New Gibson Guitars

[fivecoyote]

I just bought an Epi '58 goldtop reissue (P-90s) for $400 used. NO EBAY -- played it at a local store. Great? No. Killer tone? Yes. Price I could live with? Most definitely. I never thought I'd rtry an Epi let alone buy one, but...

[NY Chief]

I have one. It's not too bad. I put Duncan P90's in it. Fun guitar for the $$

[electricskychurch]

i understand your points of view and i agree with some of what you are saying but i might see the problem a bit differently.
i love Gibson guitars , i mean i love the tone those famous guys had (Paul Kossof, Page, Duane, Bloomfield,Gibbons, or townshend and angus with Sg's) , i love the tone i now have with most of mines (it took me several years to find the right combination of wood, pu's ...) and i love some Gibson guitars, the ones that are nice and sound well.
that said, their marketing methods (as Fender ones ) makes me wonder sometimes where is teh music mojo in all that !

i remember my first les paul was a black les paul standard i must have bought in teh late 80's or early nineties, i wasn't playing well at all so i can't speak about something else than the price and if i remember well it was about 10 000 Francs at that time (what is about 1500 euros = +/- 1850 $ but back tehn the $ was not as cheap as it was recently ).
i sold it in teh early 90's and the next one i bought was in 2002 or so and they cost 2750 euros new in a shop (+/- 3500 $) .
i bought one for 2500 euros and though it was quiet expensive, i remember the les paul 60 was listed about 8000 or 10 000 euros catalog price !!
a USA serie SG standard was about 1750 euros .
a les paul 59' was about 5000 euros or 6000 euros in the shops.
then, a few years later, the prices went down .
the SG standard went down to 1250 € and teh les paul standard sold for 2250 €.
the les paul 59 went down to about 4500 euros.
i thought the prices were much more interesting but they had been certainly overpriced for a while.
since post 2000 i had that les paul standard , a 95' les paul classic premium plus that sounded bad and a 96 & 97 lesz paul 59 ri as well as a 95' les paul 54 ri .
teh historic ones sound better than the USA serie i have had and are nicer although teh top of the classic premium plus ws beautiful.

so, now, several questions come to my mind.

the first is :
is there such production cost difference between a les paul standard USA serie and a les paul 59 ri ?
i have no idea about that !
i mean is the wood work really different and cost them more ?
i'm not totaly sure about that.
i suppose the nicer woods are more expensive but i don't think it's the reason for such a price difference.
in fact , i think tehy know people who buy teh expensive ones are usualy people that can afford them , so they can have high prices but teh competition is toughon eth lesser models with all teh other companies, so they need to have more competitive prices.
i have noticed they began to change the specifications of teh USA serie ones since they lowered the prices ,so tehy become less and less accurate and nice and they finally stopped producing teh les paul standard usa serie , maybe to force people wanting one to buy teh historic and vos ones .

so now, Gibson and Fender have a different marketing method.
they realised they couldn't keep selling as many guitars all the time, so they tried to propose a lot more different models, colors ... to compete with other brands and also started to make more and more limited edition models that they sell quiet expensive or the other way is to add added value to their products by aging / relicing them.

now you see some repros of guitars like Page or bloomfield that sell for a very expensive price whereas they are nearly the same guitars as non limited edition basicaly !
i just saw teh catalog price for teh bloomfield one : 14 500 $ !! what teh fuck is it !!
i have a 97 les paul standard 59 of teh same color with wider and more regular flames all through the top (although the flames on teh bloomfiled one they show are nice as well) , brazilain rosewood and lightweight that is as nice as this one and i paid a third of that price second hand a few years ago.

here's teh 97' flame top :

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/2056 ... l59nt3.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

the next one is the 96' one tiger top (the pu's are not the stock classic 57' aged i had with it) i bought this one the same price as teh other one, second hand , a few years ago but this one was aged . it could have been done by the earlier owner (although he said it had been done by Tom Murphy but the headstock gibson pearl inlay in yellowed (as the binding ) and note white as the not aged ones i saw :

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/6742/9 ... odyek8.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

by the way, how do you call these colors ! LOL

i sincerly don't think teh Page or Bloomfield reissue model are 3 times superior to these ones , i don't even think they are superior in fact ! LOL

building one is certainly a big job and i suppose it might be more difficult than to build an explorer.
also as flame says, you can tap teh woods and there i come wondering what method the Gibson and Fender custom shop use to select teh woods they will use ?

i'm really interested to know about that and searched the net but couldn't find anything about that.

cause as Flames says you can tap teh wood and hear how it sounds, i did it with several strat necks i unmounted from my guitars and was surprised how different they sounded (a cs60 strat one, an AV62 and an original jun63 neck).

i also wonder if tapping the wood to hear the resonance , really show you how your guitar will sound ?
i suppose good luthiers might be able to do that but is it an exact science ; i'm not sure !

that said, untill now , i haven't seen other brands making as nice les pauls and SGs as teh historic ones .

one can also wonder why they didn't make the historic ones more accurate earlier and why they are still not totaly (cosmeticaly speaking, at least from wxhat some people seem to say as i have not really compared).
was it planned as a marketing method ! LOL
i don't know why they didn't put the knobs in teh same area as teh original ones !
i discovered about that recently , but i think it has been corrected since.
why didn't they use lightweight tailpiece before although i'm not unhappy to have started with the heavy zinc ones as they seem to give more body and less brightness than lightweight ones for guitars that are bright enough to start with (but still with warmth, mids and low end ! ) , that is to say not so many it seems ! LOL
it seems also their actual bumble bees are totaly fake ones with just the cover beeing a bumble bee like but there is a smaller cap inside from what i read from a guy that had his X-rayed !
it has to be confirmed but that 's the type of marketing tech i hate (as they say they are bumble bees ) !
same for the neck profile or other things like that , they could certainly have done it earlier since teh early/ mid 90's !

by the way, in what guitars do they start to use PCB's ?

one thing i notice at least is that the regular USA serie models and regular historic ones are less expensive than they were a few years ago (unlike fender ones ) , what's good for everybody (although teh USA serie are not as good a before to my taste) but are the prices of those regular USA and historic models still too expensive for nowdays (at least teh US prices cause some european import prices are too expensive), i'm not totaly sure although i'm not luthier and i can't really imagine how long it is to build one nor what it costs them .

i think the problems i have with those brands are their marketing technics and poor customer service but isn't it teh case with most big companies as well as many small ones ! LOL
i hate marketing ; that's often lies and bullshit and i wonder if they think people are stupid or just naive ! LOL
unfortuantely, i spent much money for a while influenced by those marketing technics, when i had few experience with all that !

last, could they build some historic les paul 59 for cheaper ?
maybe but they would not sell the les paul standard anymore as i'm not sure they can lower their actual prices much.
so they have to keep the historic ones more expensive and justify the price difference how they can .
one of the reason they stopped producing teh les paul standard could be that it is bringing more and more customers to the 59'ri as prices have gone down , whereas some of those people might have bough a standard.
maybe also, there are many second hand ones on the market and many other builders trying to build guitars in that category whereas there are less builders in the historic category

[Rickey_Dee]

i havent read all the replies, but what i can say is, i won't buy a gibson any longer that was built after 95 or something... i have a '77 custom, a 1992 '59 reissue, a 1993 '57 custom reissue, a '84 studio custom, a 1995 eds1275, a 1996 sg standard, a 2001 hummingbird and a 2004 es-335... all i can say is that all les pauls are flawless and intonate perfect and just feel right... when you take the doubleneck and look at the inlays, you can see that this is in no way flawless... sometimes i even wonder that i still can see the inlays because there is so much of that black filler used cause the inlays werent cut exactly enough, same with the sg, same with the hummingbird... on the 59 reissue you cant even see any filler anywhere on the fretboard, and it's a rosewood fretboard, so as soon as a filler is used you can see it. the hummingbird is by far the worst one, the intonation is horrible, i even thought about bringin her to a builder and get that fuckin fretboard replaced. it is an fantastic sounding guitar, but who needs a good sound if the intonation is shit... when you put you finger at the 10th fret on the b-sting, you almost get an A flat... horrible. you cant even hit a D-chord, it simply sounds wrong. i havent played the guitar a lot when i got her, so i didnt really recognized that, i always thought it was a bit detuned. well, at least shes standin in my room, nice to look at...

the es335 on the other hand is one perfect example of a gibson guitar and how it SHOULD be built... top notch, flawless, perfect intonation, awesome finish... hmm... maybe they had a good run. but most gibsons i looked at in music stores were the same... like someone stated above, they all look to me like factory seconds.

i have payed $3.300 for my almost new 59 reissue in 1993... when i look at what gibson produces now and look at the price tag, i ask myself what the hell is goin wrong there???? is it truely a weak production company that is concentrated on makin money and not good guitars??? why did they make really good guitars til the mid 90's, and why doesnt this work now?

for me the situation is clearer than ever... IF it should be a gibson, then it would be the best to get one that was made prior to 1990. you simply can get a far better guitar for a far better price... i havent seen a lot of the latest custom shop models, so i cant really say if there's the same problem with them, but the regular series... no way. whatever, i just need a couple of gibsons more, like a flyin v, a firebird... and maybe one or two more, but then i'm fine and don't have to worry about that anymore. and of course a properly made hummingbird.

[Omn]

Nice One!
Beautiful wood...