Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) February 24, 2012 -- Gibson's 2003 les paul custom shop reissues reach new levels of compulsive attention to historical detail and striving for utmost quality. True aficionados will fall in love when they dig deeper and deeper, scrutinize with larger and larger magnifiers and still discover no discrepancies on the '57 Goldtop, '58 Plain Top, and '59 Figured Top Reissued Les Pauls as compared to the vaunted originals.

To your average vintage Gibson fanatic in the street, Edwin Wilson is something of a demigod. He's been with Gibson 17 years and has been in charge of the Gibson Historic Collection for 8 years. Arguably, this man knows more about vintage Les Pauls than any other human.

This year Wilson has pulled out all the stops and plunged deeper than ever into the magic years of the late '50s. Under his relentless driving, Gibson has forked out over a million bucks to go the last mile and reestablish whole manufacturing techniques that have been dead since the '70s. The end result is a crop of reissues that are identical to the originals in every tiny detail.

The first les paul custom shop featured a neck tenon that extended beyond the fretboard all the way into the cavity of the front pickup. This put a whole lot more of the neck in contact with the body, which of course produced much of the phenomenal resonance of the late '50s guitars. I could feel that resonance distinctly in the '57, '58, and '59 Reissues I played.

An electric guitar's tone knob bleeds signal through the capacitor (cap), which sucks out higher frequencies. So the nature of the cap is critical to the final tone. In later, cheaper capacitors, paper is used, which can dry out and become less effective and inconsistent. Gibson painstakingly re-created the original manufacturing setup to reproduce the original foil-in-Bakelite caps used in the late '50s LPs. They produce the precise tonality and response of the original Les Pauls. And they even have the original bands around them, hence the name "bumble bee."

Gibson's been remanufacturing the original '57 Classic humbuckers for the past few years using the exact same equipment, magnets, and techniques developed for the original PAF (Patent Applied For) pickups. The one thing they had added was a more-accurate digital winding counter, which produced an exact number of windings on each coil. But the actual late '50s PAFs had inexact matches between the number windings on each coil. Those with golden ears could hear the difference between the perfect copies and the imperfect originals. So this year Gibson deliberately put fewer windings on one coil, resulting in the precise transparent, vibrant character of the first PAFs.

If you want to learn more,you could visit their site http://www.lespaulcustomshop.com/

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