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Last week I did something I haven't done since 2003 -- I bought three guitars on the same day, and they arrived late last week. It just happened that three guitars I've had on my loose list of desirables showed up online at once.
First, two Gibsons. A 1994 Custom Shop Super 400 1939 Reissue in Cherry. Cherry 400s are scarce and I told myself years ago that if I found one at a sane price I'd buy it. But there's another bonus to this purchase that made it compelling: Early this year I bought a 2018 Crimson Custom Super 400 1939 Reissue, Blonde. But for some reason, the Crimson shop chose to build their 2018 version X-braced. The real 1939s were parallel braced. This 1994 cherry reissue is parallel-braced. So, now I have one of each. They are both 400s, so in that sense they are the same, but the bracing difference yields clearly different tonal balances.
The second Gibson that arrived is a 1994 Custom Shop LeGrand in dark wine burst. I played a LeGrand eons ago, when I wasn't ready to spend for it but its sound was both memorable, quite different from an L5 or Super 400, and not really like a Guild. It was its own thing. This one was available at the intersection of color, condition & price that made it compelling to me. BTW, I read some of the threads here on the LeGrand, and noted the back-and-forth about size inconsistencies. This one has a lower bout at 16-15/16", and rim depth is 3-1/8". It feels smallest of my 17" family guitars. Acoustic sound is sweet, chimey, projecting and dynamically eruptive. It has excellent bass, almost reminiscent of a Guild flattop. It sounds like no other Gibson I have, closest being my Hutchins-era L-5CT Acoustic.
1994 Super 400 & LeGrand:
For context on the Super 400, here's the '94 & 2018 together:
Then the third acquisition from last week, a Guild-Benedetto 1999 Artist Award. I was a Guild enthusiast before I became a Gibson enthusiast, too. Beginning in the '70s, I had an enduring love for the Guild Artist Award, and finally got a new one from Westerly in 1994. I still have it and it's staying, through thick or thin. I bought it for myself for my 40th birthday. Then by the end of the 1990s, Fender had bought the company, closed Westerly, and Bob Benedetto entered the picture. I was fortunate enough to get a 2006 G-B Johnny Smith Award back in 2011, one of the 18 Johnny Smith signed. But I wanted the 'tweener -- an example of the Benedetto-revised Artist Award made before Bob made further accommodations to Smith. Last week I found this 1999 Corona-crafted AA, and it appears to be the 2nd one in that production sequence.
Here it is, on the left, alongside its younger brother, 2006 G-B Johnny Smith Award:
I'm sure this seems extravagant and I almost didn't post this because of that. But on the other hand, I thought these three axes would be interesting to this forum. I play and collect, and I play everything I own. To make room for these, I'll start selling some of my inset-humbuckers, arched guitars.
PhilLast edited by 213Cobra; 11-24-2025 at 09:06 PM.
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11-24-2025 06:49 PM
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The big question is they are all nice beautiful for sure, but which one sounds the best? Acoustic of course and which is the loudest or has the most volume? How does the Guild's compare to Gibson for sure. We and I need these details. Congratulations!
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Wow, what a NGD! Or is it NGsD? I love to be able to here the difference in the Supers' bracing in person. (Even better, you're lucky to be able to *feel* the difference.)
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Congrats on the three scores and may they each inspire your playing for many years to come!
I owned two of the Guild Benedetto Artists Awards and was not able to bond with either. One was much louder than the other acoustically and I preferred that one, but the neck profile, scale length and string balance just did not work for me. One was sold on eBay to a fellow in Kentucky and the other went to a forum member in Austria. I also owned a 1971 Artist Award with a DeArmond 1100 that i regret selling (it went to a forum member named Matt, and I believe he is thrilled to own it). Guild made superb archtops during their run in Hoboken and Westerly.
A friend had a 16 inch L-5 reissue and while it was nothing like any of the vintage 16 inch L-5's that i have played, it was a superb guitar in it's own right. Gibson made some great archtops after Henry J. took the company over for sure (I feel fortunate to own 6 Gibson archtops made during Henry J.'s run).
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Absolutely stunning guitars. A big Congrats!
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Guilds are the ducks guts. That’s a DE-400 in my avatar.
You have great taste and let it be known that I am jealous.
I too have a very unique artist award collection that you may have seen? I won’t steal your thunder as you rightfully deserve it, so we’ll do it another time.
Well done!
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Standby, Mark.... -Phil
Originally Posted by deacon Mark
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What a lineup! An old short scale Artist Award with a DeArmond is my dream guitar.
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Congrats on the purchases!
Just a note, not all original '39s are parallel braced, Gibson switched from X to parallel mid year.
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It's hard to know why someone doesn't bond with a guitar and someone else does. You don't like G-B AAs, as you've pointed out on many threads here. To me the Gibson ES-175 is a pointless guitar (but the ES-165 isn't). But then, I don't know what "thunk" is. I don't want thunk in my guitars... Originally Posted by Stringswinger
. They all can make music, though. I'm glad they all exist. I am not indifferent to necks, but I'm adaptable, within limits; mostly that limit is when the neck is too narrow and cramped. I have a 1944 L-7 that has a nice, fat, 1" depth, big-C neck, 1st through 9th frets. That's excellent for me. Similar fatties on my 1951 Epiphone Emperor and 2013 D'Angelico US Masterbuilt 1942 Excel reissue. All the Guild archtops I ever had were somewhat thinner in neck profiles, unlike their same-eras flattops. But they also all fell within my acceptable range, including these Artist Awards. My 1994 Westerly AA is really superb -- it would benefit from a floating pickup change. After 31 years I'm about to; I just got a Krivo tab-mount from Deacon. Now, I just need to find the right Artist Award crafted in Hoboken to round out that subset of the collection!
Almost everything archtop, and most of the flattops out of Montana, that I've seen come out of Gibson since 1990 have been admirable instruments, notwithstanding the incidents others have reported here. We agree that Gibson made a lot of great archtops during Henry's run.
PhilLast edited by 213Cobra; 11-24-2025 at 10:42 PM.
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Thank you. I have read conflicting info on that matter, but I take the correction from you. That would explain why the Crimson team felt they could take the liberty of X-bracing what was billed as a 1939 reissue in 2018. Originally Posted by wintermoon
Phil
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Well this is really interesting to see, because it appears that Benedetto changed the shape of the body of the guitar on the JS version. The cutaway horn is rounder and the throat of the cutaway is wider on the JS. And it looks like the body length of the JS might be a tiny bit shorter, but that could be camera angle and lens distortion. Thanks for sharing. You know, it would've been really interesting to witness Johnny Smith's conversations with Bob Benedetto about these guitars. Johnny was famously particular with Guild, Gibson and Heritage, but I wonder if he was the same way with Bob. He did apparently allow, later in life, as the original Artist Award was a pretty good guitar and he might've been a bit overzealous. Originally Posted by 213Cobra
Then the third acquisition from last week, a Guild-Benedetto 1999 Artist Award. I was a Guild enthusiast before I became a Gibson enthusiast, too. Beginning in the '70s, I had an enduring love for the Guild Artist Award, and finally got a new one from Westerly in 1994. I still have it and it's staying, through thick or thin. I bought it for myself for my 40th birthday. Then by the end of the 1990s, Fender had bought the company, closed Westerly, and Bob Benedetto entered the picture. I was fortunate enough to get a 2006 G-B Johnny Smith Award back in 2011, one of the 18 Johnny Smith signed. But I wanted the 'tweener -- an example of the Benedetto-revised Artist Award made before Bob made further accommodations to Smith. Last week I found this 1999 Corona-crafted AA, and it appears to be the 2nd one in that production sequence.
Here it is, on the left, alongside its younger brother, 2006 G-B Johnny Smith Award:
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I have seen your excellent and enviable Guild collection online, Archie. In fact, it was a recent perusal several weeks ago that prompted me to put up the periscope to look for a Benedetto-revised, but pre-Johnny version of the AA. In Guild archtops, I've had X-500, Westerly X-700, G-B Corona X-700 Wes-style, an unsigned G-B JSA in Benedetto's distinctive creamy brown, and of course these three Awards presently in my care. That's all apart from the Guild flattops I had and have. I developed an early love for Guild starting around 1970 when all my friends wanted Martins. I should have wanted a Martin flattop first, given that I grew up about 50 miles from Nazareth, PA, but Guilds had a voice and feel I preferred. Along with Guilds not having had the "Mennonite austerity" vibe of Martins. I did eventually add a couple of Martins and still have one flattop. When I got my first Guild, which was a flattop D44M, in the early '70s (which I still have) it was common to see archtops on the wall of a store, too. So I tried an AA at the same time. It made a lasting impression on me, but I couldn't afford it at the time. It got bookmarked in my brain permanently until I could spring for a new one in 1994. After taking a financial breather, after the new year starts and if the market does OK, I can scrape off some gains to seek a Hoboken AA, which I'd very much like to do. Originally Posted by Archie
Phil
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Correct; there are some subtle differences in the bodies between the two, and your cutaway observations are accurate. I can measure the body lengths to be sure, but I think a lot of the perception of a difference there is that the Benny JSA has a slightly more rounded bottom than the AA revised. The flatter bottom of the revised AA increases the flat-spot width to where the sides curve up to form the lower bout. The Benny JSA is almost absent a bottom flat spot. And the 1994 Westerly AA I have is just a little different still. Originally Posted by Cunamara
Phil
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That wouldn't necessarily explain Gibson's way of thinking, they're notorious for not being accurate in reissues. Originally Posted by 213Cobra
Like X bracing the reissue 1934 16" L-5 when all of the originals were parallel.
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The 2018 Crimson Shop Super 400 was apparently not played much by its prior owner, and then it hung on Retrofret's wall in NYC for something like 18 months. Except for two slight finish checks, it arrived to me essentially mint. So when I got the guitar it felt tight. It opened up nicely over the next month after I bought it and made sure to play it every day. I think it will be improving over the next three-to-five years. But it's already quite remarkable in sound and feel. Originally Posted by Woody Sound
The 1994 has been played in for 31 years, though not harshly at all. It has very little visible wear & tear. I expect the differences in sound attributable to the bracing difference to become increasingly apparent in coming years, but some aspects of that are clear now.
The X-braced 2018 has more chime and snap than the 1994. The '94 has more "butter," is smoother in tone than the 2018. At the moment, the '94 has more bass bloom than the 2018. Overall, the tonal difference is akin to the tonal differences between a maple back/sides L4 acoustic and a mahogany back/sides version of the same. In that comparo, the mahogany sounds rounder, more buttery and "warmer." The maple version has more snap and a higher-frequencies shift. That's a lot like what I'm hearing from the two 400s, after just three days of playing both. In terms of feel, the '94 feels more responsive to lesser inputs than the 2018, as of now, and it feels palpably more reverberant against my body.
I can update you in a month or so. Also, more info coming in my answer to Deacon Mark's questions.
Phil
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I am not sure that I know exactly what "thunk" is either. Perhaps it is like the old SCOTUS thing about obscenity. only we hear it rather than see it? I do love the 175D sound. It is warm and electric. If there is a better jazz guitar tone than Joe Pass got on the "For Django", "Joy Spring" and "Intercontinental" albums, I have not heard it (Though the Johnny Smith albums recorded with his DA is (for me) a close second). Originally Posted by 213Cobra
It's hard to know why someone doesn't bond with a guitar and someone else does. You don't like G-B AAs, as you've pointed out on many threads here. To me the Gibson ES-175 is a pointless guitar (but the ES-165 isn't). But then, I don't know what "thunk" is. I don't want thunk in my guitars.... They all can make music, though. I'm glad they all exist. I am not indifferent to necks, but I'm adaptable, within limits; mostly that limit is when the neck is too narrow and cramped. I have a 1944 L-7 that has a nice, fat, 1" depth, big-C neck, 1st through 9th frets. That's excellent for me. Similar fatties on my 1951 Epiphone Emperor and 2013 D'Angelico US Masterbuilt 1942 Excel reissue. All the Guild archtops I ever had were somewhat thinner in neck profiles, unlike their same-eras flattops. But they also all fell within my acceptable range, including these Artist Awards. My 1994 Westerly AA is really superb -- it would benefit from a floating pickup change. After 31 years I'm about to; I just got a Krivo tab-mount from Deacon. Now, I just need to find the right Artist Award crafted in Hoboken to round out that subset of the collection!
Almost everything archtop, and most of the flattops out of Montana, that I've seen come out of Gibson since 1990 have been admirable instruments, notwithstanding the incidents others have reported here. We agree that Gibson made a lot of great archtops during Henry's run.
Phil
While I prefer slim necks in general (My 71 AA had a sweet neck), I can play a fat neck if it has a C profile. A somewhat thicker neck with a D profile like the Westerly GBAA just did not float my boat. The 25 5/8 scale was an issue for me as well. My 71 AA had a 25 1/2 scale and I understand that in the 60's, the AA model had a 24.75 scale. I know that Guild used the 25 5/8 scale on their flattops. I am not sure when they went to that scale on their archtops. I believe that if they had used Benedetto's choice of scale (25) on the Guild-Bene4detto AA's and Stuarts, those guitars would have sold better.
My days of playing 13's or 14's on the high E are over. I am actually not even using many 12's at this point. I found the Benedetto floating pickup with it's lack of adjustable pole pieces to have a thin E string tone in live performance. If my GBAA's had a shorter scale and a C neck profile, I think I would have swapped out the pickup and would probably still own one. They have a high quality voice. And they sure are easy to look at.
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Mark, Originally Posted by deacon Mark
"Best" is a deeply difficult quality to discern. They are all different, within each design genre. But to give you a sense of what you asked for (best, loudest, most volume) I have to offer some context. These observations are all limited to assessment of acoustic sound. I also have to point out that I don't play with a flatpick at all. From the time I first picked up a guitar in 1968, I could never make sense of a flatpick or make music with it. It just never felt right. I started out as a fingerpicker on flattops, and that persisted right through to the present, regardless whether playing a big archtop, a flattop, a 12-string, a Telecaster, an ES-335 or anything else. So I can't assess a Super 400 for the sound it was originally designed for -- comping in a band context competing against drums, horns, etc. I'm not that player. The closest I get to that is frailing. I usually play bare-fingered, occasionally with fingerpicks and thumbpick when necessary. So, take what follows accordingly.
My loudest archtop is my Gibson Super 4000 Chet. It has Super 400 dimensions in width and length, but a thinner depth -- not a thinline but reduced-depth to Chet's preferences. That has no bearing on its capability to play loud acoustically. It's a Hutch-era, Hutchins signed, whereas the 1994 guitars here were signed by someone else -- hard to make out the signature. It might be Rick Gembar's sig, though Hutchins was in the Custom Shop then. The 2018 Crimson Custom Super 400 was Wharton/Culberson-era, Culberson signed. Now, the Super 4000 had an original list price of $40,000, so maybe the top carve got even more attention and tap-tuning customization than a regular Custom Shop guitar. I don't know, but the Super 4000 is loud, and has a tonal profile very different from any Super 400 I've ever encountered and played. By a small degree, the next loudest of my archtops is my 1951 Epiphone Emperor, and then after that, my Guild-Benedetto Johnny Smith Award. That's a pretty tight cluster in loudness but also three very different sounds. With some daylight between these and the next loudest of my archtops, there's my Hutchins "L-5CT Acoustic" (on the label).
Against a lot of people's expectations, then, my big Super 400s aren't my loudest guitars, nor are they subdued in any way. Just not the loudest. Of the five guitars featured in this post, The G-B JSA is the loudest, followed in order and by small degrees, the LeGrand, then the 2018 S400, then the 1994 S400, with the G-B Artist Award (revised) bringing up the tail. I have to add that the perception of relative loudness is affected by the tonal balance of these various instruments. So, for example, the 2018 S400 has a tonal balance somewhat higher-frequency shifted than the 1994 S400, which isn't surprising since the latter is parallel-braced and the former is X-braced. Is the 2018 really louder than the 1994? That's the impression because of the greater upper midrange/highs projection, but the 1994 has bloomier bass response. As I noted, the LeGrand is kind of its own thing. Despite being clearly smaller volumetrically than the Super 400s, its projection of "cutting power" seems out of scale to its trimmer size.
BEST is much more difficult. If I play the same thing on these and other guitars in my stash, I play each a little differently. Mood and what I want to express also affects my choice of guitar. So what's "best" changes with mood and expression, my dexterity on any given day (I'm 71 and counting...) and the changeable human factors of what I react to in the feel and sound of my guitars. For me, a lot of "what's best" is heavily influenced by responsiveness of the instrument to the mechanical inputs made by my fingers/nails/picks. I've only had the LeGrand, the '94 S400 and the G-B AA (revised) for now four days. But they all had prior owners and have been played in. The G-B JSA and the LeGrand are pretty evenly matched on responsiveness, i.e. yielding a great, bell-like tone from even the slightest inputs while proving eruptive, dynamically when I dig in. This, they share with the L-5CT Acoustic and the even more responsive Super 4000. The two Super 400s need more energetic inputs to really come to life, which makes sense to me given the musical environment the Super 400 was originally designed for and introduced into. With elevated picking energy, the S400s can be equally eruptive, but they don't play quietly as well as the more delicately responsive instruments. The G-B AA (revised) is responsive and toneful from quiet to reasonably loud, and sounds beautiful within its dynamic range, but it doesn't feel or sound like it has quite the mechanical-acoustic headroom of the others. However, compared to the JSA, Super 4000 and the LeGrand, it retains more of the older "woodiness" of my older, Westerly 1994 Artist Award. It's four days in, but I don't think I will value it any less for that. It's a discernibly but also marginally different voice.
Also, I must note that the 2018 S400 got into my hands last spring (2025). Before that it hung on Retrofret's wall for around 18 months, and they got it from its original owner who did not play it very much. Aside from a couple of slight finish checks, it arrived to me near-mint and the guitar felt very tight when I first played it. I don't consider it a fully played-in guitar yet. It opened up a lot during the first month I owned it, played daily and I love it, but I have a sense that over the next three years or so, it will bloom considerably.
So, I gave a picture of loudness / volume. Best? Like asking which child you love most. Of the five guitars featured in this NGD post, if I had to live with just one, I'd have to pick the G-B JSA or LeGrand with a blindfold on, and miss the sheer thrill of playing a Super 400. Or I'd have to pick either S400 with a blindfold on, and miss the tonal sophistication and chime available from the JSA or LeGrand.
I know, for a guy asking which is best, that's clear as mud. But ask me in a couple of months and again deeper into next year and I might have a clearer answer. For me, having multiple guitars (as a player) is for having voices to choose from that correspond to mood, expression and music in play. As a collector, variety is in the art of different guitars.
Then, how do Guild & Gibson compare? Put aside the LeGrand for a moment. Aside from what's mentioned, I also have a 1944 L-7 (courtesy of @thatrhythmman who also sourced my L-5CT Acoustic), and a 2002 Hutchins L-5 Wes. In general, Gibson acoustic archtops are more midrange forward than Guilds, and have a bit meatier thickness to their tone. Guild's tend toward higher frequency extension and chime, which contributes to their cutting projection and advantage in articulation. Both have similar bass characteristics. The LeGrand and Super 4000 are outliers to the Gibson realm, blending the better traits of both Guild & Gibson, IMO.
In 2022, I had 46 guitars, a collection dominated by archtops, electric & acoustic, but also well-stocked with Telecasters, flattops and gypsy-jazzers in the cases. Then late that year my wife suffered early & sudden onset of fronto-temporal dementia, though we didn't know that's what was causing her then-alarming cognitive dysfunctions until August 2023. Not knowing what I was facing, I just did a wholesale revision of our financial life that included selling 35 of those 46 guitars in one fell swoop. Many of them, especially some of the archtops, I regretted letting go. Once we had a diagnosis, the result was that there's no medical treatment possible, and other financial moves I made meant I had some latitude to rebuild a smaller collection, this time more focussed on acoustic archtops, which had become in recent years my preferred guitars to play most of the time. In that context, the experiential aspect of the guitars I now have, in feel, sound, responsiveness is rewarded by some variety. Plus, guitars make me happier than not having guitars. I haven't performed publicly since about 1980. So I don't have a guitarist's "tool mentality" about these instruments. Hence my salami-slicing of differences and appreciation for them. I'm also a longstanding hifi audiophile, so that creeps in, as that interest has been fully coincident with my guitar playing, as a matter of elapsed time involved. A real guitarist-performer who plays jazz with a flatpick might -- probably would -- have a different and better assessment of which of these is best for jazz guitar. I am kind of blues-centered as a player, and when I play anything thought of as jazz, I play it my own way. Idiosyncratically. I happen to love archtops above all other guitar types, regardless. But you are getting here an assessment of these guitars that is probably as idiosyncratic as the rest of everything about me.
Happy to answer further questions if you have them.
PhilLast edited by 213Cobra; 11-25-2025 at 04:31 AM.
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Very nice!
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Holy Cannoli!
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Good for you Phil, as I said before, you're a man of excellent taste, those Chet 400’s a beautiful. Originally Posted by 213Cobra
I’ve been holding back a photo shoot I took a year ago of an AA, JSA, and a BJSA. I put out a couple of teaser shots from the first shoot but took a second better one. I was going to turn some into posters but time and workload get in the way.
I originally started out thinking the best looking archtops were Gibsons, and your Chet400 is one on my bucket list but as time goes on, I find the Guilds have that pure Americana look. There’s a grace a delicacy about them, very art deco. Some of the pics I took made me think of the great buildings of early 1900’s America.
One of my other passions is architecture. I have quite a collection of architectural books and I usually go for the modernist stuff but; sometimes I get a book on American stuff and I get the same feeling, I get from Guild Awards.
Last edited by Archie; 11-25-2025 at 10:06 AM.
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I'm not gonna lie: I got drool on my laptop.
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The thunk is the staccato, woody "thunk" on the attack. I present the Thunkmeister: Originally Posted by Stringswinger
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Baffling. I like Tal, but "thunk" is defined as an "abrupt, dull, heavy sound often described as an impact sound" as in "the suitcase fell off the conveyor belt with a thunk..." Informally it's sometimes used as past tense for think. Originally Posted by Cunamara
I don't hear anything coming out of Tal's playing that registers as an abrupt, dull, heavy sound. So the term seems seriously at variance with sound characteristics of any jazz guitar playing. Not sure how this community lashed thunk as a term to that sound of Tal in your clip, but it's usage is lost on me.
But thanks for trying!
Phil
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The Super’s have no equal. But honestly, I’m a bigger fan of the Guild’s. Having owned many arch tops the Artist Award is the only guitar that I regret selling.
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