Guitar Info

guitarz.blogspot.com:

We've already looked on in horror and dismay when confronted with modifications made to vintage and classic guitars. Time and again, we've said, if you're going to mess around with something choose something cheap and Chinese-made that nobody is going to lament the demise of if it all goes horribly wrong (as it so often does).

Thankfully we have no worries in this instance for here we see what was a vaguely Les Paul-style very basic bolt-on neck Epiphone Special Plus which surely has been enhanced by the modifications performed on it. This is a cheap guitar that has been vastly improved through modification. This is the type of self customization that we like to see on Guitarz.

The eBay seller describes the work carried out on the guitar:

The body was cut in half. The inside was routed to leave roughly 1/2" sides, a 1/4" top and back, and a 4" solid core running from the neck pocket to the end of the stop tail. A sound hole and control access holes were cut in the top. The body was re-glued and then routed for a middle pickup. The finish on the neck is still the factory polyurethane, but the body was stripped and refinished in nitrocellulose. The body finish is thin and a little bit coarse in some areas. An aluminum pickguard was added, along with aluminum truss rod, control cavity and jack plates. The stock pickups were pulled and replaced with a set of three handmade humbucker sized blade single coils built around exposed alnico 5 firebird magnets. One master volume knob, one master tone knob and three individual on/off switches for each of the pickups.

Currently listed on eBay with the auction due to finish later today. Bidding has been keen already, although I doubt it'll sell for big money. Bidding is at $127.50 at the time of writing.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's what the current owner of this guitar has to say about it from the eBay listing:

Quilt Top One Off Custom Les Paul type guitar with great specification

I bought this guitar new around 18months ago through eBay and I've been delighted with it.

It was bought as a prototype model for a company called Bluesbelle and as such the fit and finish is excellent (presumably this guitar was used to secure sponsor funding and retailer orders).

The guitar has a mahogany body that is slightly slimmer than a traditional Les Paul. It has 5 ply binding to the body and highly figured quilted front and rear caps (even the cavity cover is quilted!!). The neck is bound and features 22 well dressed jumbo frets on an ebony fingerboard with side-markers. The guitar features gold hardware throughout.

The guitar has been upgraded to include a set of Tonerider Alnico 2 Classic Humbuckers (pretty much Gibson Burstbucker 2 & 3 copies) with 500k CTS pots, mullard capacitors and 50's spec wiring, a set of sperzel style locking disc tuners have been added to aid tuning stability & mismatched knobs have been added to aid adjustments when singing and a bone nut has recently been fitted and cut by my local luthier. The headstock features an inlaid Lucky Clover logo and no manufacturer name.

I bought it for around £300 and I felt it represented something of a bargain given the specification. Since then I've spent in excess of another £100 on upgrades.

The original seller stated they were expecting the retail model to have an RRP of £599 and I see no reason why that wouldn't be the case as it plays as well as other similar mainstream overseas guitars in that price bracket eg. ESP, Epiphone, PRS SE etc. I've only seen one other that was identical to the original spec of this guitar but it was a tobacco burst finish with the manufacturers name on the headstock and it was been offered for sale at £495 second hand...

Now, I'm not normally into quilted or highly figured tops, there is something a bit precious about them, but overall I like this guitar. It is definitely my kind of Les Paul. I think the feature that absolutely clinches it for me is the location of the pickup selector switch, i.e. down by the other conrols. I really dislike the positioning of the selector switch on regular layout Les Pauls both from a practical viewpoint (I always end up hitting it by accident) and from an aesthetical point of view (sitting up there on its own it looks like a pimple on someone's arse).

So, I wonder what happened to Bluesbelle guitars? I guess the venture ran out of steam and/or money. Still, it's nice to see this prototype and were I in the market for an LP type guitar right now I'd have to give it serious consideration.

Currently for sale on eBay UK with a Buy It Now price of £250, which -if the guitar is as great as the seller suggests - sounds like a bargain.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Often incorrectly cited as the "world's first guitar synth" (it wasn't - the Innovex "Condor GMS" system predates it by seven years), the Roland GR500 guitar synth and GS500 guitar controller was certainly a first for Roland. The synth module "was a simple analog affair with Bass, Solo Synth, and String sounds based on previous Orchestral and analog mono-synths from Roland" (see VintageSynth.com). It was my understanding that the pre-MIDI era synth used some kind of 5-note polyphony (I know, weird on a 6-string guitar!) which unfortunately was not known to function fantastically in practice.

The guitar controller itself was, I believe, built for Roland by Ibanez (but feel free to correct me via the comments section below). On the example pictured, the original guitar humbucking pickup has been replaced by an open coil unit. Note the hex pickup (essentially a housing containing individual pickups for each of the strings) which is situated between the guitar pickup and the bridge. There is no neck pickup. These Roland guitars have this strange black plate in the neck pickup position (covered in this instance by a hologram) which looks like it ought to have some purpose but probably doesn't. I wonder if it was just to conceal a pickup hole that had been drilled before the Les Paul style body was destined by become a guitar synth controller.

It's not too often that these guitar and synth units come up for sale together. (There was very recently a GS500 guitar in original condition up for sale on eBay but alas it was without the synth unit). This guitar and synth pair is currently being offered for sale on eBay with a starting price of $1,050. It's an interesting museum piece, but a cumbersome piece of kit, and it's not going to be especially useful for the guitarist interested in playing guitar synth, unless they are more or less content with producing simple sound effects.

For guitar and/or synthesiser historians only!

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

The previous blog post reminded me of this - another Gibson guitar with a part of the body sliced off and reversed. The photo shows Bob Mothersbaugh in the video for Devo's "Whip It" with a very peculiar-looking Les Paul.

Bob tells the story of this guitar in this Premier Guitar magazine interview:

With all the technology being dangled in your face when you hit it big, did you ever use a guitar synthesizer?

Back in 1979, I used a device made by 360 Systems. It was a big box that sat next to your amp and required a special pickup. The 360 Systems people recommended I use a Les Paul, and at the time I was horrified—I thought Les Pauls represented arena rock, long hair, and Puka shells. But I got a Les Paul and took a jigsaw to it with the intention of making it look like a skull. I cut the little horn off at the cutaway and flipped it over backwards and thought it looked a lot better. The 360 was a horrible synth and really didn’t sound good. I only used it for one tour.

Read the full interview here.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Bertram


© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

No comment!

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's another relatively early Yamaha solidbody, the Yamaha SG45, made in Japan in 1973. This particular "natural relic" is currently being auctioned on eBay in the UK with a low starting price. It'll be interesting to see what it fetches.

The body is solid mahogany and it has a set neck with rosewood fingerboard. It's quite obviously a Les Paul inspired design, but the body shape has been softened with a much smoother lower cutaway. Note also the bizarre back cover plate stretching all the way from the volume and tone controls on the lower bout to the pickup selector on the bass side of the neck. It makes you wonder why they didn't use separate covers for each area, but thinking about it, I'd wager that the routing for the wiring between these areas is directly beneath the plate rather than inside the body. After all, on most Les Pauls the wiring channel would be beneath the maple top of the guitar, but the Yamaha doesn't have a separate top, just a mahogany slab body. This would be a cheaper, more efficient construction method, even if it does lack elegance.

One other minor detail, I notice that the pickup selector moves from side to side rather than up and down as on a Les Paul. This is much more logical. I play a LP style guitar (actually a cheapy Vintage brand V100) and I'm always accidentally knocking the selector switch and changing pickups when I don't want to. I don't really like selector switches in this position, I'd rather they were well out of the way, but if you've got to have one here then side to side operation makes perfect sense. I had been considering turning the selector in my LP-alike through 90 degrees to get the same effect.

Anyway... I'm so glad to have found out what this guitar was. Back in the tail-end of the 1970s I saw a punk band called Case whose guitarist had one of these and I have often wondered what it was.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here we have what is listed on eBay as a "Rare Kay Les Paul with onboard effects. Collectors item". OK, so I realise that as a seller on eBay you have to apply a certain amount of spin when listing your item, but really, these guitars are neither rare nor what would ordinarily be considered a collectors item. Seriously, these come up for sale all the time, and the fees slapped on them are somewhat optimistic. The singer/guitarist in a band I was in several years ago had one of these. It was alright, I suppose, but no great shakes. (It couldn't have been that great because he always wanted to borrow one of my Fenders.) The on-board effects were gimmicky and largely unusable.

What nearly everyone seems to forget, however, is that the guitar isn't an Les Paul copy per se, but is modelled after the Roland GS500 controller for Roland's very first guitar synthesizer, the GR500, which was introduced in 1978. This was back in the day when any new and exciting guitar spawned Japanese-made imitations - in this instance the guitar that was being "copied" was also Japanese. Obviously, it would have been prohibitive to make it a guitar synth, hence the on-board effects as a suitably high-tech alternative.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Stephen writes:

Hi, I've been following your blog for a year and bit now, it's brilliant. It led me to wonder about one of my own guitars - I've had it about two years now, and never really wondered about it, but the more I try and find out about it, the less I seem to know. It started off as (according to The Gutar Dater Project website) a Korean made 1996 Epiphone Les Paul Limited Edition, nice sort of bluey green marine burst that is semi transparent so you can see the wood texture (nice gentle quilted look).

The guy who had it before me upgraded a lot of stuff, ie Speigel locking tuners, chrome telecaster style knobs, chrome pick up switch, a couple of punchy new coil tapped humbuckers (JBs I think) and generally upgraded stuff to make it better sounding, rugged, and all with a chrome theme. I was looking for a beefy guitar that hopefully wouldn't develop problems, so I figured if it had been throughly up graded it would do the trick.

Nothing too unusal there, but here's the thing, and I don't know why I've never really wondered about it before - sitting between the humbuckers is a single coil pick up, and it's sunk about half an inch into the body so as to be in keeping with the levels of the humbuckers. It looks like the sort of chrome lipstick pick up you'd get on the neck position of a telecaster. I wondered if someone might have routed out a slot for it and installed it as a guitar project, but when you look on the inside of the hole that the single coil sits in, it's perfectly machine cut and the same bluey green colour is on the inside walls of the hole. If it was a project, surely routing a slot for a pick up would expose the wood of the body of the guitar and there would be none of the blue stain?

The guitar was due a restringing, so while I had the old strings off this evening, I popped the single coil out, and the blue colour of the wood stain definitely goes all the way to the bottom of the slot. I popped out the bridge humbucker too just to compare the slots and any colouration in that one, and they're both bluey green all the way down, including the bottom.

The colouring in the hole suggests to me that the slot for the single coil may have been cut before the guitar was stained the greeny blue colour, which suggests it may have been done at the factory where it was made. The guy I bought the guitar off said it was like that when he got it, and he'd had it while.

Do you know of Epiphone ever releasing a Les Paul with a tele style single coil sitting between the humbuckers? Have you come across anything similar in your blogging? By the way, the single coil sounds very nice, it has a dynamic, articulate chime that the humbuckers can't achieve.

Thanks for showing us your guitar, Stephen. No, it's not a pickup arrangement I've seen on a Les Paul before. Perhaps some of our readers might know some more about it. I have to agree with the conclusion that you yourself have to come to, that the middle-pickup routing was done at the factory.

Now, I've read comments on guitar forums and in emails and a lot of people out there seem to think that we here at Guitarz have set ourself up as self-proclaimed experts. We're not, and have never claimed to be. We - like many of you - are simply guitar enthusiasts and are learning things about our favourite instrument all the time. We're happy to do our best to answer any questions and if we don't know the answers we can try to find out or else ask our readership to assist.

One thing that I've often wondered about is, on a 3-pickup Les Paul, which of the controls control which pickups and is the pickup selector switch a 5-way or is it a regular 3-way with the middle pickup being dialed in separately elsewhere? I took this opportunity to ask Stephen about the controls on his LP, to which he replied:

I'm not 100 percent sure that it all does work, but here's what it does what at the moment - the switch is a standard three way - of the two volume knobs, the volume knob nearest the bridge currently acts as master volume, and the tone control near the bridge currently acts as a master tone - the two tone knobs are push / pull coil tap type jobs for the humbuckers and both work - the volume knob furthest from the bridge doesn't do anything (although it looks like it's wired up) - all the pickups work, I had a look and they're all wired in, but I don't know enough about that side of things to be able to follow what they do.

The bridge humbucker sounds like a bridge humbucker, the neck humbucker sounds like a neck humbucker, and they can both be tapped for a single coilish sound. the centre position engages all three pickups, but the single coil seems to push to the front, with a nice sort of snappiness and articulation that the humbuckers can't manage, tapped or full.

If I was better with electronics I might be able to deduce more, but one thing I do know is that it sounds great, and I can get a ton of sounds out of it.

Thanks again, Stephen!

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's another Les Paul, and one of my own personal favourites - but you know me - it most probably appeals because within the sphere of Les Pauls its a bit of an oddity. Looking for all the world like a hybrid  a Gibson 335/Les Paul, the Gibson Les Paul Signature - produced between 1973 and 1978 - is a semi-hollowbody guitar. Now, some would say a semi-hollowbody Les Paul was an oxymoron because a Les Paul by definition should be a solidbody guitar. I think it's this breaking the rules attitude that appeals to me. However, it could have been even more bizarre. I seem to remember seeing pictured in a guitar book many years ago, a Gibson Les Paul Jumbo acoustic guitar with cutaway and pickup (single, I think). Now surely that couldn't be further away from the Les Paul ethos? (And I need to find a picture of one of these!)

The Signature differs also in that its controls consist of volume, treble tone, midrange tone, and in/out phase switch, and it has two output jack sockets - high-impedance on the guitar's top, and low-impedance for recording on the rim.

Most Gibson Les Paul Signatures were finished as gold tops - this is one of the rarer sunburst models, of which there were only 84 produced, and this example is currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of £2,995.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Perspex-bodied guitars are always a real head-turner, but are not quite such an unusual sight these days. Regular readers will know that I'm quite a fan, having owned three over the years. Here's a unique LP-styled guitar from the 1970s that provides an interesting varition on the see-thru guitar theme.

I'll let the seller explain about this guitar and shall quote from the eBay listing:

It was built in London in 1970 by Alexander and Gordon (long gone) - commissioned by me as a one-off. The body is fabricated from perspex (plexiglas) and aluminium honeycomb (from an aircraft wing - fabulous shimmer under lights) and is very strong, with great sustain - perspex is known for it (cf Dan Armstrong etc). It has a combination stop tail/bridge with really sturdy steel posts embedded in a block of solid perspex inside the body - a deliberate design choice for maximum sustain. The stop/tail is the original one when built and was supplied as Gibson, but doesn't have any marks.

This beauty has a pair of genuine Gibson 1970 humbuckers that were brand new at the time and came over from Kalamazoo as a special order, wrapped in tissue paper, via a Gibson dealer in Denmark Street. Those original factory humbuckers were near-impossible to get back then, as Gibson in those days would only release them as spares to their own dealers, and even then only in exchange for broken or damaged parts. You can still see fragments of the old black transfer label on the back of the pickups, through the honeycomb. The pickups have never been taken out since the guitar was built.

It has been played occasionally (but not recorded) by, among others, Robbie Robertson of The Band, Greg Lake of Emerson Lake and Palmer, Mickie Most, Robert Stigwood and others. I also jammed around with people like Mick Taylor of the Stones, Steve Thompson (John Mayall's Bluesbreakers), Ted Turner (Wishbone Ash), etc in those days and it would probably have been in their hands at one time or another.

It's certainly different! I think I like it!

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

When Bertram posted his photo of the ukulele shop window in Berlin recently, the one thing that really stuck out for me was the diminutive 4-string Les Paul in the centre of the window display. It turns out that this is an electric tenor ukulele from Germany's very own Risa Instruments.

Risa have for a few years now been producing a very interesting range of professional quality ukes, including minimalistic headless uke solids and steel string electrics. For a number of years they produced an electric with a thinline kidney bean-like body equipped with Danelectro-style lipstick pickups. Now they've gone more traditional and have based their latest electric quite faithfully on the Les Paul, complete with a set-neck. There are soprano and tenor models, and a choice of natural mahogany, cherry sunburst (pictured above), and black finishes. (Incidentally, there is nothing new about the electric steel-string ukulele - Gibson themselves produced such an instrument way back).

They look fantastic, but don't come cheap being priced between €499 and €599. My immediate reaction was that "I want one of these" but then I saw the demo video and was put off slightly:

I mean, he may as well have been playing a guitar. What is the point of using a ukulele?

What appeals to me about a uke, is using different tunings from the guitar and approaching the instrument in a different way allowing for fresh song ideas.

I'd still like one (a tenor... I can't be dealing with the titchy scale of the soprano), but I for sure won't be doing any of THAT.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Here's a Gibson Les Paul Standard from 2004 in the apparently rare finish known as "latte creme"

Or "Antigua" as Fender prefer to call it.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!