty of sense because this isn't an acoustic that deserves to be transported to rehearsal wrapped in two hoodies and optimism.

The Hummingbird Standard sits in a very sweet spot: iconic styling, solid spruce and solid mahogany construction, proper Fishman electronics and enough decorative flourish to make even an ordinary Wednesday-night rehearsal feel like you've made some effort.