DoctorPaul's Guitar Emporium - Sold Guitars

1995 Gibson USA Les Paul Studio

"Jeff"

#9XXX5XXX

 

No frills Les Paul ‘Studio’, made in the same place, and by the same folks, as “Lester”. The only tangible difference between this and the Les Paul Standard are that this has no binding around the body and neck, the body is a teensy bit thinner (about 5mm), and that the ‘Gibson’ logo on the headstock is silkscreened paint as opposed to inlaid pearl. Same pickups, same woods, same paint, same …everything else. Yet these are much, MUCH cheaper than Les Paul Standards.  Which is quite curious.

 

This one had a neck repair, as the headstock joint was cracked some years ago. Not snapped off, but cracked nonetheless. I have always been fascinated by the propensity of Gibson guitars to shed their headstocks if you so much as look at them the wrong way … like a lizard dumping its tail. Using a single length of mahogany to make a neck with an angled back headstock (so that the headstock hits the ground first if the guitar falls backwards) is probably great for tone, but seems like a rather silly idea. Anyway, this looks to have been repaired well, so I’m thinking that the repair doesn’t make a bugger of a difference.

 

The photo below (from the last owner) shows a sticker on the guitar that reads “My other guitar is a Flying V”. Interestingly, when I asked the seller about that, he told me that he’d sold the Flying V that the sticker refers to a few years back … it turns out that he’d sold it to ME, and that the Flying V is “Matt” shown here on the site.  What are the chances?  I suppose, in that case, that it was probably destiny that I bought this one.

 

This one was bought in order to be used sacrificially, so that my pretty Les Pauls got less wear.  However, it ended up getting relatively little playtime (it was difficult to pick it up when it was next to a Standard, a Shred and a Custom Shop Access).  The idea was that, as I'm a serial string polisher (I can't even TOUCH a guitar without Fast-Fretting it afterwards) this one was NOT polished and nurtured.  No Fast-Fret.  No polishing.  I threw on some Elixir Polyweb strings (the ones that clam to last eternally without cleaning) to encourage me to use this as a 'beater'. 

 

This sounded GLORIOUS. The bridge pickup sounded like Lester. A LOT like Lester.  But the neck pickup ... was strange. It was GREAT, but it sounded like you'd rolled the neck tone off quite a bit already. The tone pot functioned perfectly, but with the tone fully open, you were already into that 'hooty, woody goodness' territory that I like so much. When I use a Gibson neck pickup, I almost always roll off a little top end using the tone knob. I didn't need to bother with this one. Maybe it was the orange-drop tone capacitors.  Whatever, I liked it a lot.

 

The original picture from the seller is below ... which is quite uninspiring really.  Note 'that' sticker behind the bridge ...

 

This was sold to a forum buddy as part of what was INTENDED to be "The Great 2015 Cull", where I planned to shed a few dozen guitars.  I ended up shifting a few, but I got nervous and pulled back the sale before much damage was done!