A light of hope that we will see some body shapes returning..

[Cagey]

Hehe! Yeah. There are no fat jeans. Some are just wrapped around more cheesecake than others  :laughing7:

 

[ByteFrenzy]

My feeling is that a lot of this just shows how confident Gibson are about the quality of their products. I'd expect that if somebody got a cheapo knockoff, sooner or later he'd want the real thing. Whereas now he'll still get the cheapo knockoff but knocked off something else - a strat, for example, and someday buy the real thing of that.

 

[Cagey]

My feeling is that a lot of this just shows how confident Gibson are about the quality of their products.

Stop!  Stop!  I'm gonna pee! OMG, my sides!!
​

You're adorable! :laughing7:

This is all just a misguided effort to protect their revenue stream, plain and simple. If they have any confidence in the quality of their product, they're not only misguided, but delusional. There was a time when you bought a Gibson to end all discussion about whether you needed a better guitar. Sadly, those days are long gone. Now, instead of leading the way in the industry, criminally incompetent management has reduced them to where they have to fight tooth, fang and claw just to keep out of bankruptcy court.

 

[ByteFrenzy]

My feeling is that a lot of this just shows how confident Gibson are about the quality of their products.

You're adorable! :laughing7:

It's my mission in life  :headbang:

 

[Kostas]

How can you copyright the shape of a Les Paul given as it's just an standard archtop with a florentine cut?

No wonder they didn't sell any in the late 50s they looked so fuddy duddy and old, daddio. Eyeball and get hip to the new shapes and throw that cube in the dumpster.

Or something.

If they sold zero or millions makes no difference to me, Les Pauls aesthetically are my favorite guitars.

The LP is (was) different from the archtops of the 50's. Smaller and solid body compared to bigger and (semi) hollow body. The cutaway is not a florentine, it's similar but not the same.

Explorers & Flying V's didn't sell well in the 50's too, who cares? Except Gibson executives of course...

I thank Gibson for giving us many iconic guitars but if the company closes tomorrow my only worry would be for those who would lose their jobs. I can have (and I do have) Les Pauls and Flying V's from other brands. Actually I'd love to see Fender & Gibson closing down just to see what all these snobs would do if they can't buy a guitar with these two names on the headstock.

 

[Cagey]

I thank Gibson for giving us many iconic guitars but if the company closes tomorrow my only worry would be for those who would lose their jobs. I can have (and I do have) Les Pauls and Flying V's from other brands. Actually I'd love to see Fender & Gibson closing down just to see what all these snobs would do if they can't buy a guitar with these two names on the headstock.

That's pretty much me, too. I have a Les Paul in the collection, although mine's a high-quality example from Korea rather than one of Gibson's pitiful attempts. I also have an actual Gibson - a Melody Maker - that's the worst examples of guitar craftsmanship in the collection. Still, an iconic guitar - gotta have one - and its got better fretwork than the Fretlight, whose fretboard is a cruel joke. I'd hate to see the Gibson employees lose their jobs, but I don't think there's much risk of that. Gibson's not going anywhere, but they may get sold at some point. Best thing that could happen, really. The new owners would likely not have the overhead Gibson does, and could afford to make those guitars properly and still make money.

 

[musicispeace]

First time around playing I loved Les Pauls and always aspired to having one but could never meet the price when the choice was rent and food on the table or a Les Paul, and with nowhere to go I was not going to risk homelessness to have a name on a headstock. I went with an Ibanez solid body back in the day. I occasionally see a second hand ST-50 and they still are not bad guitars. My brother was a Gibson man in the sixties when he was in local bands. He started with an SG special and eventually got his hands on a white SG Custom, but those boys often lived hand to mouth and no one had more than one instrument at a time.

I agree the Les Paul is one of the iconics but now, myself older and a second time player, I find a home in the Fender based partscaster world and am very happy there as a player. I'd just like to see good parts options for a proper LP or SG or Melody Maker parts guitar without Gibson screaming they "own" shapes or working to keep the best Japanese copies out of the United States. Drives me as nuts as what Gibson and Fender charge in the modern day for their wares. I'd follow Cagey's example with a good Korean Les Paul if I still wanted one, but that is solely my 2 cents worth.

 

[bagman67]

I was in my local Guitar Center today because apparently I hate myself, and I saw that Gibson had basically bought the entire main flooring area and set up a bunch of huge, track-lit, Gibson-branded displays featuring their high-end stuff.  Couldn't have been cheap.  Of course, alll these $3500+ axes were in locked racks so you couldn't pick one up without interacting with a salesperson and getting the spiel. 


I skipped the Giibby rack and played the new Musicman St. Vincent signature model.  VERY COOL GUITAR. 

The iodd shape throws off the balance when one plays seated without a strap, but that's remediable.  The thing sounds and plays awesome.  And they equip it with a raw rosewood neck, nice and smooth and well-dressed.  If I were made of money, I'd have picked one up.  But it gave me ideas for a three-mini-humbucker concept that'd be worth pursuing when I have the shekels to pull it off.

 


Joe Bob sez "Check it out."

 

[Kostas]

The good thing about Gibson is their 100+ years of history, they have made some incredible guitars that are out there in the second hand market. Even if the company won't exist tomorrow there are thousands of their guitars available. I have two Gibsons, one is a good solid guitar, the other is perfect (for me) in every way that I bought it mint in almost half the price. If someone thousand miles away can get a great fair priced Gibson then most Americans can too.

Music Man is a weird company. Personally I consider them a bass company, I prefer their basses but I like most of their guitars aesthetically. They are still a small company, you can't find many new in Europe and they are rarer in second hand. The worse thing is their no option policy, most models come with thin necks and 1 5/8" nut. I wouldn't consider one even with US pricing.

 

[swarfrat]

yeah, but if they went under I suspect an $800 used Gibson would overnight turn into $1500.  Probably the best thing they could do is stockpile, then "go out of business" and then "discover" the NOS warehouse.

 

[mayfly]

unfortunately (fortunately?) if they did that the NOS warehouse would actually belong to the bank and not them.

 

[Cagey]

Which means the instruments would be fire-sale fodder, and prices would drop to what they were actually worth. Besides, they wouldn't be NOS, they'd be NNS, and it's the new stock and the pricing on it that's putting them out of business. Prices on actual old stuff probably wouldn't change much - there's a fixed supply of it that the market has already set pricing on.

 

[new-killer-star]

Regarding the locked racks at GC. This is something their corporate made them do... when the GC in Redmond opened up they kept the high end room unlocked for the most part and the instruments there moved quickly, then they locked them
and they haven’t been rotating / selling.

 

[BigSteve22]

Unlocked, high end rooms are one of the best things about my "local" music store. I work about 15 minutes from Alto Music's Middletown store. Place is HUGE, and absolutely FILLED with gear.

They have a walk in humidor for their high end acoustics. First time I was there I walked in just looking around, there was a guy sitting in the front working on something, he says "hi", and tells me to help myself to anything in the room. By anything I mean a Martin D-45, Gibson J-200s, Taylor 900 Series, and too many more to mention. I spent the next hour and a half there and must have played $30K worth of stock.

They earned my business that day, and I've spent a bunch in their store. If everything had been locked up, I don't think I would have gone back.

 

[aarontunes]

Whether or not to keep the high-end gear locked up is a tough call. Any time I visit the GC near my house it's just full of kids, crawling all over everything, playing djent on anything they can get their hands on. As a result, the gear hanging on the walls there is pretty rough. Dented, missing switch tips, greasy crud all over everything. On those rare occasions when I actually find something I want to play, the first thing I do once I'm out the door is reach for the hand sanitizer.


Not sure I would put the nice stuff out for that crowd. GC must lose a ton of dough every year to damaged/stolen inventory.

 

[Cagey]

Any time I visit the GC near my house it's just full of kids, crawling all over everything, playing djent on anything they can get their hands on.

That's been my experience as well. I wouldn't let most of 'em touch anything of mine unless they bought it first.

As an aside - one of my nieces worked for GC for several years. She recently returned to Michigan, and took a job at a large boarding kennel. Dozens and dozens of of dogs coming/going daily, on top of the many longer-term residents. My brother commented it must be noisy as hell, which she agreed it was. Then he wondered aloud "why not go back to GC?" She said: "The noise was much worse."  :laughing7:

 

[Strat Avenger]

The Gibson Les Paul is one of the best looking guitars in the world, and it sounds good too, but it's not very comfortable to play, and the quality of today's Gibsons is not what it was in the '50s & late '60s. They are also way over-priced.  My ESP LP-style guitar has a much more comfortable neck, but has the same drawbacks of poor weight distribution, as well as the lack of comfort contours that a Fender Strat offers. I also despise Gibson's letigious mentality.

 

[TBurst Std]

I hope we can put Gibson bashing aside as a topic. The fact is withing the last 3 years:
I have tried more than 10 Gibsons on the rack
I have tried more than 10 US Fenders on the rack
I have tried more than 20 non US Fenders on the rack
I have tried more than 8 Gretchs on the rack
And I could go on and on

Honestly, out of over 60 instruments played off the rack, only 3 were good to go as set up. (It was one Gibson, 1 US Fender and 1 non US Fender)

Only 1 was so bad that I was like "I'm not certain if this would ever play well,regardless of what I do."
It was a 6000 series (Gretch White Penguin).  Oddly enough, it was made within weeks of my Gretsch White Falcon in the same factory.  That Falcon was set to go off the rack. Now to add to that, they both were in the same store within 3 months of each other.  So we can count out store set up differences to a degree.

 

[TBurst Std]

I do think we live in a time were a better quality instrument can had for a generally lower relative cost vs 2 -3 decades ago.  Let's relish that.  Let's also relish the fact we have quality companies like Warmoth, as well as qualities forums so we can build better instruments for more effective prices than we could have dreamed
Of 2 - 3 decades ago. 

 

[Cagey]

Yeah, it wasn't that long ago when "partscaster" was a derogatory term because they really were just made of cast-off/leftover parts from old soldiers that couldn't easily be made whole again. People who built their own guitars were actually pretty rare, and most folks didn't even know what a "luthier" was. Some kind of werewolf, maybe?

Now, many of the "partscasters" you see getting built just on this forum alone make Fender's offerings look pretty pedestrian in comparison, not to mention some of the unique creations some guys bring to life.