The Ultimate Guitar Video !!!

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Bertram

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

1970s Yamaha SG45

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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!

1970s Kay LP-type guitar with on-board FX

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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!

A Les Paul Oddity - Epiphone LP with HSH pickup arrangement

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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!

1974 Gibson Les Paul Signature Sunburst

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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!

1955 Gibson Les Paul Custom

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This  Gibson Les Paul Custom (aka the Black Beauty, aka the Tuxedo since Mister Les Paul himself allegedly requested a black guitar that could be played wearing a tuxedo - that were other times) is some serious vintage stuff since it's a 1955 model - just 3 years after the Les Paul was first released...

And as you can see it has lived a long and active life and grew old honestly and harmoniously, not like these stupid sandpaper relicked fakes that some soulless ignoramuses think are cool.

It's a pre-humbucker model - the Gibson PAF humbucker is from 1955 also - with a bridge P90 and a neck Alnico V. Like the Custom models of the time, it's a full mahogany body, without the usual maple archtop - it makes it lighter with a darker tone.

I always enjoyed showing some ultraclassic guitars here sometimes, hard to do better than this one, isn't it?

Bertram

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

1970s one-off perspex LP

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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!

Risa LP-style electric ukulele

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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!

Xaviere XV-560 Les Paul Thinline

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In guitar making, you can endlessly take the same old models and trends and recombine them to do something new. The Xaviere XV-560 is one of these guitars, just a Les Paul-like guitar (with a florentine cutaway), but with a chambered body (mahogany with maple top) and F-holes. The XV-560 is the version with P90s, there is one with humbuckers.

It's not exactly cool - the F-holes don't really fit and Rickenbacker style holes would be probably better, but still it's an interesting guitar, and I'm curious about how it sounds. Xaviere is the guitar brand of GuitarFetish.com, who produce and sell nice gears and electronics; I bought some stuff there - mostly lipstick pickups that fit in a Tele bridge for my last projects - and I'm not unhappy with them.

It's good to show a guitar here that is not over 40 years old, no?

Bertram

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

1979 Jolana Diamant

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OK, this vintage Jolana Diamant is not something overwhelming new or original, just one of these 70s LP copies made in Czechoslovakia, though you must admit that the pickups and switch look terrific (we actually already showed here the bass version of the Diamant).

But the opportunity is good to tell that I just found out that the Jolana company started again - I don't know exactly when... I wonder if this is an effect of the vintage cult that seriously hit the east-european market since the US/UK/Japan vintage guitars are unaffordable for musicians! Unfortunately, the charm is not there anymore, their guitars look standard Chinese production with Korean gear and just a Jolana branding - but maybe I'm wrong...

bertram

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

pre-MIDI Roland guitar synth GR/GS 500

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What I like with the guitar controller GR 500 of this very first guitar synthesizer proposed by Roland in 1977 is that it's a very classic wooden Les Paul model in sunburst finish, not a Star Trek prop. Not that I don't find the Roland G-707 that came later one of the coolest guitar design ever, but this one looks as good as a late 60s Czechoslovakian LP copy (I love writing Czechoslovakian, don't you?) with even more knobs that a vintage Eko and really weird pickups (it's actually also equipped with an early sustainer...).

The perfect companion for progressive rock's debuts!

bertram

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

70s Ibanez Les Paul Studio 2372 (pre law-suit)

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The Les Paul Recording/Personal is my favorite Gibson LP but for some reason I like it better as a Ibanez law-suit era perfect copy - maybe that 70s feel vintage Japanese guitars have... Of course at the time it was an infamous copy by the evil Japs (see previous post), but now it's the splendor it's supposed to be...

bertram

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

Gibson Les Paul Standard in Latte Creme

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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!

Loïc Le Pape Lsteel Paul Black Grid

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Yesterday's post about the übercool steel-bodied Teletubby made want to check what's new with Loïc Le Pape's metal guitars that we showed here a few months ago and raised enthusiastic comments.

Well I found out that Loïc has now a new website - www.loiclepapesteelguitars.com  - where you can find all his guitars - each of them being a one-off. The photo on the top is a detail of the Lsteel Paul Black Grid, an archtop thinline with an astounding grid front - another of his guitar that I'd love to play! 

bertram

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

A Les Paul that thinks it's a Strat

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We've all seen "Double FAT" Strats which are outfitted with a pair of humbuckers in an attempt to emulate the Les Paul sound.

However, I've not previously seen a guitar so obviously styled after the Gibson Les Paul but featuring the Stratocaster triple single coil layout including the angled pickup in the bridge position. This guitar, from 2008, is an ESP Edwards E-CL-96I Luna Sea Sugizo model, that is to say, another Japanese signature guitar designed for a Japanese musician we in the West have never heard of.

In keeping with the Strat part of the equation, the guitar has a bolt-on neck and a tremolo. In this instance the trem is a Floyd Rose, which aren't totally unheard of installed on Les Pauls. Gibson have a Floyd-equipped Les Paul, the Les Paul Axcess Standard, in their current catalogue.

G L Wilson

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

Astro Cows!

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I can only assume that when the "Astro Cows" inlay work for this Les Paul-style guitar was designed, the inspiration was the old children's nursery rhyme: "Hey diddle diddle / The cat and the fiddle / The cow jumped over the moon / The little dog laughed to see such fun / And the dish ran away with the spoon", and in particular the line about the cow jumping over the moon.

For more inlay overload see: www.mandoharp.com

Thanks Biliby for that one!

G L Wilson

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

Ibanez Les Paul Custom Agent 2405

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Like the people who sell this Ibanez Les Paul Custom on eBay say, this guitar is more than a very good copy of a Gibson (from the lawsuit era), it's a real homage to the brand, combining the body of the LP with the headstock of their mandolin models.

Add to that the mother-of-pearl inlays, and you have a remarkable, beautifully classic and slightly bizarre instrument... (and it's the first time that I like a sunburst finish, isn't it weird!)

bertram

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70s Hoyer Les Paul close-up

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Don't know about you, but I love guitar gear close-up such as this roller bridge from a vintage Hoyer LP (yes it seems that I started a LP series lately). And when it's a little bit worn and rusted, it's so sexy!

bertram

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1975 Eko Kiwi

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OK, this Eko Kiwi is maybe just another Italian 70s LP copy, but with several cool details - mostly the P90s and the bridge and tail covers that gives it a soft frankenstein-ish touch, and exactly the right proportion of shining metal... If I'd have a LP it would be one like this (Czech company Jolana also had a cool model...).

And it's quite in a good state for a 35 year old guitar!

Bertram

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Gibson Les Paul for American Football fans

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This NFL Football themed Gibson Les Paul is topped off with real leather used for making footballs, and also includes lace binding and detail. It's the creation of the Gibson Custom Shop in conjuction with Wilson Sporting Goods.

Apparently Hank Williams Jr. was presented with the prototype.

G L Wilson

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