I have a friend who can seriously make a $15 kids guitar from K-Mart sound good... No Joke!
He took my extensively modified G-400 to a recording session once, and was tuning it to start playing.
The recording engineer looked at it and said: "What are you doing with a POS Epiphone? You've got Gibsons, a Fender and a BC Rich to play. Get that piece of junk out of here!"
My friend didn't say anything, but started playing for a bit.
After a few minutes, the engineer says "OK. That Epiphone stays".
True story.