Of course, if you are just looking for that shape, you can always get one of the Epiphones. Epiphone is a company owned by Gibson even though Epiphone is twenty years older , and they specialize in creating cheaper and more affordable versions of Gibson guitars. Gibson guitars were never cheap, and it is unlikely that they will change soon.
There is a reason why Gibson is around for so long and why people always go back to this brand. Since we use our hands for playing the guitar, all those smooth edges are quite important and mean a lot.
You will be able to play expensive guitar easier since everything will be easier and it will feel better. If you ever tried one of the expensive models, you know how good it felt to play simple chords on a well-crafted instrument.
If you found this article useful you may want to save this pin below to your Guitar board. I have been playing guitar since As long as I can remember I always had a huge passion for rock music and I extremely enjoy playing it. Helping people on their rock journey is what drives me to keep on playing. Read More About Me. I hope they will find their way. They are part of the rock culture, it will be such a shame see them going out of business. I understand why. But I am like a lot of guitarist, I am playing junk becouse i cant afford a good guitar.
Gibson should find a way to finance to people that cant afford a great guitar. Gibson is making great sounding guitars and good looking guitars no doubt. But really, the consumer is horrified by the prices! Save your pennies if you want a custom shop guitar. They are the best guitars on the planet! The store let me make monthly payments. This is an excellent deal! I have many guitars. Gibson are high-end for good reason.
They play flawlessly, thier own pickups are fantastic, and they are beautiful. Yes, I am a true fan. Some people will agree with you, while others will not.
The most important thing is you have the favorite guitar that you enjoy the most! Your email address will not be published. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. One of the most common questions about guitars is whether it is smarter to buy a new one or upgrade the one you already have.
These are fake Gibson guitars made in China and are not official products by Gibson. In general, Gibson guitars are handmade in the sense that all of the components are assembled and touched up by hand, meaning there is a lot of manual handling of the instrument compared to mass-produced guitars overseas.
However, in order to produce a sufficient amount of guitars to meet demand, Gibson does use a CNC machine to automate the process of cutting out the wood for the individual pieces of the guitar. Therefore, while the guitar is hand-assembled and inspected to ensure maximum quality, the entire process is not by hand as they utilize machinery to cut out the individual components of the guitar.
As a guitar manufacturer that has been around since the very beginning, I would definitely say that Gibson is a good brand despite the financial troubles they have faced in recent years, such as filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Gibson really pioneered the electric guitar and rock music in general. The brand has released several classic guitar shapes over the years, such as the Les Paul, SG, ES, Explorer, and Flying V, which are still the most common guitars today and copied by pretty much every other brand.
As far as guitar brands go, Gibson has cemented themselves as one of the best guitar brands in history. With all of that said, are Gibson guitars actually good? Gibson guitars were no doubt the best of the best back in , but how do their guitars hold up in the current day. And while American made Gibsons are definitely good guitars with outstanding build quality and tone, some people give Gibson a lot of flack for the lack of innovation. Some fundamental flaws, such as the headstock angle, tuning stability, and playability have gone unchanged in over 60 years!
Some of the work done by hand at the Gibson USA factory. Another big difference between Gibson and Epiphone is the actual parts and material used. The wood used to make Gibsons, particularly in premium models, is of a higher grade. Sit with a Gibson and chances are, it will ring out more when you play it than an Epiphone. Gibson pickups have more clarity and definition — when you play a chord, you hear the individual notes more easily with a Gibson. The frequency range also seems wider to me with Gibson pickups — that is, when you play low or very high, the sound is richer and more defined.
Now, just to make things confusing, Epiphone make some guitars fitted with Gibson pickups — these sit at the top end of their price range. The hardware on a Gibson is better than Epiphone also — small things like switches, knobs and tuning pegs can wear out and break over time. Parts such as the bridge and nut have direct contact with the strings and subtly affect the sound, particularly how the guitar sustains — a big thing with Les Pauls.
They say a guitar is the sum of all its parts and most things that make up a Gibson are of a higher quality than they are on an Epiphone. The body is also a touch thicker on a Gibson Les Paul than it is on the Epiphone counterpart.
Typical headstocks on a Gibson and Epiphone guitar — note the slightly different shape. Nonetheless, the air brushes are hand controlled by Speight and his peers, giving the finish of each Gibson guitar distinctive qualities. Before the guitars are painted all the parts that won't get a coating, like fingerboards, are taped over to preserve their integrity. If a guitar that comes through the paint shop has a problem, it's up to the department's quality control team, Michael Baker and Jack Browning, to find it and correct it.
And they're looking at more than paint. Painter Tom Morgan adds that fixing paint flaws is tricky, since every finish — even one color ebony — has distinctive patterns of airbrush strokes. More elaborate color schemes like sunbursts — which take two or three colors — are more challenging, since the primary shades used to paint the guitars alter to different degrees when they blend.
During lacquering the guitars make multiple trips through an oven set to degrees to promote drying between the applications of layers. Depending on humidity and other atmospheric conditions it typically takes eight or nine hours to get all six coats of dry lacquer on a guitar.
An important part of the visual charm of Les Pauls and many other Gibsons is the binding, which is sprayed over with paint and lacquer and then restored to its original look by an eagle-eyed crew of scrapers. The scrapers take the guitars in hand and employ sharp blades they make themselves. Those blades are wielded with the dexterity of sculptors as the scrapers peel the layers of paint off the bindings and the nuts. Most of the time a scraper can remove the paint from a guitar's body and neck binding with a few long, deft, flowing slides of the blade.
It's truly impressive to witness the steadiness and confidence on display in this exacting process. Another post-lacquering step is scuff sanding. That's essentially a rubdown by hand for each guitar that takes place in a small space near the entrance to the paint shop, where Brad Brown and other scuff sanders man their stations with sandpaper and hand tools. Brown, who's a bass player, has done many other jobs in the plant.
Use too much force and you peel off the finish, which means the guitar goes back to the paint shop, but get it just right and it's really ready to take a great shine. After a final coat of lacquer the guitars dry for four or five days.
Then they're ready for the last few processes that will make them player-ready. Lacquer, paint or wood filler that may have gotten onto the frets or fingerboard is removed by delicate sanding.
The frets are polished and the fingerboard oiled. And then it's time for buffing, where Gibsons get their distinctive, deep shine. Steve McQuery doesn't play guitar, but he is a master of the buffer's wheel, bobbing and weaving as he stands over his machinery and brings the surface of Les Pauls, Flying Vs, Firebirds and other models in contact with the special wheel surfaces that work polish to a mirror-like gloss.
And the only way to do that is develop an eye for it. You need to buff out any fingerprint smudges, and just work that surface to the consistency of glass. By the time I'm done these guitars are beautiful. Now the instruments are ready to get their guts — the electronic innards that help Gibsons achieve their world-class sound.
Some components come from outside suppliers, but not the most crucial, like the pickups. The same machines that wound wire around magnetic poles and pickup forms in the original Gibson plant at Kalamazoo, Mich.
Their speedy armatures pull yards and yards of wire off stationary spools in seconds, producing multiple pickups, which are then carried to the next station and dipped in hot wax for 10 minutes before being allowed to dry. As we walk though the plant the humming machines are producing the company's classic humbuckers, arguably the most versatile pickup on the planet.
And they're being made not just for the guitars traveling the assembly line, but for the aftermarket. Just a few yards from the pickup-making operation is electronics building, where toggle switch assemblies are soldered together and control panel assemblies are made.
These configurations of potentiometers and switches are typically placed in bags as self-contained kits that also include the hardware for certain models of guitar. For example, a Les Paul kit would contain the electronics, bridge, mounting rings and tuning peg assembly for a Les Paul. Some models require a bit more assembly at this stage. As we pass by the station there's a stack of Flying V pickguards with all the right electronics already attached — ready to be dropped into the guitars' space age bodies.
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