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Gibson survives on being a "lifestyle" brand. 52 flavors of Les Paul at at least 3k a pop.
The really good players I know who plays Gibsons--none of them bought a new one!
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03-05-2015 12:36 PM
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100%
Originally Posted by Franz 1997
Why do people buy Gibson's? Because they see them on TV. Most brands live of die off endorsements, its pretty standard. Gibson is no exception.
Just look what Slash did to the Les Paul!
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Never a truer word said. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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ATH, all you're saying is that people see many players they like/ admire/whatever playing Gibsons. On TV, wherever.. Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
That doesn't mean those players have been given them, or got them cheaply. Could it be - I know you'll hate this idea- that many players that others admire buy Gibsons 'cos they find them to be good guitars?
Jeff's got a point, but someone has to be buying them..
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My friend, who's a corporate lawyer, has 5. Just sayin.'
Before Guns and Roses, you could get a Les Paul for like 50 bucks.
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except that none of the boutique makers get a 175 right either. I have owned owned three hand-made plywood archtops made by 3 different (premiere) luthiers who's names are continually banded about on this forum as examples of exquisite luthiery. Both of these guitars were gorgeous and the craftsmanship and attention to detail was extraordinary. Certainly, much better craftsmanship than gibson. Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
Not a single one of these instruments captured the thunky "goodness" of the Gibson 175. In many ways , these were much better instruments with better resonance, lighter weight, better acoustic sound, etc. Yet, they absolutely couldn't get the sounds of (175 players) Jim Hall, Joe Pass, Pat Metheny, etc. I can walk into any shop with a Gibson 175 made over the last 50 years and assuming it's not strung up with .010s I can get it to sound very close to hall, pass, metheny.
Just because you can get an instrument made to your specs doesn't mean it'll sound as good.
Another case in point, I have played and owned many boutique, solid top spruce guitars. None of them sounded like an L5. Many had better acoustic tones, were lighter weight, had better construction, finer detailing, but none of them sounded like an L5. The only guitar I ever played that nailed an L5 tone was the Heritage Eagle.
I once went into the local guitar center and they had 3 boutique guitars back in their acoustic room. They had a '90s L5, a $25k benedetto and something else who's name escapes me. The L5 blew the others away.
I realize it's all subjective and there's no right or wrong here but what I can pretty objectively state is that it's not as easy to make a better 175 or L5 than it might seem.
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Could it be simply because they sound like what they expect a Gibson to sound like¸and they happen to like that tone?
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has nothing to do with anything I've discussed. Jazz guitarists aren't getting free instruments from gibson but they are getting loaners from other companies. This is one reason you see some jazzers using alternatives Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
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I agree with JZ. You know me and how I have bashed Gibson on their QC issues but it is the ONLY archtop guitars that gets "the tone" that I love and need. If you love that dark thick thunk sound it has to be a Gibson. If you like a brighter acoustic sound you have very many other choices.
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My personal quest for archtop tone led me to sell my Eastman 803 to buy an Ibanez Fg-100 from the 80's.
Go to jam with a friend who sold his 371 to get a 175 and well... it's really hard for me to not want a 175. Hard to put words to it, but as many have stated here the Gibson's have something unique. For one thing it made notice how the upper mids are so bright on the Ibanez. His tone is warmer etc.
There is the price thing too, Ibanez =1000$ Gibson well at least 2x the amount(used). I play gigs and well there seems to be less and less so(for me anyways)...
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Originally Posted by vinnyv1k
I love the Gibson Tone too but that doesn't mean it is without fault.
3 main issues with Gibson's tone.
1) Its not stable. Either a few strings sound great or a few areas on the fretboard. Rarely is the the whole neck accessible tonally, across the strings, especially for solos. Say what you will, end your comment with as many !!! as you like, thats my opining through years of experience.
2) The rattles and pickups (hardware) can be mind blowing frustrating. Gibson pickups range from heaven to instant bin.
3) Set-up and stability of instrument over time. Or in other words QC. Rarely I have found a Gibson that can achieve the action and response I'm looking for.
My friend thinks my Japanese stuff is bland because he claims, the foibles with Gibson give it character. As an artist, I like to paint on fresh canvasses, not half scrupled pre used ones.
But absolutely when Gibson get it right, there is not a finer thing (inspire of the name on the headstock).
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I don't agree at all that gibsons are not stable from string to string. The example you pointed out on the Joe Pass Joy Spring cut was dead wrong. Sorry, I call 'em as I see 'em.
I will admit that their quality control is among the worst in the industry. I would never, ever buy a gibson without some sort of eval period. It took me 6 guitars to find a 175 that was a good one. Best bet is to go to NYC and pay $1k more than typical internet retail to buy one you can play first.
Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
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I can't stand either Slash's, or Jimmy Page's playing, and for that reason assumed for a long time that LPs were mediocre guitars... Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
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Wow, good detective work! Originally Posted by Ren
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Joe Pass being the classic example of this. Ibanez paid him to play their instrument for about ten years, per Tony D's report. He was not particularly happy with it but, hey, you gotta make a living. And unlike some endorsers he did actually play it (there aren't a lot of videos of Barney Kessel playing his signature guitar, for example). Originally Posted by jzucker
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Well, you can't blame Barney for that. I never understood why they came up with that model, when there was such an obvious choice for a Barney Kessel inspired guitar: ES350 with a CC pickup. Originally Posted by Cunamara
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I can agree with most of that too. Originally Posted by jzucker
I know full well without even buying one, that boutique luthier made guitars are aiming for a different angle. They want their guitars to sound as alive as possible.
So no, if someone gives me a new Eastmen or Campellone, I know it wont sound as good as my £500 Ibanez AF-120 (btw you'd have trouble telling that apart from an old 50's 175), for playing the kind of Jazz I like. Thats not to say they wont sound great for playing a different style.
Gibson don't have magic "thunk" it wouldn't be hard to replicate, if you knew what you were doing or wanted. The joy is getting that thunk in another guitar, that you can really feel confident with, in all situations. I find Gibson's can be so room depended, on how good they sound.
My old Greco had it and you could play from low F, to high C on that and it stayed round and fat, without a hint of muddiness, woolliness or brittleness (ok maybe up at high C lol).
Essentially this guitar is an improvement on the Gibson Es-175. Slightly shallower, slightly narrower shoulders, hardly feeds back, no dead spots, no rattles, the notes just pop out and its more comfortable. The tops thinner so the sound of this is more like an Es-175 from the 50's with p90's (if you could define such a thing). Not like the later 70's to recent, heavier darker ones. The ones I think are the most unstable tonally.
Oh and just because you say your right doesn't make it so. I keep forgetting that myself
Last edited by Archie; 03-05-2015 at 05:13 PM.
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I was most disappointed to find out from ArchtopHeaven that my Gibson 175 is no good.
So I gave it one last chance, and recorded it direct, no amp or effects. Just added a touch of reverb to stop it from being too dry.
I didn't think it sounded too bad? I think I managed to play all 6 strings.
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Damn you got chops! Double thumbs up Originally Posted by grahambop
Come on, I didn't say they were no good, I've just had my run with enough that didn't sound as good as I wanted them too and my experiences with them in live situations, where I felt frustrated or annoyed.
You sounded great by the way, that was really nice tone, like an 8.5 out of 10. Although lets here you play some kind of Bossa on the bass string past C. You've got a High Pass filter haven't you ;-)Last edited by Archie; 03-05-2015 at 06:28 PM.
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
Well, I guess I haven't been around here long enough to even notice it once. Originally Posted by jzucker
And, I don't appreciate getting dismissed like that.
Joe D
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Thankyou. Tone is a big thing for me, I've always worked on it. Actually, when I first got the Gibson (about 1982 I think), I was expecting it to make me sound just like Kenny Burrell right away - I thought it came with that tone sort of 'built in'. But it didn't. In fact it didn't sound massively different to my solid-body Ibanez Artist. At that point I realised I had to do a lot of work on my tone production! Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
Have to say, I really love the feel of the Gibson 175 neck, frets and fingerboard. It just seems to suit me. When I've played other jazz guitars they feel uncomfortable by comparison. I also like that little space between the end of the fingerboard and the neck pickup - for me it's the ideal place to pick and get a good sound, without hitting the pickup.
As for the bossa, I guess you mean it'll get a bit bass-heavy up there. Well I quite like that, I think the bass response is part of the overall tone. But I appreciate it could be too much. In which case I guess I would try and control that a bit with my fingers or picking technique.
Maybe I'll try and record something like that and see how it comes out.
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read through the whole thread - wanted to respond to this interesting post (see bottom of this essay-post)
it seems obvious to me that jzucker is dead right that it (usually) takes time to find a really great guitar.
it would be very interesting if he were also right that the whole 'boutique archtop' thing 'was created to fill an imaginary void (nice phrase) for folks who drool over the great instruments but don't want to take the time or effort to find one.'
but surely not.
for one thing, peter bernstein plays a boutique archtop - and he sounds absolutely stunning (no-one can deny that!).
for another, its just not a question of whether classic gibson archtops are better than boutique archtops. its a question of how consistently gibson can make wonderful archtops and how consistently say campellone or andersen can make wonderful archtops. just as there are better and worse 175s there will be better and worse comins classics or campellone standards or andersen model 17s etc. etc. if you had three or four to play it would probably be quite easy to pick out the one you wanted most - or even to rank them (and reasonably expect many other jazz guitarists to rank them the same way or similarly).
so the question is not whether 175s are as good boutique archtops but what percentage of the 175s that gibson have produced are really great instruments, what percentage are okay and what poor? and how do these percentages compare with those of the best ten boutique makers?
of course no one is in a position to answer these questions. but that doesn't mean that they aren't the real questions.
and the fact that these and not the simplistic ones about whether 175s are 'as good as' ibanez or sadowsky archtops or boutique archtops etc. etc. is relevant largely because so many of us are in the business of trying to find a great archtop to see us through. that means we're in the business of deciding e.g. whether its better to take a bet on a 175 or on a ibanez, eastman, or a boutique archtop etc etc. the fact that you find the ibanez in the local guitar shop better to play than the 175 in the local guitar shop just does not mean that this type of ibanez is better than the 175. if you went into fifty guitar shops and almost always found the ibanez archtops to be better than the 175s it still would not mean that some types of ibanez archtop are better than 175s. you should realize that, in this sort of case, you could find a 175 the next day that would make you lose all interest in ibanez guitars. etc. etc. etc.
even if you've got great local guitar shops, it really isn't easy to find out what you can and can't get out of a guitar in a guitar shop. you need to try it out in lots of different sorts of situation to find out what you've got.
the other big thing is that a guitar could give you a certain, say strongly amplified, tone that you loved - but only from G to Bflat (lower middle part of the neck mainly). low registers could boom and top registers could be out of tune or thin sounding - but there's a bit in the middle that just sounds great.
you could reasonably reject a guitar like this in favour of one that sounded pretty good and worked great through the whole range.
playability (in small jazz gigs probably) might be more important to a lot of players than sound. (they may be precisely trying to find an instrument that works really well - that doesn't make playing well harder - which they also think sounds great - or pretty good)
and it is crazy to hold up that joe pass clip as some kind of jazz-guitar-tone-universal. its his playing that's great. if you don't feel that then try a different gig - sure. but his sound - well that's a different thing altogether. sometimes it works great, but sometimes its a bit boomy or over mid-rangey and nasal. wes never risks that over heavy sound (for example) - neither does the 175 playing jim hall (and neither does barney k.)
(and, for my money, its jim hall with e.g. paul desmond or to pick a stand out example - bill evans - that makes the 175 work best. and he sounds absolutely nothing like joe pass sounds on your clip. so even talking about 'the iconic 175 sound' can easily be misleading and simplistic.)
in my case - i gigged for years with a series of 175s, moved on to a much more friendly L4, and finally went over to a lovely 50s 175 (which i thought much nicer than the modern 175s i started with). i sold the 50s 175 very quickly after getting a sadowsky jim hall. the reasons for preferring the sadowsky had to do with usability - clarity, consistency, feedback resistance (lack of boominess) - rather than purely aesthetic considerations concerning sound.
i've since moved over to boutique archtops because, whilst the jim hall instrument amplified like a dream come true, it felt so dead 'in itself' or acoustically, that i got frustrated with it.
even though i sometimes have trouble in gigs keeping my boutique archtops under control (if i don't watch them they start fights!), i could never go back to a laminated gibson. the gibsons were all of them feedback-prone anyway. and the musical satisfaction of playing an instrument that is consistent across the range and so woody and RESPONSIVE is very great indeed. i might go back to a sadowsky - if i end up wanting something that works effortlessly week in week out, and sounds pretty good - but i wouldn't go back to a gibson. that is - i would not bet on a 175 i found on the net being a guitar i could live with, but i might bet on a sadowsky i found on the net being a guitar i could live with - or an andersen, or a comins or a buscarino etc.
i think e.g. comins or sadowsky are probably better at producing usable guitars that sound good CONSISTENTLY than gibson is now or ever has been. so even if i preferred the tone of some of the gibsons i've heard (if i preferred jim hall's sound in 1965 than in 2005) it still might make sense for me to try to get a great archtop by getting a sadowsky rather than by getting a 175.
finally - we all have to decide whether we want to capture some version of the iconic 175 sound or whether we want to find a different sound that is just as pleasing but not so, well, iconic. i was pushed in this latter direction largely by the desire for an instrument that was consistent across the range and responsive - peter bernstein shows that you can get a fresh and fabulous mainstream jazz sound by playing a boutique archtop.
Originally Posted by jzucker
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sorry Joe, i was short in my response because I had just mentioned it a few posts earlier. Wasn't trying to be a dick, but i succeeded. Originally Posted by Joe DeNisco
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Mr B, that's ok bro. I deserved it because I wasn't paying attention. Thanks. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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It strikes me that "archtopheaven" has many opinions.
Would you please post some of your playing so we can more fully consider the source, and perhaps all experience what a good guitar might sound like well played?
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