What happens when you cant find a gibson worth buying?

Quality control is about NOT letting lemons pass through. The fact you had quality Gibsons just means they don't f**k up 100% of the time.
Might even mean they don't have any QC and some come perfect of the line.

 

Ha! I like your perspective!

 

Thats pretty much what you get with a Esp Eclipse 1 Ctm FT. of course it wont sound 100% like a gibson but considering every gibson is going to differ a little from each other i dont care about it.

 

Honestly, unless you've got truly, truly magical ears to make dogs jealous, painting in any but the broadest brush strokes about the "Gibson" sound is a load of bollocks. After a pickup swap, and assuming neither instrument has any massive quality control issue (Which is to say you don't have one of Gibson's thousands of lemons) you can no more tell a real Gibson LP apart from any other brand than I can step across the channel to Calais or throw a tennis ball to the moon.

24.75" scale
2 Humbuckers
TOM bridge
Set neck
All mahogany with arched maple cap
That singlecut body shape joined to the neck at the 14th fret. Bonus points if you forego any contouring and keep the entire guitar full thickness. (Which is the MAIN, MAJOR reason most ESP eclipses don't sound right - just not enough guitar.)


All you need. Any finer, more detailed change, will honestly be masked by build quality, material choice or even just the amp. Curiously enough, an LTD EC401VFM fits the bill exactly. That's why I bought mine - because it soundly shat on the best Les Pauls I've ever played - £650 versus £3000, and it's BETTER? No brainer. I can swap the pickups 10 times and still come out cheaper. The top and finish are even good.

If you want the pickups to be closer to vintage spec there was even a DMZ variant which came with 36th Anniversary PAFs instead of JB/59

 

I'm not old FFS. Besides, only Standard and above LPs are really expensive. Vs, Explorers, SGs are priced more decently.

 

Some unchangables make a large difference in tone too. Not sure what the measurements are from one brand to the next, but pickup placement is HUGE on what makes guitars sound a certain way. Even just a few mm off will effect the tone the amp produces in a noticeable way. Part of the reason why a strat or les paul clone with 24 frets won't sound exactly the same in neck position, as the neck pickup on the OG models sits right around where fret 24 is. Not to say you can't get great or even similar tones out of any clone, but there could be a legit difference between a clone and the original. My ears will never pick it up, provided it's not a huge difference in pickup placement. I still can't shake the bad vibes the Ibanez IC507's bridge pickup placement gave me, and for all intents and purposes it was just another 2 hum guitar with a set neck and, I think, gibsonish length scale.

Perhaps this is nitpicking though, considering I certainly can't tell you what kind of two hum guitar somebody is using in a recording.

 

Yeah, but at some point you get down to people who think they can tell what brand of battery is in their Klon Centaur, or whether their speaker wires have been cryogenically treated. What I'm saying is there's no special sauce in how a Gibson is made that will translate into that guitar sounding totally different to another guitar with the same fundamental design. Even if there were, its all coming with a compromise anyway. Do I think 17 degree vs 13 at the headstock angle makes a difference to the tone? Probably not. But I do know it makes that headstock much more prone to breaking, so even if it did, do I want one or the other?

 

I'll definitely agree to that. I have the tendency to get into debating semantics or whatever you want to call it. I've heard people say "yup, that sounds like a les paul" when it just sounds like any ol' guitar with humbuckers to me, and I knew full well that was more or less what was essentially being talked about. Just figured I'd bring the pickup placement thing up, since it is something that is frequently overlooked.

As someone who owns and loves a non-lemon Gibson LP, I can say without bias that they're really nothing special. It's a great guitar that plays well and cost a lot of money, but it's no more special than any other properly put together single cut of similar design. (though I've never played another LP style guitar with this particular neck profile, and I love it.)

 

HNGD. If you look a bit around, you can find a bunch of old Japanese LPs that can easily take any Gibson on in a fist fight. I once had a '92 Japanese Tokai LS-65 with an SH-5 in the bridge and an old Gibson T-top in the neck. So sad i sold that... So naturally I had to buy it back years later when I got the chance. Love this guitar.

 

Man, I hear heaps about Gibson lemons, but I've owned two LPs - blind bought, and both have been fantastic. First, some tobacco sunburst 2004 one that had a huge maple cap, weighed a ton and was the hugest sounding guitar in the world. (A big .... you to whoever stole it)

Current one's a honeyburst 2008, fair bit lighter but is just ridiculously versatile, this super full and fat guitar, is a delight to play and over 8 years of abuse has had two frets levelled out a bit and nothing else. I own a few guitars that are about half the price of the standard and while they're fine guitars in their own right they don't sound anywhere near as rich or full.

I don't think I'm a Gibson fanboy but yeah, my experiences have always been very positive. If I had the money I'd probably buy another one.

 

First off, I'm not a Gibson fanboy. I'll never buy something just because I "like" the company producing it. Every company out there makes good stuff and ....ty stuff. They all cater to a certain crowd. As long as people will pay what a company charges for a product, the company will continue to make that product how they see fit and charge the price that people will pay. Now don't get me wrong, I've played some Gibsons that should have never made it out of the factory; bad fretwork, finish flaws, and some that just played/sounded dead. But, when you find one that they got right, to me at least they are as good as anything else out there. ESP Eclipse's are some pretty amazing guitars, but I don't really think it's fair to compare them to every Les Paul out there. Just because they share the same body shape doesn't mean they are designed for the same target audience. I played an R7 recently (don't remember what year) and it was hands down the most connected I've ever felt to an instrument before. I don't know of any other Les Paul "style" guitar out there that can capture that. It was heavy as hell, the neck was like a baseball bat, and the frets were pretty small (pretty much the opposite of what's popular around here) but yet I can't think of any other guitar manufacturer out there that makes anything similar. To sum it all up, I bought the two Les Pauls that I own because nothing out there gave me the same feeling that I got when I first played them. Either a guitar speaks to you or it doesn't.