I am pretty light on scratching, I use medium picks and tend to keep my hand on the bridge quite a bit (comes from playing LP's for years!). I remember it was a buggar to stop fingerprints though. I'm not sure what happened to it to tell you the truth, I changed to all black with the guitar, I had it resprayed (the blue had been hand painted), and put an EMG H/S/S set on it. I still have that and it looks mean!