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There are those who consider Epiphone no more than a budget company selling cheap Gibson copies, and those who are thankful for the affordable quality instruments they provide, but you can also focus on their original models, of course the ones released before they where bought by Gibson in 1957, but also some that were released later (up to nowadays) like the 1966 Epiphone Olympic SB 722 you can see here.
Oh dear, it looks like I'm going to have to watch Bertram coming out with wild things such as "did you ever see a hollow body guitar with 3 P90s?"Dear Guitarz Blog,On Tuesday you posted about a hollowbody guitar with 3 p90 pickups and asked 'did you ever see a hollow body guitar with 3 p90s?', well there is one sitting in my front room!I bought this guitar a year ago from a local guitar shop for £300. Google has revealed to me that it is an Epiphone Riviera P93, a thinline semi-hollowbody guitar with 3 p90 pickups, a threeway selector, 3 volume pots, a master tone pot and a bigsby tailpiece with a tune-o-matic bridge. The selector switch selects the neck and middle pickup in the top position, all three pickups in the middle position and the middle and bridge pickup in the bottom position. It was released sometime around 2007-8 so it is definitely a modern guitar!just thought you might be interested in this guitar after Tuesday's post.Keep up the good work,your loyal reader,Rob J
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).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.
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.
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.Thanks again, Stephen!
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.
Nine Inch Nails have created an eBay account especially to sell off their old stage gear - guitars, keyboards, amplifiers, drums, staging, anvil cases, cables, rack/outboard gear, guitar effects, pedal boards, etc. Some items are in working condition and some items, such as this Epiphone Les Paul Gothic, are trashed.
When this guitar first caught my eye, I didn't realise that it's a complete fake, one of these 'relic'ed' new guitars (this one is from 2006) that I usually hate (even more when it's done on industrial scale like Fender's). But, well, it's still an interesting modification, so I'll do as if I don't make an unwilling advertisement for an acquisitive guitar torturer.
From a very desirable Epiphone to... ermmm... this thing.
The eBay seller is listing this as an Epiphone Les Paul, but this Epiphone Scroll guitar dates back to the mid 1970s - long before Epiphone were resigned to becoming the Gibson equivalent of Fender's Squier brand.
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