That would be your President and Vice President: Me(BostonGuitar) and Mike Duncan...
We both have goldtop '08s and Frost Blue Metallic Standard '12s...
For me, it is all about tone, and for me, the Standard is sounding EXACTLY as I had thought it should without the maple cap.
One might assume by subtracting a wood, you are only losing something in the tone. While there are a few shimmery frequencies not apparent in the standard, I can truthfully say that the "advantage" of a great one piece slab of Mahogany as your body actually brings more to the table than what is lost. The standard does not lose any clarity by losing the bright sounding maple, because the mahogany brings some increased "ear friendly" upper mids that are not harsh in the slighest. Resonance is still really happening. Complex chords still ring right through. Sustain is probably a tad more. It is like the perfect complimentary tone to a maple topped DGT, but you could own just the standard and still do all the same things. The area where one might think would be the weakest for the standard would be split coil stuff(due to not having that extra shimmer a maple top brings). But the pickups are getting over whatever hump that might be, because I did a gig yesterday with my Standard and played authorotative versions of Purple Haze, Smoke on the Water, and Shine On You Crazy Diamond. The neck and bridge position single coil tones that are required to really come correct when playing those tunes were not just passable using my standard, but rather they were EXCEPTIONAL. The overall formula of the DGT with the balance of big strings, trem, big frets, pickups with best coil taps, etc, translate to the all mahogany body BRILLIANTLY...
If I had any concerns of regret in trading my custom shop '60 relic strat towards this dgt standard, my gig yesterday wiped them completely away and made me feel silly for even being worried about regrets.
The DGT standard is a fantastic instrument.
