Overview

This is a Les Paul guitar with a mahogany body and neck and a AAAA maple top. Sadly the top is sprayed with a sickly faded yellow and then further hurt by a satin lacquer that is not smooth to the touch. The neck is not a gloss back, thank goodness, but is the same slightly rough and sort of sticky satin. The neck shape is what Gibson calls 50’s vintage (of course they do) and I would say it is more a 59 or 60 carve than the baseball bat of a 57 or 58. So despite the unpleasing finish, it is incredibly comfortable, to me, for extended playing. The inlays are acrylic and are whitish, a huge improvement over the urine yellow ones in some other Les Pauls. The tuners are real Grovers and are smooth with a nice consistency. The nut is from Graph Tech and in my example, cut perfectly. In fact, except for the ugly finish, this is the first Gibson that I have picked up in many years where the setup was pretty much perfect right out of the case. The factory strings are the expected fence wire in 10 to 46 gauge, but a set of decent strings is not expensive when one considers the price of this guitar. You will note that the knobs are different for the bridge and neck pickups. This is cosmetic only and the way that the current real Greeny is equipped. While I dislike the look of the finish, the fit and quality is superb, astoundingly good for a Gibson product. The pickups are called Greenybuckers but what that means when it’s at home is not documented. They sound terrific especially wound full up into an amp that is happy being overdriven. They are also nicely bright and warm into a Fender clean amp, so very versatile.

There are more than a couple of folks who think that I am a Gibson hater. This is not true. I own a lot of Gibson guitars. My frustration is with the operational leadership, not with the good people who work in the factories. So let me be crystal clear. Both Greenys that I tried are far and away the BEST Gibson guitars that I have seen from anywhere, including the Custom Shop, in over five years. They are so good, if I were a suspicious person, I’d say that the builders ignored the time slots allocated for each task and just put the time in to make them great.