Gov't Series

[thearmofbarlow]

When/why did Gibson stop spending money on grainfill?  That SG is horrible, and it's the best looking one chosen for the photo.  If it's intentional, as an "I don't give a crap, look how rustic I am", that's one thing, but the last 2 gold tops I've seen, as well as my guitar player's Nighthawk, have been the same.

It worked REALLY well on the original style faded SG's, I owned two of the damn things and loved 'em, but they're doing it on practically everything under a grand now and marketing it as "BARE BONEZ ROCKN MASHEENZ!"

In actuality it's a cost-cutting measure. Throw a coat of sealer on it, spray a thin splatter of color on, and kick it out the door. It probably knocks a day out of the production of each guitar build that way, which translates to a lot of labor over the course of a fiscal year.

Gibson is getting LUNCHED by their own low-end line. If you're the kind of person that doesn't give a flying weasel arse about country of origin and you walk into a Guitar Center looking for a Les Paul, what do you see? You see a half-finished, unbound, featureless, and colorless Gibson hanging just down the row from an Epiphone with flame top, bright and good looking colors, binding all around, and block inlays... for LESS MONEY?!?? And the Gibson doesn't really play any better at that?

At this point they can't cut features from the Epiphones. They've painted themselves into a corner in so very many ways. Rather than making high-end imported guitars with the Gibson name, with a quality level that matches or exceeds the PRS SE line (which is, let's be honest, the direct competitor to their low-end lines) they've instead decided to make wholly uninteresting cheap guitars in the US because Henry J can't come to grips with fact. That his flapping jowls have basically made him a hypocrite if he dared to move any Gibson production overseas is his own fault, and I think we all know what the possibility of him ever admitting to being wrong about anything is.

 

[Super Turbo Deluxe Custom]

Believe me, I get the aesthetic value of no grainfill if that's the intended look.  I even get it on budget models.  I don't get it on the 3 grand+ flagship models, which I've seen it on.  Worse, it doesn't seem as if there's no grainfill, rather they stopped or ran out.  It's not uniform.

 

[thearmofbarlow]

Believe me, I get the aesthetic value of no grainfill if that's the intended look.  I even get it on budget models.  I don't get it on the 3 grand+ flagship models, which I've seen it on.  Worse, it doesn't seem as if there's no grainfill, rather they stopped or ran out.  It's not uniform.

Cost cutting. They keep wasting money on turds like the Firebird X and their godawful automatic tuners rather than concentrating on making guitars people might actually want to buy.

Hell, if you think about it, their most successful recent introduction has been the ES-339. No electronic frippery or BS there. Just a good idea executed well.