The Player’s Guide to Ultimate Tone ReportTM The Mighty · PDF fileThe Player’s Guide to Ultimate Tone Report TM The Mighty 335 INSIDE ... responsible for having launched a thousand

theMountainview Publishing, LLC

TMReportThe Player’s Guide to Ultimate Tone

The Mighty 335

INSIDEA celebration of Gibson 3-series Thinline guitarsand the mighty

ES-335

Can your guitar do that?

The ‘67sparkling burgundy

335

Who played what?Legendary

thinline players

The ES-Artist

1997Historic

‘59 ES-335

JT Ribiloffon the ‘57 Classic

humbuckers

1982ES-335 DOT

Stripped down& worthy…the ES-333

The vintage ES-330

Custom Shop CS-356

The Johnny ASignature

Lee RitenourSignature ES-335

50th AnniversaryCustom Shop

‘58 ES-335

Joe Glaser on Plek

Holmes

Chasing ‘vintage tone’

The other end of the rain-bow…

RS Guitarworks Surfmaster

24Eastwood Tuxedo & MAP

Guitars Revealed

$10.00 US, July-August 2011/VOL.12 NO.9-10

www.tonequest.com

“I came up with the idea of putting a solid block of maple in an acoustic model... it would get some of the same tone as a regular solidbody, plus the instrument’s hollow wings would vibrate and we’d get a combination of an electric solidbody and a hollowbody guitar.” – Ted McCarty

When it comes to Gibson guitars, 1958 marked a year of stunning creative energy and craftsmanship at the old factory on Parson’s Street in Kalamazoo. Ted McCarty and the wizened workers at Gibson launched the Flying V,

Explorer and Moderne (?) in 1958, only to discover that their radical vi-sion of the future would not be so easily embraced by dealers with enough credit to tote the note for such extreme designs. Ah, but the buttoned up

fellows at Gibson weren’t betting their future in the electric guitar busi-ness solely on the Flying V and Explorer…

In hindsight, the ‘modernistic’ guitars appear to have been little more than a frivolous experiment

intended to show Leo Fender and the rest of the world that Gibson was capable of creating the most far out, innovative designs while adhering to their superior standards of craftsmanship

and enduring quality. If the korina Explorer and Flying V had sold well, more would

have been built, but McCarty was no romantic patron of art for the sake

of art, and he astutely hedged his bets with far more impor-

tant and endearing designs in 1958…

Of course you are aware that the first sunburst Les Pauls were intro-duced in ‘58 as well, which seems to have be-

come a much more signif-icant event in the minds of

guitarists today than it may have been at the time… There

is a perfectly good reason why the bursts barely lasted three years before

being unceremoniously dumped for the devil-

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.12 N.9-10 July-August 2011

horned SG… At $265 plus case, sunburst Les Pauls were extremely expen-sive in 1958 dollars, and until Eric Clapton fronted his burst on the Beano album in 1966, they were commonly perceived as simply used guitars that were somewhat rare, but worth no more than a few hundred dollars in the early ‘60s. This turn of events was probably no

more discomforting to McCarty and company than the flop of the Flying V and Explorer, however, because just as Fender constantly struggled to meet orders for its budget Musicmaster and Duosonic models, Gibson’s top-selling guitars throughout the ‘50s remained the cheaper ES-125, ES-125T and ES-225T.

Today we can say with certainty that McCarty and his crew in Kalamazoo drew a perfect hand with the introduction of the ES-335T. The ‘58 335 was an instant hit with the same Gibson dealers who had run from the Flying V and Explorer, for as innovative as the 335 was in construction and tone, the unique double cutaway design, arched back and top, and flowing feminine curves appealed to a wide variety of players who found the ES-335 irresistible at first sight. As the Gibson ad correctly claimed, “the thin-body guitars feel just right.”

In this edition of the Quest we celebrate the ES-335 and the 3-series thinline models in all their variations past and present – but most importantly the more recent past, since it would be pointless to wank on endlessly about the old ones for too long. If you possess the motivation and the cash to buy a vintage ES-330, 335, 345 or 355, you don’t need us to validate your desires, and if you do, well, just remember that every guitar is unique, which is to say that if were spending that kind of money, we’d need to buy a ticket to ride and play it first. Throwing the dice on a more recent model with a 48 hour approval period or picking one off the wall in a store is an entirely different proposition. Either way, we invite you to boldly Quest forth in semi-hollow style and Enjoy…

Strange Days – 1967 There are no ‘experts’ speaking here – the word itself smells too much of self-promotion and the insecure need to be ac-knowledged, and we don’t. Most of the true ‘experts’ we know (and we know a few) would recoil at being called an expert anything, and the people who present themselves as such often impress us as charlatans whose mothers weaned them from the tit too soon. But we will gladly admit to having acquired more

than a little experience playing a 1967 ES-335 in venues ranging from an outdoor stage in front of 10,000 hippies-in-training at a Guess Who concert to sweaty frat parties in Bloomington, Indiana that provided an accurate tem-plate for the ultimate frat flick, Animal House. We acquired our ‘67 sparkling burgundy 335 as a result of an unfortunate accident

after leaving our first electric – a National Glenwood, sitting in a stand in the basement practice room of the drummer’s house, where he accidentally knocked it over, breaking the neck. Since the band was in a fairly lucrative position for 15 year-olds with a real booking agent, union cards and gigs, they bought yours truly a new ES-335 provided by a guitar teacher who had traveled to Kalamazoo and picked out a few guitars to sell back in Indiana. The sparkling burgundy 335 was a big, red, luscious lollipop, sold as a factory second due to a trivial little paint flaw the size of an eraser head on the back. It was a monumental step up from the woofy Glenwood paired with the ‘66 Deluxe Reverb that Mom had bought on time with the National in ‘65. Technically a ‘Norlin’ 335 with a trapeze tailpiece and nylon saddles, did anyone really care that Gibson was now owned by an Ecuadorian brewing conglomerate? Nope. Gibson was inlaid on the headstock, the orange label inside said Gibson, and a Gibson it was. In the orbit of garage bands and the older guys who could afford matching suits and boots, Gibson was king in ‘67, while Fender guitars were the exclusive domain of black R&B bands (white Strats and Jazzmasters) and redneck Telecaster players on the southside who sprinkled salt in their beer and worked a day gig at the Allison plant. Yeah, Hendrix came out of nowhere in ‘67 dry humping a Strat, but no one yet had the nerve to consider playing “Purple Haze” covers. Fender guitars simply weren’t that cool in the mid ‘60s, and the 335 was, which must have made Ted McCarty mighty proud.

As the gigs in-creased with more frat parties every

weekend, high school dances and outdoor ‘festivals’ in munic-ipal parks, the rig expanded to include an Arbiter Fuzz Face replacing the Maestro Fuzz, a Cry Baby Wah, and a bizarre modification to the Deluxe… The bass player’s older brother

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had been an electrician in the Navy, lived in the Haight for a while after discharge and returned to Indianapo-lis, where he worked in a machine shop. Drove a primer-gray MG he called “Smack” and had the longest hair of anyone we had ever seen in town until Al-ice Cooper’s band blew in from Detroit. In his role as part-time roadie

and full-time ballbuster, he suggested we cut the cabinet of the Deluxe down to a head and build a couple of 4x12 cabinets loaded with JBLs. Cool! And it was. We could easily hang in the frat houses with enough punch to keep things movin’ and groovin’ with a single 4x12 while keeping up with the 100W Bogen PA and Hammond B3 outdoors with two cabinets because we were moving more air.

The 335 became the seminal wellspring of teenage life, always carried to motel rooms, never out of sight, played unplugged for hours in the back of the van, carried on a Trailways Silver Eagle 3,800 miles to California and back where we first saw Canned Heat and Deep Purple slack jawed, habitually picked up whenever there was time to spare – an essential ruby red appendage that defined everything that was remotely impor-tant in life when nothing else really was.

Musically, the 335 could cover anything – from running fuzz bass lines just above The Bishop’s EB3 on “Dance to the Music” and all the Family Stone dance grooves, Steve Miller’s early trippy stuff, to soaring Santana riffs supported by infinite fuzz sustain, heavy Cream, the Airplane, the crisp, growling rhythms on the Rascals’ hits, the Animals, Hendrix’ “Let the Good Times Roll”, and whatever was called for to properly ape the haunting guitar tracks on Beggar’s Banquet. The 335 was also featured in a stand front and center during the requisite strobe lit drum solo in the middle of “Innagoda-

davida”, the jittery kinescope flashing off the metallic top and chrome hardware like a totem in a ritual pagan dance. And for a few hours at least, girls and boys who would become mothers, fathers, and otherwise consumed with earning an

adult living and raising families of their own soon enough were free to revel in the primal instincts that higher education was intended to suppress, hearts pounding to a primitive beat drenched in sweat, sloe gin Fanta punch, and the intoxicating anticipation of the teasing, tentative, urgent sexual foreplay that would inevitably come at the end of the night. Was the ‘67 335 a ‘great guitar’? By today’s self-conscious standards who can say? We weren’t nitpicking over nuanced details or questing after a set of PAFs to replace the T-Tops in 1969, and perhaps we should be reminded that the true gravity of an instrument’s worth is best determined by the music made with it. If you can agree with that, then yes, the life experi-ences and music created with the ‘67 were priceless – easily responsible for having launched a thousand deep kisses. Can your guitar do that?

Thinline PlayersGuitars have always been best promoted by the players that play them, and the art-ists that embraced ES thinline-style guitars provide a fascinating study in contrasts…

“If Chuck Berry had been a white man, he would have been the King of Rock & Roll.” – Cesar Diaz

Chuck Berry didn’t start out playing an ES-355 because it hadn’t been built yet, but it became his axe of luv soon enough, and he undoubtedly sold a lot of guitars for Gibson throughout the ‘60s. One can only imagine the conversation that ensued when Keith Richards and Chuck first met… “Ahhh, Chuck, what a thrill to meet you, man! I mean, uh, heh, heh… I owe you so much… I don’t think I’d have picked up the guitar at all if not for you! I’m so excited I could piss meself, heh, heh.” “Mmm, well thank you, Keith. Why don’t you stand over here then, just in case. Yes… I’d say you and your skinny little English friends do indeed owe me a lot. Without the stuff you, ah… bor-rowed from me, there wouldn’t be much left. Well, have a good show now, and try not to get too high on the thrill of meeting me. I have my heroes, too. Try listening to Louis Jordan. I need to go find the promoter now, because until he puts that money in my hand, there will be no Chuck playing with the band. I don’t play encores, either. Encores cost extra. Chuck doesn’t play for free.

Yes, Chuck Berry was the king bee by all counts – the most influential and creative singer, songwriter, guitar player and

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entertainer in rock & roll, and certainly one of the most potent endorsers of Gibson thinlines.

Another giant (in actual fact) was Freddie King, who started out playing a goldtop, but also felt the tug of the ES-345 and ES-355 throughout the ‘60s, when he routinely knocked out 300 shows a year with his Gibsons, and in later years, a mind-numbing Fender Quad Reverb ‘combo.’ Freddie’s tone was always huge and searing, and like Chuck Berry, BB and Albert King, he possessed a big man’s ability

to wrench huge notes from the thinlines, which sustained for days when you wanted them to.

And of course there was BB… Pictures of him exist playing a Fender Esquire in the ‘50s, as well as an ES330 and ES-355 before Gibson designed his signa-ture Lucille minus the f-holes. As far as BB King is concerned, we’ll backtrack a little and admit that there is definitely some signature tone in those big hands, unmistakable from the first note, played more often than not

through a Gibson Lab 5 Series ‘Norlin era’ 2x12 amplifier. You can still find ‘em… cheap.

While we’re into the blues, the mighty Otis Rush cannot be overlooked. Otis played a Stratocaster during his early years in Chicago, switched to an Epiphone Riviera for a while, and then permanently adopted Gibson Thinlines with a stop tailpiece and the Varitone

circuit for the remainder of his career. Otis could play and sing the shit out of the blues, and he did so the longest with the

Gibson Thinline.

And there is the other Otis… the unheralded and equally un-forgettable Shuggie Otis, son of Johnny, dedicated ES-335 player and one of the greatest guitar players and songwrit-ers to have ever lurked (and

he didn’t care) beneath the radar of the masses. At the age of 15 Shuggie guested on guitar for Al Kooper’s second Super Session album in 1969, and his debut solo album featuring an all-star lineup of veteran L.A. sidemen titled Here Comes Shuggie Otis followed the same year. He was invited to re-place Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones and declined. Didn’t like crowds… His scant commercial success was limited to the classic “Strawberry Letter Number 23”, but if you want to hear exceptional blues guitar played on a 335 like no other, log on to Youtube and pull up “Slow Goonbash Blues”, “Purple”, and Shuggies’ Boogie.” While you’re there, don’t miss “Me and My Woman” and “Sweet Thang.” Shuggie Otis not only did the 335 proud – he was one of the most visionary and influential artists of the late ‘60s and ‘early ‘70s. Not to be missed, all of his recordings are essential.

While the Epiph-one Casino doesn’t technically qualify as a Gibson, it’s pretty much a 330 Thinline in all other respects, so let’s also give a nod to John Lennon and Paul McCartney

for both playing Casinos on later Beatles records and Lennon during the Beatles’ last roof top performance above Apple Records in London.

Now what about Eric? His ‘64 ES-335 was most prominently featured during the ‘Farewell Cream’ shows in America and London, and it can be heard on “Badge”, and “Hard Times” from the 1989 Journeyman album, but for a full 51 minute dose of Clapton brilliantly playing his 335, log on to youtube and cue up “Cream Farewell Concert 1968.” Nothing more need be said about the unique tone of a 335 rammed

through a Marshall after you’ve experienced that. The ‘64 was eventually sold to Guitar Center at the first Christie’s Cross-roads auction for $847,500. It was also meticulously analyzed and measured by the Gibson Custom Shop prior to building

250 limited edition replica ‘Crossroads’ 335s in 2005.

Prior to Woodstock, who knew about Alvin Lee? Brit-ish rock fans, certainly, but Lee’s inspired performance of “I’m Goin’ Home” at Wood-stock elevated him to legend-

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ary status in the U.S overnight. Despite all of the guitar deities that had already emerged from England, few played with the intensity and speed of Alvin Lee wielding a ‘59 cherry red 335 covered in peace and love stickers. In so many ways, the ‘60s just rocked, and Alvin Lee was among the best. “Bluest Blues” is also a classic example of a 335 played through a Marshall.

Elvin Bishop must also be ac-knowledged as a fine purveyor of southern fried funk with his 335s. He played two ‘59 Stereo ES345s – “Brown Dog” and “Red Dog.” Dog!

Frank Zappa also played a couple of thinlines in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and if you ever saw Frank live, you know he was no slouch on guitar. Nor

was John McLaughlin, who played an ES-345 with a scalloped fingerboard inspired by his love affair with the Indian vina.

Keith plays a wicked black Custom…

While he has never been known as a par-ticularly burning soloist, Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues has exclusively

played his ‘59 335 throughout his career quite successfully, thank you very much, and as the entire Moody Blues catalog reveals, he is an excellent guitar player who possesses a brilliant ear for composing melodic hooks that support those Moody melodies.

Of course Robben Ford also played a vintage 335 early in his career, as did west coast blues legend Hollywood Fats… Speaking of Robben Ford, let’s not forget “Mr. 335” Larry Carlton, and Lee Ritenour (we’ll get to his excellent signature

335 in a minute…)

When asked what his favorite guitar was of all time, Warren Haynes said, “Well, I think my ‘61 335 would be my favorite over all, even though I don’t perform with it, except when I’m in New York.” You may

also see Warren Haynes playing various Historic 335s.

We shot this picture of Peter Stroud playing his ‘60s Trini Lopez 335 during a Don Hen-ley sound check at the Fox Theater in Atlanta…

The late Atlanta blues prodigy Sean Costello also played a couple of different ES-335s before he finally managed to

buy his vintage ‘56 goldtop. To be honest, we liked his tone best with a 335. And among today’s contemporary guitar he-roes, the North Mississippi Allstars’ Luther Dickinson seems to enjoy playing just about anything with frets, but you’ll often see him playing a 335, as he did recently opening for Robert Plant and the Band of Joy.

Let’s not forget the incom-parable Grant Green and his ES330…

And finally, we must men-tion the late Stephen Bruton, who passed away in 2010. Thanks to James Pennebaker and Danny Flowers we knew Stephen, and he was not only a brilliant musician, but an extraordinarily thoughtful

human being. Listen…

Growin’ up in Ft. Worth, when you’re playin’ joints down there you’re expected to be able to play Hank Williams and country music, west-ern swing, straight ahead blues, Jimmy

Reed… You were expected to play lots of different styles and have a pretty good grasp of your instrument. As far as gear goes, I always dug Gibsons, ‘cause if you had a Gibson, you had arrived. And as far as amps, there was always noth-ing but Fender amps. A great guitar player and friend of mine named Mike O’Neill swapped me a Gibson SG with a Telecaster pickup and a humbucker in it, but that didn’t suit me ‘cause the neck moved around too much. Then you start goin’ through all the instruments. I played a Telecaster for a long time until it got stolen, then I did the whole thing where I played everything from Alembics to archtops and 345’s, Les Pauls... I was making money and trying lots of different

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things. I always played Fender amps… I’ll tell you the truth, man – I bought a lot of Fender amps because they had wheels on them. I have a bad back, and when someone would ask me to try a Marshall stack I’d say, “What? Are you kidding?” I like Vibrolux Reverbs. I just think they are the most efficient Fender amp, because you can get a really good clean tone

and a great overdriven sound, and you can play it in clubs and in sessions. I’ve played a lot of Twins because they’re powerful and everything, but they have a real generic, one-dimensional sound for my taste. But that’s cool, too. Then pedals came along, and the first time I heard a phase shifter I thought that was it. But eventually you wean yourself off of all that stuff. You get a few assorted pedals that work for you over the years.

TQR: Did you ever settle on one guitar?

I wound up getting another Telecaster, which I played for a long time, but when I started playing with Bonnie, she wanted me to play a Stratocaster. I really like Strats, but I’m not all that comfortable with them. Because Fenders have such a super high and wide sonic spectrum, they just seemed a little thin, and it was kind of hurtin’ my ears. I always dug that humbucker sound, and I have an old 335 that I really like, and I got into PRS guitars in the late ‘80s. It’s all about what your personal preference is. I had a 345 that, for me, was com-pletely unusable, but it was exactly what they guy I traded with wanted, and his 335 was perfect for me. We both got what we wanted. I judge electric guitars sometimes by whether I can feel the notes resonating in my left hand. When that happens, you know that it’s transferring down the neck and not being stopped somewhere.

Black JujuSomewhere along the line inbetween college, working on the ditch crew for the Indianapolis Water Company and realizing

that nothing much was ever going to happen musically in the Hoosier state, we traded the 335 for a new ‘72 Les Paul Black Beauty and moved to Atlanta. Was that a great guitar? In hind-sight, no. The frets were ‘fretless wonders’ but we thought we needed a Les Paul, and before long we were paying our dues with it three sets a night, five nights a week in Underground

Atlanta in the house band at Sargent Peppers. Aside from pop-ping the gold pickup covers off, we played that guitar for years alternately through an Ampeg V4 rig, blackface Pro Reverb and a silverface Twin Reverb running up and down the club circuit in the southeast. Never thought of weighing it, but the ‘improved’ pancake body wasn’t a featherweight by any means, not that we would have noticed or cared. One night in Virginia Beach at the Jolly Roger, one of the nastiest, stinking shitholes you can imagine, the Black Beauty popped out of the strap, hit the wooden stage and bounced to a concrete floor three feet below with nothing but a hairline superficial crack along the binding at the nut to show for it. Tough guitar. Our fearless leader, guitarist John Avera, was fond of writing songs in open C tuning, which he would play on his vintage cherry red 355 with Bigsby. The sound of that guitar C-tuned always made the Les Paul sound timid and weak by comparison, and when John would rake a big mongrel minor chord out of C tuning and lean into the Bigsby pushing the wound strings ever lower, the entire room seemed to drop into Middle Earth, leaving an eternal echo reverberating in your head, and we can still hear it to this day. Open C (CGCGCE…) Mine it.

‘80s ES-ArtistOur next adventure with a Gibson ES model occurred in the early ‘80s when, during a moment of weakness buoyed with trade bait, cash and a Miami cocaine connection we were gob smacked by a new ES Artist sunburst hang-ing on the wall at Rhythm City in Atlanta. Beautifully, tastefully flamey with a gor-geous ‘fireburst’ finish, semi-hollow with no f-holes, TP6

tailpiece, ebony fingerboard, 5-piece maple neck, humbucking pickups and the now infamous Moog active electronics, the Artist’s striking beauty effectively disguised the failed science experiment lurking within. Rather than sounding like a big, juicy Gibson, the Artist more closely rendered the searing tone of the ‘72 Fender Thinline Tele we played during the ‘New Wave’ era when the Kinks’ Ray Davies actually made the cover of Time magazine. The Artist was an emotionally charged error in judgment that provided a valuable lesson we would never forget… There are no mistakes. Here’s what Tim Shaw had to say about the ES-Artist…

“Steve Howe used to say that you were a flick of a switch away from complete and utter disaster. That was a really dangerous guitar, man. If you hit the compression switch with the volume turned down, you were done. You couldn’t upgrade anything on that guitar, like the pickups, and we worked with the Moog people on that circuit. The compressor design was

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an early digital circuit that they were feeding into an analog configuration, and the signal wasn’t very happy about it. It was a fad that pretty well died, with the exception of some of the active electronics for bass.”

‘65 Sparkling Burgundy ES-335 Fast way forward to 1999, and just prior to launching TQR we made our first ‘vintage’ gear purchases since the early ‘80s – a 1966 Vibrolux Reverb with original Jensen 10s, and a ‘65 Bigsby-equipped sparkling burgundy ES-335. As a point of reference, we paid $1200 for the amp and $3,000 for the Gibson. In hindsight, we can refer to the ‘90s as the age of sanity on a host of different levels. Well, the amp was truly bitchin’ as you can imagine, and it was our review posted on Harmony Central that led to the creation of the ToneQuest Re-port. Within a few days of having written up the Vibrolux, we

began to receive e-mails from players in the U.S., Europe and Australia asking more questions about the amp. We were shocked by the response, but having just left the real world after 13 years in publishing, it seemed that we were being given a clue to a new career choice. The wisdom of launching a publication dedi-cated to the guitar without the benefit of advertising revenue remains debatable, but since our background was in subscriber-supported subscription publica-tions and we lacked the funds to launch a real ad-based magazine anyway, we did what we could given our experience and the funds available.

The sparkling burgundy 335 represented an obvious attempt to revisit the past, and it did not disappoint. We will always remember meeting James Pennebaker for the first time in Atlanta when he was backing up Lee Roy Parnell with his Gretsch Country Gentleman and Vox AC30. We brought the 335 with us and James played it on stage, uncorking some wicked Freddie King riffs that filled us with a surge of envy and admiration that remain to this day. James is one of the most talented, versatile and tasteful guitarists we have ever heard. When he was finished playing the 335 he simply said, “Why can’t they make pickups that sound like this anymore?” providing us with still another incentive to do what we do in these pages. We held on to the 335 for quite a while and enjoyed it immensely before finally turning it loose, reasoning that we really didn’t need to have that much money under the bed when we were obligated to replenish our gear stash with

new and interesting pieces for TQR.

‘97 Blonde Historic ES-335Our first meaningful experience with a Custom Shop ES-335 occurred in 2004 at Midtown Music, where a ‘97 blonde Historic ‘59 335 was hanging on the wall sporting a sobering

price tag of $3250. You know how this goes… You stand there staring at it. Looking the guitar up and down hang-ing on the wall, you flip the hang tag over and stare at the price thinking, “Can’t do it, shouldn’t do it, don’t really need to do it,” and then you ignore the voice of reason, gingerly lift the guitar off the hook and wander off to find a stool where you can be

seduced in privacy. Of course, unless the store has one of those isolated audition rooms like Guitar Center, there is no privacy, and the longer you sit there petting that new puppy, more cus-tomers amble by, stop, look at the guitar and mumble, “Man, that’s nice.” Just what you need to hear. Well, we figured out some kind of way to buy the Historic ‘59 through a combina-tion of a trade and cash now forgotten, brought it home and told our readers all about it. We also mentioned it to Greg Martin of the Kentucky Headhunters, who owns a vintage ‘59 335…

TQR: We have a Historic blonde dot neck 335 that just has a vibe, and so far we’ve left the original Gibson Classic ‘57 pickups in it. They sound great.

They’re not bad at all. If you watch the video for Cream’s farewell concert, I think that may have been some of the best tone Clapton ever had.

TQR: You mentioned that you also used your ‘59 335 in the studio recently. A 335 through a Marshall is an under-appreciated joy…

It’s pretty cool… I really do like the 335. You can’t quite get into the Billy Gibbons territory – almost, but it has a little more high end than the Les Paul. For some odd reason, my 335 captures the Michael Bloom-field “Super Sessions” vibe, and Mike played a Les Paul and Twin Reverb combination. My old 335 seems to cut more, and it sits well in the mix.

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The truth is, we didn’t trust anyone we knew at the time in Atlanta to pull the harness out of that Historic 335, and we weren’t mentally prepared to tackle it yet ourselves, so the ‘57 Classics remained, and yes, while the rhythm pickup lacked the level of treble presence and snap that we prefer, as modern humbuckers go, the bridge pickup was rich with a soulful treble quality that we find quite pleasing. JT Ribiloff was a key member of Gibson’s R&D team when the ‘57 Classic was developed in cooperation with Tom Holmes, and we’ve revis-ited our conversations with them for reasons that will become vividly clear soon enough. If you really want to understand what was happening with vintage PAF and early patent num-ber pickups, these two have done the heavy lifting…

JT Ribiloff“By the time I was 21 I had owned over 400 guitars. I’ve been a guitar freak since I was 14 years old, I’m 44 now, and I’m sure I’ve had over a 1,000 guitars. I grew up in south-ern California, so we had access to a lot of guitars and I’ve owned lots of vintage Les Pauls, SG’s, Specials and ES175’s. When we started to develop the ‘57 Classic, I had quite a few vintage pickups at my fingertips, and George Gruhn was very generous in that he would let us go in and pull guitars and hold on to them overnight so that we could find those that really had the ultimate tone. There were significant inconsis-tencies among all of those old instruments, because you have to remember that these factories existed primarily to make money, and the way to make money was to keep material and labor costs low and build as efficiently as possible. They were trying to use whatever was commercially available, but in the music industry, the quantities of usage are very, very low compared to the automobile industry, for example, and that’s where the inconsistencies in materials came in. The rod stock for the pole pieces in the PAF’s was basically low-carbon steel, and I had different pole pieces analyzed to find out what types of carbon compound and grade of steel they used, because that’s a big part of getting that authentic sound. They used plain enamel 42 gauge wire, and the very first PAF’s basically used the same magnets that were being used for the P90’s at the time. The magnets didn’t really change dimensionally until around 1961, but the magnet material in the early PAF’s did vary between Alnico II and Alnico IV.

The ‘57 Classic was spe-cifically aimed at making a “middle of the road” version

of the PAF pickup that would sound equally great played through a Fender reverb amp or a Marshall 100W Super Lead. The final testing came down to just playing the pickup through a variety of guitar bodies and amps. And it’s not just about how the pickup sounds, but also how it feels… At the same time the Classics were being developed, we were also trying to develop the Historic Les Paul, so we were listening to a lot of different vintage guitars. There were some vintage pickups that didn’t sound good at all, and it wasn’t so much due to the way they were originally made, but the way they had aged. Enamel wire becomes brittle with time, and as it gets brittle, you can get little breaks in it, and the pickup actually stops working on inductance and starts working on capacitance. Some pickups with these breaks can become warmer sounding, and others become really bright.

The final testing of the Classic took place in multiples of dif-ferent guitars because what I wanted was a good, rudimentary pickup that worked equally well in a broad range of instru-ments, and I’m sure that was the goal they had in mind when the original PAFs were designed. Any time I tried to duplicate the extremes that we heard in vintage pickups, one style of playing always seemed to suffer. A pickup that sounded particularly great through a Marshall amp for really aggres-sive kinds of rock music would sound way too dark through a Fender. Then, if you made the pickup sound super sweet, it would sound like a buzz saw ripping through your skull played through a really bright Marshall. Gibson had just started pot-ting pickups prior to the time we were working on the Classic, and they had never wax-potted pickups prior to 1988-89. For-tunately, at the time we were working on the Classics we were also going through a complete re-tooling, so all of the usual restraints and resistance to change had been removed.

There is so little to these things that what little there is does a lot. That’s my rule of thumb with pickups. If you change the type of steel you use for pole screws, you change the sound. Change the spacing of the pole pieces, or pot values, and you change the sound… What we tried to really do with the ‘57 Classic was to make them as close to the originals in terms of the material specifications as was physically possible. The actual grade of steel was specified from the original pickups, the #22 shielded wire was the same… The Classics are potted, even though the originals never were, but I haven’t noticed anything detrimental from potting, unless of course you were trying to create a counterfeit PAF. It was Tom Holmes and an engineer at Gibson named Ray Atwood who really helped me with the development and documenta-tion for the ‘57 Classic. I’m proud of the fact that when I left Gibson, I also left them with complete documentation on every aspect of the pickup. In fact, one of the stipulations made when we developed the Classic was that there were to be absolutely no deviations in the production of that pickup. I hope that is still true today.”

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Our experience with the ‘97 His-toric ‘59 ES-335 was instructive. The stop tailpiece produced a far more robust and penetrating attack and deeper, stron-ger sustain and resonance than the

late ‘60s models equipped with the trapeze tailpiece that had been used on the ES-330, and we began to remember why we had ultimately let our ‘67 go. Tastes change. We eventually sold the ‘97 Historic once again to acquire more gear for re-view in these pages, but it wasn’t long before we stumbled on another thinline that was too affordable to pass up. Nashville Historic 335s are rarely seen for sale today, and when you do find one, they are very expensive – no less than $3800, and usually more, since there seems to be a perception that guitars built in the Nashville Custom Shop are ‘better’ than those built in the Memphis Custom Shop. We’ll address that, too…

1982 ES-335 DOTIn 2004 it didn’t seem as if the secret was out quite yet on the early ‘80s ES-335 DOT reis-sue guitars built by Gibson in Nashville. That has since changed, and our original article on the 1982 335 we bought for review may have contributed to these excellent guitars now routinely selling for $2200 or more – still quite a bit less than a Nashville Custom Shop Historic, which seem overpriced due to the usual snob factor that perme-

ates certain segments of the used guitar market. You’ll find these early ‘80s 335s in blonde, sunburst, alpine white, and cherry red finishes, and our review of the ‘82 will give you more than enough motivation to go looking for your own…

We walked into Midtown Music to return a borrowed, handwired Fender ‘57 Twin and the first thing we saw as we walked through the door was a blonde 335 with amberhighlights leaning against the wall behind the counter. “Who’s that?” we asked. “Oh, that’s an ‘80s Dotneck...” “Are you setting it up for someone or did you take it in on a trade?” “It just came in on a trade...” (handing it over the counter). We hit one chord and promptly requested an overnight stay to really check out the guitar, and it isn’t coming back.

Gibson introduced the first reissue of the 1960 ES335 in late 1981 as the ES335DOT, and the serial number on the guitar we scored (#80622531) indicates that our 335 was built on the 62nd day of

1982, making it an early model. The mahogany neck is a 3-piece, and after 22 years it has remained dead straight and true, kinda in between a full ‘50s round shape and a slim ta-per. An old but very good refret looks as if it has been dressed one or twice, and we will be putting new frets on this guitar soon, documenting the refret for publication with George Goumas. But for now, the frets are still quite playable – just

a little low. The original tulip tuners had been replaced with an outstanding set of older Schallers, and they will remain, along with the original Schaller tune-o-ma-tic bridge (the cool and original Schaller nickel studs would have to be pulled to retrofit a differ-ent bridge). The nickel Schaller bridge is actually very well made, and we will continue to experiment between a lightweight

TonePros aluminum stop tailpiece and the heavier, original nickel-plated brass Schaller when we change strings. We’ve found that some hollowbody guitars seem to respond better to a heavier tailpiece... there are no rules! The original ‘82 Gib-son humbucking pickups (now referred to as collectable ‘Tim Shaws’) didn’t really leave us reeling, but they did motivate us to complete our first pickup replacement in a semi-hollow guitar with f-holes.

Getting the entire wiring harness out through the 2-inch space adjacent to the bridge pickup rout was easy enough, and solder-ing in the new Gibson ‘57 Clas-sics was a cinch,

but staring at the harness sitting on top of the guitar, it was hard to imagine how to snake everything back in so that the pots, input jack and toggle switch all lined up in the mounting holes. But like many things in life, the anticipation was far worse than the actual task, and after a couple of tentative half-starts we had the whole rig back together in no time.

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‘63 Historic

Peter Stroud playing the ‘82

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We chose Gibson ‘57 Classic pick-ups for several reasons – we had just played a 1996 Historic ‘59 reis-sue Les Paul with original ‘57s and it totally knocked us out, our 1997

Historic 335 with ‘57s was very impressive in every way (including the price), and the ‘57 Classics happen to have been originally designed by Tom Holmes and J.T. Ribiloff when they were employed by Gibson. Yes, that Tom Holmes... If you’re looking for righteous tone for your humbucking guitar and you’d rather not pay a premium for somebody’s latest ren-dition of a ‘PAF” (whatever that means), don’t ignore the ‘57s. They’re real good, as is our ‘82 ES335DOT. Every guitar is different, but this one sounds and looks like an old guitar that has grown better with time, it was built right, and it cost much less than a new reissue or a used Historic. We’re keeping ours for now, but we urge you to find one and enjoy optimizing it. There is nothing more rewarding than finding a relatively inexpensive guitar with priceless tone that is routinely passed over by collectors.

ES-333 The introduction of the ‘budget’ ES-333 built in Memphis in 2003 didn’t seem to make waves among the guitar aficio-nados who like to stay abreast of limited edition releases, but that’s OK – the 333 wasn’t built for them. The premise behind the ES-333 was straightforward and exceptionally clever… Build a raw 335 guitar to the original vintage specs as far as

the neck and body construction and materials were concerned, apply a nitro matte finish that didn’t require the additional labor of a gloss finish, forego a pickguard, pickup covers and pearl headstock inlay, use cheaper pickups, and add easy access to the wiring harness from the back for players who would inevitably wish to upgrade the electronics. We bought a 333 for review in 2003, upgraded it with CR Coils pickups and TonePros hardware, and everything we said then still stands. Today, used ES-333s commonly sell for $1100, and they are worth every penny. Here’s what we wrote in ‘03…

Whatzat, you ask? A very affordable and respectable ‘budget’ rendition of the classic ES335 that’s just begging to be person-alized? Yes, we are still pushing 33-something guitars. Why?

Because we’re just plain tired of going to shows and finding the same two food groups represented (Lesters and Strats, with an occasional Tele.) A guitarist without a semi-hollow-body is like an artist without a tube of blue paint. Here’s what you need to know about the 333…

Along with the standard Gib-son reissue 335’s, the ES333 is built in Memphis with the identical specs, tooling, and materials used for the reissue 335, including maple/poplar/maple ply body, mahogany neck, and nickel plated ABR1 bridge and stop tail. However, the 333 is equipped with the cheaper 490R and 498T Alnico humbuckers rather than ‘57

Classics, it has no pickguard, and the very thin nitro finish consists of a faded cherry stain, two clear coats of lacquer and a tinted satin top coat. And there is access to the wiring harness through a small plastic cover on the back! Give the man that dreamed that up a raise. We love this guitar for a lot

of reasons: It looks cool – more like an old guitar than a new piece of furniture – it’s built right (we compared the 333 to a vintage ‘62 335 and the construction of the maple center block and long neck tenon were very similar), and with that thin finish, the 333 really sings. Of course, we made a few improvements, beginning with the pickups… TQR board member Don Butler (Toneman) turned us

on to Jim Wagner and CR Coils. We settled on his Crossroads humbucker set, and they were outstanding — open, airy, smooth, balanced and very Creamy.

Optimizing the ES-333In addition to the Crossroads humbuckers, we replaced the stoptail and ABR1 bridge with TonePros hardware. As we’ve described in the past, the stud caps on the super-lightweight, nickel plated aluminum TonePros tailpiece can be screwed down, locking the tailpiece firmly in place and preventing it from pivoting on the studs under string tension.

This design significantly improves sustain by transmitting

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more string vibration to the body of the guitar. The TonePros ABR1-style bridge can also be locked down on the posts with two Allen screws. Once your bridge height is set, it will stay set during string changes, and as Dan Erlewine observed in his September ‘03 interview, the TonePros bridge saddles are precision-machined for a tighter, smoother, longer travel.

The fretwork on our new 333 was passable, but we wanted a larger fret profile with a higher

crown. Brian McDaniel refretted the 333 with Stew-Mac #154 fret wire and the result was a significant improvement in overall playability, sustain and easier string bending. We also replaced the stock ceramic disc tone caps with Jensen (Denmark) copper foil/paper in oil caps – a .022 for the bridge and .015 for the neck pickup. For now, the best source we could find for these caps was Angela Instruments (and now RS Guitarworks).

If you’re interested in acquiring and customizing a 335-style semi-hollowbody guitar (and nothing sounds or sustains quite the same) for comparatively light dough, you deserve to check out the ES-333. This model was only built from 2003-2005, but there are plenty in circulation, often in barely-played, as new condition.

Gibson ES-330We also bought a vintage ‘66 ES-330 in 2005, reviewed in the now infamous June ‘05 ‘Jimbo’ issue. If you’re jonesing for a vintage ES model, the 330 remains your least expensive option in 2011.

While the Gibson ES330 and ES335 may look similar, theyare very different. Both deliver a tone and vibe that are exception-ally unique and desirable, but our focus is on Jimbo

Mathus’ main squeeze in the studio – the vintage ES330. We bought a ‘66 330 on eBay in exceptional condition for under $2000. If the seller had started the auction at less than his minimum selling price it probably would have sold for much more. eBay people like to play the game and bid stuff up, and they tend to ignore auctions that start at the minimum price

the seller will accept, even though half a dozen bidders may have exceeded that price by the end of the auction if it had started lower. Our cherry 330 was in outstanding condition – very lightweight at 6 lbs. with lots of fine finish checking typical for its age and no structural cracks, breaks, repairs or gruesome dings. Only the pickguard had been replaced with a proper replica along with the original plastic saddles (why did they ever use those in the first place?) The chrome covered P90’s were strong and untarnished, and the guitar sounded fantastic, with all the hollow acoustic woodiness that is so characteristic of the fully-hollow ES330, and it played extremely well. The original frets had been dressed at least once, and although they were wide and a little low, we didn’t feel compelled to immediately send the guitar off to be refret-ted. Even the nut was original and in good shape. For a 40 year old guitar, the 330 was in remarkably good condition and definitely delivered the goods.

The ES330 often gets shoved to the lower rung of the ‘ES’ hierarchy be-cause of its shorter neck (full-length models wereonly introduced in 1969) and feedback at high

volume due to the absence of a center block. Our 330 was quite happy plugged into any of our vintage Fender amps, and we were able to produce plenty of overdriven, bluesy tones with no howling feedback simply by paying attention to our physical orientation to the amp. Of course, should you want to generatea little wooo-wooo you can do that, too, just by lean-ing into the speaker a bit. Various band-aids have been used tocut down feedback and howling in fully-hollow electrics,including foam stuffed into the body, covering the f-holes with thin sheets of plastic film, and installing sound posts similar to those used in violins, violas and cellos. We tend to agree with Joe Glaser’s observation that if you are really driven to neuter your hollow body, you’re probably just playing the wrong guitar. The ES330 has a very distinctive, woody voice that lacks the punch and sustain of a 335, yet it produces a lush, organic acoustic tone that is deeper than the 335, and that’s the best reason to play one.

Nashville Custom Shop CS-356We’ve seen lots of Gibson 336 and 356 guitars at various guitar shows and during our frequent visits to the GibsonCustom Shop in Nashville, but it wasn’t until a next-to-new356 was traded in at Midtown Music that we finally had anopportunity to really party with one, and it was a good party, indeed.

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At first glance, you might assume that the CS356 is simply ascaled-down version of an ES335, but this guitar is

entirely different by design. The body dimensions are smaller —13 3/4”x 16”x 1 11/16” for the CS356 compared to 16”x 19” x 1 3/4” for a standard ES-335, but the CS is also built in a completely different fashion and with radically differentmaterials than the vintage 335, starting with the top. The fig-ured maple top on the CS356 is solid maple rather thanplywood, and the back, sides and center block are carved from a solid piece of mahogany. Add a one-piece, 22-fret mahogany neck, stop tailpiece or optional Bigsby, and you get some mighty good wood, brilliantly designed, well-built, comfort-ably light in weight, and eminently suitable for just about any musical style. With gold hardware and the distinctive ‘custom’ peghead inlay, a ‘stinger’ on the back of the peghead running down the neck and triple neck and body binding, the quilted 356 was a little more dressed up than we are accustomed to, but on this guitar it’s a good look. \

The ‘57 Classic Gibson humbucking pickups in the 356 predictably produce very warm, clear, clean tones in all three positions, and they can also push the front end of an amp into a very sweet and balanced overdriven tone. They aren’t ‘hot’ pickups with the snappy treble or higher output of the Burstbuckers, but they seem to be extremely well-suited for this style of guitar. The CS356 sounds just like it’s built; the hollow body tone is there, but it’s a more solid and anchored sound than a typical semi-hollow body

guitar with a center block. Purists may prefer to continue lean-ing into a wide body 335, but for those of you with an itch to try something beyond the mainstream, these innovative guitars definitely deserve your attention.

The Gibson Johnny A SignatureThe Gibson Custom Shop doesn’t keep a lot of completed guitars sitting around, and there were no Johnny A’s in pro-

duction at the time this article was being developed, so we prevailed upon Willcutt Guitars and they promptly sent us a Johnny A for review.

If there is one word that can describe the ‘A’, it’s stylish, in a very old school style, yet still unique when viewed against the backdrop of the entire Gibson heritage. We like it a lot, as the look seems to have been inspired to some extent by a vintage Barney Kessel, Trini Lopez and a Les Paul, with none of the funky quirkiness of a Barney/Lopez. Even

more significant are the practical design features that evolved from Johnny’s wish to maintain the hollow character and comfort of his ES295, and the solidbody prowess of his Les Pauls when a song calls for ballsy sustain. The ‘A’ can range between the classic, clean, hollow humbucker tones needed for jazz and swing tunes, and it can also be pushed into subtle, bluesy tones with just the right hint of girth and dirt, or all-out screaming sustain. The ‘A’ was specifically designed to avoid being a one-trick pony, and nearly every stylistic variation on the electric guitar can be authentically explored with it. The key contributing factors to this uncommon versatility are the solid mahogany back and sides carved from a single block of wood and joined to a solid maple top, which creates a much

more stable and controllable hollow body electric guitar tone than the typical ‘ES’ design that has historically uti-lized plywood construction with or without

a center block. The ‘A’ is also laid out by design to provide easy and constant access to the Bigsby and the entire length of the 25.5” scale length neck. As described, the toggle switch can be moved with a flick of the pinky, literally between notes. This is also a very light and comfortable guitar at 6.8 pounds, very well balanced, with none of the dive-bomb tendencies of a Les Paul teetering on your lap. Even in the absence of a traditional center block, the thinline-style hollow body produces a great acoustic tone without robbing the gui-

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13

tar of sustain or causing squealing feedback at higher volume levels.

The neck profile can best be described as similar to a ‘60s ES335 – not nearly as clubby as a typical ‘50s neck shape, but slightly more rounded than an early ‘60s thin-taper or the flatter Les Paul Classic neck shape. The fret wire feels similar to medium jumbo Dunlop 6105 with plenty of crown, and the fret ends extend over the fingerboard binding rather than beneath it – a good

move. We were also pleased to find that the ‘A’ did not exhibit any string binding and telltale creaks at the saddles or the nut. We sometimes find new Gibson guitars to be plagued with nut slots that bind the strings during tuning until they have been tweaked with a fine needle file, and if you choose to use anything larger than a .010-.048 set, you’ll need to re-work the nut slots.

The ‘57 Classics remain among our favorite humbuck-ing pickups, and the more variations on humbuckers we hear, the more we like them. At $198 a pair, they are priced far lower than typi-

cal “designer” pickups, and they are well-suited for all types of music. As much as we admire and enjoy the work of builders like Jason Lollar, Jim Wagner at CR Coils, Holmes and Rolph, the ‘57 Classics continue to earn “classic” status. They are

warm and rich, exception-ally well-balanced with a very musical top end char-acter. Driven to extremes through a great amp they produce thoroughly pleas-ing harmonics, all of which serve to remind us that you don’t always have to lay out a thick stash of cash to get the tone you crave.

Although we aren’t big fans of gold-plated hardware,

the workmanship and detail on our review guitar was really phenomenal from top to bottom. The sole negative we can offer is that the ‘A’ may simply be too pretty and flashy for some players who would otherwise really dig this guitar. Per-haps Gibson and Johnny A will consider an optional model offered with nickel hardware and a slightly less flashy, toned-down look that would match up better with a t-shirt, jeans and a wallet chain, ya’ll. We do believe they would sell well. In all respects, the ‘A’ earns an A, and we urge those of you who can appreciate an extraordinarily versatile and exceptionally well-built ES-style guitar to check them out. This is one “sig-nature” model that truly earns its name. (Note: A ‘standard’ version with nickel hardware was subsequently added to the line after this review was originally published, although we aren’t taking credit for it).

Lee Ritenour Signature ES-335And now we arrive at a crossroads in our review of ES-3 series guitars… the Memphis Custom Shop, just sixty miles north of the original crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.

Every once in a while, through nothing more than

chance fueled by optimism and curiosity, we discover a guitar that sets a new benchmark for the kind of deeply resonant vibaciousness we all crave, yet is never guaranteed at any price. You immediately know when you’re playing a guitar that has ‘it’ – a unique vocal quality richly endowed with a distinct character that seems to complete you. When we find one of those guitars, it is a good day indeed, and we are forever spoiled by it.

In 2008 the Gibson Custom Shop in Memphis shipped two signature Lee Ritenour ES-335s to Midtown Music in Atlanta, and we were on top of them immediately. A cursory strum in the store prompted extended sessions with both guitars, until we finally chose one to take home over the weekend. We’ll get straight to the point… Both of these guitars were oddly, strangely, inexplicably, overwhelmingly good – lightweight at around eight pounds and remarkably resonant with tremendous sustain. The basic construction was that of a vintage-correct 335, with a 1-piece mahogany neck, maple center block and

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rosewood fingerboard with a 12” radius, medium frets and a stop tailpiece. “Ritneour’ touches in-cluded a me-

dium elliptical neck profile,1 11/16” wide low-friction graphite nut, aged nickel hardware and Grover tuners, VOS trans cherry nitro lacquer, and the guitar was shipped with installed strap locks. The pickups were ‘57 Classics. To this day we can’t explain what made those two guitars so special, but they were, and we’ve never forgotten them. The aged cherry finish was the best we have ever seen, the neck was a perfect transitional shape falling between the bigger ‘50s necks and the slim taper, and both guitars sounded, played and looked extraordinarily fine.

Fifty Ritenour ‘relics’ were built in 2008 selling for $5,200, and one hundred VOS Custom Shop models like those we played at $3,200. If cherry red is you, and you happen to see one for sale, ya might just want to pull the trigger.

The 50th Anniversary 2008 Custom Shop ‘58 ES-335

As the theme for this issue was gradually revealed to us, we real-ized that we would need to find a centerpiece that would provide a proper climax for our celebra-tion of the ES thinline guitars. The funny thing is, so many different variations all of the clas-sic guitar designs have been produced by now that without the help of the Gruhn Guide and the Internet, it is impossible to fully comprehend all the models that have

been produced by a single maker. If anything, we humans are a remarkably prolific and industrious bunch…

Personal preference plays a significant role in the process as well. If we are going to spend several thousand dollars on a guitar that we can freely customize (and you can’t do that with a new loaner), we’d prefer to buy something we will enjoy

owning and playing. So all we knew for certain prior to be-ginning our search was that we wanted a guitar that was spe-cial and relatively unique, but not odd or quirky – something that would embody everything we (and you, perhaps) could possibly desire in a 335. As so often happens in the Quest for tone, having successfully found just such an instrument, an interesting and unanticipated back story emerged.

After several days of study and research, we bought a lightly used 50th Anniversary 2008 Custom Shop ‘58 ES-335 on eBay for $2750. Two days later another one sold for $3300, so we felt pretty good about having successfully made an offer below the seller’s listed price of $3250. A limited run of two hundred ‘58s were built in ‘08, and that was that. We could no longer find the original Gibson web page for the ‘58, although pages for the ‘59 and ‘60 50th Anniversary Custom Shop models remain from 2009 and 2010. Features on the ‘58 include a VOS sunburst finish, aged binding, a truly huge and perfectly rounded mahogany neck, lightweight alumi-num nickel plated stop tailpiece and ABR-1 bridge, standard Custom Shop vintage Kluson tuners, Bumble Bee replica tone caps, CTS 500K pots and ‘57 Classic pickups. The frets on our guitar were also dressed on the Plek machine at the Mem-phis Custom Shop. Let’s linger there for a moment and reflect on why a ‘Pleked’ guitar might appeal to you…

We have no way of knowing how many of you re-ally understand what the Plek machine does and why it’s important, but with companies like Gibson, C.F. Martin, Suhr, G&L and Due-

senberg among others now using Plek machines in production as well as independent repair shops like Joe Glaser and Gary Brawer, understanding what the Plek does is important. Joe Glaser was the first to embrace the Plek in the U.S, Gibson was the first major manufacturer to install them, and Joe has been involved in the initial training and installation for all new Plek users in the U.S. His explanation of how the Plek machine works is fascinating, informative, and in our opinion, essential, because you really can feel and hear the difference in a properly Pleked fretboard…

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Joe Glaser — Plek

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“The Plek is a computerized tool that scans an instrument strung to pitch, generating graphic views of the fret plane, fret heights, fret shape and placement, fingerboard relief radius, humps and bumps – basically everything you always wanted to see well but couldn’t. Within an extremely accurate map of the neck on the computer monitor, the operator creates a virtual fret dress incorporating any individual real world preferences, then the strings are moved aside and the Plek does that dress, applying complex relief calculations to the particular action and string gauges on that guitar, accurate to a resolution of .00005 in.

TQR: And has it been accepted well by your customers in Nashville?

People like the work that it does a lot. They were initially pretty afraid of the machine because the process costs more, and it does cost a little more, but not a lot. People do talk about their guitars sounding better, which surprised me. I suppose that’s because it puts a consistent, equal center on the frets and it allows maximum clean attack everywhere, given their action. And you hear

those two things, as well as feel them. People say fret dressing is an art, right? But to me, the Plek machine is like a guitar tuner. Today, I can’t imagine living without a guitar tuner, and now I can’t imagine not being able to see what’s really going on with the neck. It’s not like sighting down the neck from either end and trying to see past the optical illusions to where the high spots are, or playing it and figuring out where the high and low spots are and what problems are due to string quality. It’s like discovering a major tool family, just like with calipers when I first began using them. Even though manual fret dressing is an art, I can do a virtual fret dress with the Plek and account for every possible consideration – whether or not I want any particular compound radius further up the neck because a player bends and likes low action, or if I want lower frets in the first position to keep a hard grip in tune while leav-ing higher frets up the neck for vibrato… All of those things that I have always taken into account when I hand dress frets are still done, but once the parameters are programmed into the Plek, I’m turning the actual work over to the most accurate and consistent employee in the shop, or in the entire the U.S., for that matter. It’s not like I plan to do my best fret dress and execute it pretty well, because life is tricky. With this tool, it is executed perfectly. That’s the result of technology gone right,

to say nothing about the benefit of doing the hyper-accurate analysis scans with the neck at full string tension. It has powerful viewing capability. You can look at a graph or topo map of anything. Its like X-ray to a broken bone. Goodbye to the witch doctor. A difference of .003 of an inch is a night and day difference in playability, but that’s a typical tolerance. Now we hold a tenth of that or even less and do it in an ideal relief. That’s important, too. The master-level guesswork is gone. The neck jig was a great idea, but you can’t hold a neck in place with the kind of tolerance that can make or break a great fret job, nor fight the bizarre contours that occur when string tension is released. The Plek measures each fret relative to the fingerboard, then when the strings are pushed aside, it levels and shapes them perfectly regardless of the effect of the tension release. The only similar effect that I’ve ever seen is that device that Ken Parker has that truly simulates string tension as the frets are dressed and polished. But not everyone is a genius.

You get different learn-ing skills from people. Part of the whole thing with Plek is that we’ve learned not only about the technology but how people use the technol-ogy. Gary Brawer uses his Plek Machine very differently than I do, which is kind of cool. It was initially thought of as this robotic machine where you strap in your guitar and it comes out

finished, but in reality peoples’ philosophy about fret work very much colors what happens. So early on we thought about how these machines could proliferate, which led us to think about manufacturers. When I first met the guys from Plek, they had been to a NAMM show and all the manufactur-ers had come by and just chuckled… At that time the machine ran an hour to an hour and forty minutes for each guitar, and we realized that the only way these machines would be ap-propriate for manufacturers is if they were capable of running much faster, so we began working on that. You could do about six guitars a day and we asked ourselves, “Who really needed the quality improvement?” Ultimately we learned that if you show the player what can be achieved, eventually that comes back to the company, which is what happened with Gibson. People on the Les Paul Forum began talking about the Plek, and eventually Gibson made the decision to install one. We had figured out that if we were able to get the capacity of the machine to 12 minutes per guitar for cutting the frets, the nut slot and the nut top, it would work for Gibson, and that’s what we did.

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TQR: So they could run 30-40 guitars a day in theory…

Yes, but they sometimes run more, and all the data on each guitar is stored. Matthew Klein at Gibson is a very sharp guy and a very good problem solver in engineering, and the

one thing he realized the first day we were scanning guitars was that the first fret was always high and there was this kind of scoop beginning at the nut. The machine is like a forensic tool that enables you to identify problems on the production line. One thing that they saw is that the fingerboards weren’t exactly a symmetrical 12” radius. So the Plek is really useful for doing R&D on how the necks are being put together. You can literally see a fingerprint of whatever is affecting a neck in manufacturing, and I was impressed by how Gibson took that information and proactively took steps to improve everything they possibly could.

TQR: Did you set up the first Plek at Gibson for specific models?

Matthew and the guys at the Custom Shop built this beautiful tooling to hold the guitars in the machine and with the excep-tion of the Jimmy Page model, the parameters were set for a specific fret height. We also scanned a lot of guitars for them so they could understand what was possible. Another benefit of the Plek is that you don’t have your best people dressing frets all day.

TQR: How long was the training process?

We worked with Matthew and Jeff in the Custom Shop for four days, and they both totally got it right away.

TQR: Well, for those who own a Gibson that wasn’t Pleked, it’s still always possible to get your guitar Pleked by someone, and influence the final result by choosing specific fret wire, action, etc.

Right, so there is a slight advantage to an after-market Plek dress. We ask people what they want, and one of the typical things we do for some people is dress a little lower on the bass position – not distorting the fret surface, but tipping it slightly. The personal choices are almost endless.

TQR: Well, let’s say that a guitar Pleked at Gibson is dressed for a set of .010-.046 roundwound strings, you buy it, and immediately install a set of .011s or .009s. Doesn’t that negate the benefits of the Plek dress?

Not really. You can raise the bridge or tighten the truss rod a bit but regardless, it is so much better having been Plekked. If you take a fin-ished Plek-dressed guitar and then re-enter the data with a different string gauge, the difference is slight. We con-figure the relief algorithm based on string gauge, but all of the benefits of the Plek remain. It’s so much better… The other thing about it is, you can’t guarantee that

someone won’t leave their guitar in a hot car and the neck will get whacked, or that you’ll have a problem from simply a bad piece of wood. I had a Martin guitar here for its third Plek dress and looking at the history, you can see the pattern of fret wear, but the neck had otherwise remained very, very stable. Then you have necks that just aren’t stable, and never will be.

TQR: What do you say in that instance?

I’m a huge believer in full disclosure. We try to be nice about it, because people want to love their guitars… If you’re a pediatrician, you’re inevitably gonna see an ugly kid, but there is no advantage to putting it that way. If we look at something and it’s not stable, some people care and others don’t. If they do, we might ask them to bring it back in six months. If it’s a bolt-on maybe they can replace it, but we don’t want people to feel bad about their instruments necessarily. With manufactur-ers and small OEMs, it’s a win/win even if what we see makes them introduce changes in how they operate right away. Plus, I suppose that fretwork can be mindlessly therapeutic but at some point you want to move on to other things…

TQR: It is increasingly difficult to find people that do good fret work, if you can find someone that does it at all. Did you know that?

Well, I know that very few people do good fret work…

TQR: Working with manufacturers must be tremendously fun and rewarding for you, though…

It’s hugely fun… the most fun thing because I get to relate to them at a level where you can watch their eyes open as they realize the potential of the Plek. The Plek costs over $100,000 US, so you see people trying to talk themselves into it, out of it… But the fact is, there is really just no point in people doing fret work anymore given the fact that the Plek can consistently exceed the work of your best fret dresser on his or her best day, every day.

interview

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We could have left the Gibson ‘57 Classic pickups in the ‘58 335 and felt no great remorse, but we had a an excellent set of unpotted Holmes in our desk drawer that we have used as a benchmark whenever we wanted a little extra bite, so in they would go. Way back in the ‘70s Tom Holmes was being hounded by George Gruhn to figure out why the PAF pickups sounded so good (or modern humbuckers didn’t), way before there was any such thing as an aftermarket, ‘custom’ alterna-tive, and we thought you might enjoy being reminded of Tom’s story, as it is not likely to be repeated… “I’ve built guitars for years, going back to the early ‘70s, but my first real exposure came from the Bo Diddley and the Cadillac guitars I built for Billy Gibbons. Vintage Guitar published a nice article on those years ago, but I’ve never advertised since I began building humbucking pickups. From 1989-90 I worked as a consultant for Gibson, basically setting up their coil-winding operation and getting the pickup thing going for them, and I built a lot of machines in their electron-ics division. Then I went over to the Nashville plant and built the tooling that cuts the tenon joint for the Les Pauls and arch-top guitars – anything where they needed help building hard tooling, because I was a guitar builder and a toolmaker.

When I first came to Nashville, I did all of the electrical re-pairs for George Gruhn, and George kept pounding me about why the old pickups sounded so much better than the new ones. He was trying to bounce this off of me and I was going around to the magnet companies asking them what they were making back in the ‘50s – what had changed? So I approached it from a pure study of procuring the raw material and looking at the die changes, to why the cover got out of shape and the pickups didn’t really look like PAF’s anymore. One of the things that varied a lot in this industry was wire size. People don’t realize that there is about a mile of wire

on a pickup, and it wasn’t uncommon for #42 gauge wire to vary slightly. If you got a batch of #42 gauge wire that was slightly larger, you couldn’t put 5,000 or 6,000 turns of wire on a bobbin. By the same token, if you got a slightly smaller lot of #42 gauge you could easily go beyond 6,000 turns. I’m sure the girls at Gibson went a little crazy with the variation in the wire they were supplied with in the old days. I think they just wound them until they were full, and if the coils looked like they were getting too full, they just backed off the number of turns.

All the vintage PAF pickups I’ve seen were made with AlNiCo II or IV, and this was confirmed in the archives that were shown to me at the magnet companies. That’s what was being bought at the time, and I think it had more to do with the purchasing agents getting the best prices. It had nothing to do with tone. AlNiCo II is just a name, and II from one plant is not the same as II from another. When they had 900 people pumping out guitars in Kalamazoo, I don’t think they were talking about whether to use II or IV. They were looking for price and delivery.

I use #42 gauge plain enamel wire and AlNiCo II, and we all have access to the same raw mate-rial, but

two pickups built from identical material by different people can sound very different, and I attribute that to craftsman-ship. I build everything by hand and each coil is wound by hand. I have an expensive winding machine here, but it’s never been used because people really want hand-wound pickups. It’s a slower method of doing it, but you can go into a pickup factory and these people waste wire like you wouldn’t believe because they’re trying to do it too quickly. One of the biggest problems they have is with their tension-ing devices – they get the wire on too loose or too tight, and it’s a constant hassle. When you hand-wind or scatter-wind, the more you wind, the better you get, and the tension on the bobbin is right; you start to work and understand the relation-ship between the wire, your hands and that bobbin. Every pickup has its own resonant frequency, and if it supports the frequencies that people like to hear, then you’re lucky. If it supports those that we’d prefer not to hear, then you’re unlucky, and there’s definitely some luck involved. For me, it involved years of trial and error and a lot of hard work that began in 1971.”

review

Trial & Error…Trial & Error…


We don’t spend time lurking in chat rooms, but in researching the 50th Anniversary 335 and the construction features of vin-tage and modern 335s in general, we noted some interesting perceptions expressed in forum threads that neither reflect re-ality or make guitar buying any easier. For example, there are people who believe that a guitar built with modern adhesives won’t sound as good as a vintage guitar assembled with hide glue. Or you could say that an old guitar built with hide glue will sound better… The theory is that hide glue dries to a hard, crystalline form that allows string vibrations to freely pass through it, while Titebond and other modern glues impede or stop resonant vibrations wherever they are used (such as in a neck joint, or in joining a fingerboard and neck). We do know of one custom builder who will build a guitar using hide glue for an extra $600… OK, we’ve heard this theory before, but does it imply that the presence of hide glue insures that every guitar built with it will sound extraordinarily fine? You may have heard how Kim LaFleur at Historic Makeovers routinely replaces the fingerboard on Historic Les Pauls with Brazilian rosewood while also removing the modern plastic truss rod ‘condom’ and re-setting the truss rod in bees’ wax circa 1959. Same question seems to apply there as well. Can bees wax and Brazilian consistently turn a frog into a prince? We also read posts in which the actual plywood construction used in vintage 335s was debated with much speculation on the use of maple/birch/spruce/mahogany/poplar/basswood, etc.) as well as a suggestion that the composition of the phenolic resins used in the ‘50s and ‘60s to bond the veneers in the top, back and rims of 335s would produce a superior ‘vintage’ tone compared to whatever is being used today.

Well, if such details actually can consis-tently produce the sound of a ‘magical’ vintage instrument that far surpasses the tone of a modern guitar, perhaps we should also examine the composition of the ‘nickel-silver fret wire used in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the alloys used in guitar strings made in the ‘50s and ‘60s versus today, not

to mention the wire used to assemble wiring harnesses past and present, (oh, yeah, you can buy ‘vintage’ wiring harnesses

all day long), or the alloys used to make truss rods, bridges, tailpieces and tuners. And there is the great finish debate… Must nitrocellulose lacquer be used to insure the best tone? Is the nitro made today the same as the nitro made in 1958? Is it applied in the same way? Do you remember the Defelsko Positector? It’s a device that employs ultrasound technology to measure finish thickness in mils (.001 inches), and as our August ‘05 article pointed out, Gibson has used these devices since 1995 at different factory locations to measure the thickness of their finishes. Prior to that, they would lift the finish off a guitar with heat and measure it with calipers. We acquired a Positector to measure the finish thickness of dozens of new and vintage guitars at Midtown Music. Each guitar was measured at two points on the top of the body below the bridge and near an upper bout, and at a single point on the back, and we were careful not to select any measuring points on vintage guitars or relics where the finish was visibly worn. The last column in our table rep-resents the measurements taken from the back. All measure-ments are shown in mils (.001 inch).

Positector 200 Guitar Finish Thickness Readings30’s Gibson A4 Mandolin 2.8 2.3 3.11945 Martin 000-18 2.5 2.4 2.060’s Guild Starfire 3.0 2.4 3.663 Vintage Esquire Custom 2.3 5.2 4.299 Jerry Jones 6-string 1.8 4.2 2.382 Gibson Dot RI 335 4.0 5.5 5.11940 Epiphone Broadway 3.9 6.9 5.405 Relic Telecaster 3.9 6.0 4.805 ‘56 Relic Strat 5.1 6.9 6.094 Historic Les Paul Custom 5.9 6.8 5.452 Gibson J45 nitro refin 5.9 7.3 8.105 Martin D18V 6.2 6.7 5.605 Relic Telecaster Custom 6.2 6.5 7.705 Gretsch DuoJet 6.5 6.6 4.004 Epiphone Elitist 335 6.6 8.2 6.205 Relic Nocaster 6.6 8.2 6.805 Relic ‘62 Strat 7.0 6.1 6.405 Martin HD28V 7.7 8.8 7.062 Strat nitro refin 7.7 6.5 6.995 Historic RI ‘58 Les Paul 7.3 6.2 7.102 ‘54 Goldtop Les Paul 7.8 6.6 3.091 30th Anniversary SG 9.2 9.4 8.405 Custom Shop ‘65 Strat 9.7 10.7 10.889 Custom Shop Les Paul 10.0 8.4 8.101 PRS McCarty Burst 10.6 10.4 11.504 Nash TQ Telecaster 10.6 8.3 9.4Terry C. McInturff Monarch 10.0 10.4 11.505 Fender Masterbuilt Strat 11.1 10.9 12.301 ‘57 Goldtop Les Paul 11.3 12.4 12.7Fender Japan Tele (90’s) 12.0 13.9 10.4

guitars

The Quest for ‘Vintage Tone’The Quest for ‘Vintage Tone’


05 Fender Masterbuilt Strat 14.4 12.7 13.163 Vintage Firebird VII refin 15.1 15.8 19.201 DeArmond M75T 21.3 18.1 17.305 USA ‘62 Strat 26.7 21.4 24.804 Robert Cray Strat/Mexico 37.7 31.7 27.1

Conclusions? The numbers speak for themselves with a few interesting surprises, but it is clear that a lot less finish was left on older instruments. Time = money.

Something else we noticed as we entered key word searches and referenced discussions related to Custom Shop 335 guitars on the web is a latent love/hate relation-ship with big guitar companies. Entire web sites and forums are dedicated to gui-tars made by Gibson, yet some people can’t seem to resist inevitably suggest-

ing that Gibson doesn’t make a sincere effort to build faithful recreations of vintage models, nor can the company be trusted to provide accurate information on the construction features of specific vintage guitars and modern reissues. Interesting, because we have met and interviewed people at Gibson past and present who have meticulously analyzed vintage examples of all the classic Gibson models as part of the Custom Shop and Historic program. Billy Gibbon’s Pearly Gates was put un-der the microscope not too long ago, and some extraordinary guitars were built as a result. Chasing vintage construction specifications at Gibson is nothing new, although it can be ar-gued that the pursuit of vintage tone is still a work in progress as far as pickups are concerned.

Tim Shaw was consumed by a desire to get back to the old ways of building guitars at Gibson in the early ‘80s, although his hands were tied to some extent at the time compared to what the Gibson Custom Shop can do today…

TQR: Speaking of pickups, Tim, what was really going on with Gibson humbuckers and the entire PAF mys-tique?

“By today’s standards, the early Gibson humbucking pickupswere all over the place in terms of the number of turns on thecoils, the resistance, and their tone. Some people like thewarmer tone of the original early humbuckers that were built

with AlNiCo II magnets and plain enamel wire, but later onthey went to AlNiCo V magnets and poly-coated wire thatmade them sound a lot brighter, and some people like thatsound. But there was never any conscious attempt throughoutthe evolution of the humbucker to retain the sound of theoriginal pickup. When I first developed the reissue of the PAFin the early ‘80s, I could use the original AlNiCo II magnets,but not the enamel wire, because it cost a buck or two moreper-pound. We were buying tons of that stuff, but don’t forgetthat while we were doing a lot of this R&D work in the early‘80s, the company was hovering on going down the tubes.”

JT Ribiloff previously referenced the early ‘90s as a time in which the Gibson began to take a much closer look at vintage Les Pauls prior to developing the Historic program, and we featured extensive interviews with Historic Program Manager Edwin Wilson and Tom Murphy in our April 2003 issue devoted to the Gibson Custom Art & Historic operation in Nashville. They pulled no punches in honestly describing what had been involved in getting a big company like Gibson to change. It’s never easy, but clearly, they succeeded. We also spoke with Mike Voltz as we were developing this issue. Mike is the product manager for the ES-3 series Custom Shop guitars in Memphis. Prior to joining Gibson in 1984 he attended the Roberto Venn School of Lutherie and worked for Shot Jackson and George Gruhn doing repairs and restorations

in Nashville. These people are all passionate ‘guitar guys’ with deep experience in guitar building and an equally deep understanding of ‘vintage’ Gibson guitars. And by the way, the same can be said for Fender.

The amusing aspect of such obsessive/compulsive speculation and analysis found on the Web is that more often than not we find that the old methods

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and materials that were used to build the classic archetypes were subject to change based on available supplies, price, and the need to meet production quotas. Yes, vintage Gibson guitars were usually built to a higher standard, but consistency in tone and ‘mojo’ wasn’t one of them, as evidenced by the random nature of vintage pickups alone. And no, those old pickups didn’t all sound identical when they were new. We re-call reading about Warren Haynes having been presented with two identical ‘61 ES-335s – one described as being really clean and the other as sounding really good. Which guitar do you think he bought? Any assumption that guitars made from wood can be built to a consistent and repeatable outcome with no variation in sound is a noble goal, but a practical impos-sibility. Furthermore, any attempts to ‘optimize’ or make a modern guitar more ‘vintage correct’ will be limited to a great degree by the fundamental character of the neck and body you started with. Happy and unhappy accidents abound in equal measure. In our experience, pickup swaps produce the most significant results in optimizing the tone of a guitar, followed by tone caps, tailpieces and bridges. Bigger frets and bigger strings can also introduce a mind-altering change in volume, depth, presence and attitude. Worrying about the type of glue that was used to build your guitar? There is some wicked irony in spending a fortune on a vintage ‘hide glue’ guitar that will be too valuable to be taken out of the house and played. On the other hand, if we spent five or six figures on a vintage guitar, we wouldn’t want to entertain the thought that a mod-ern version could possibly sound as good or better.

We played the 50th Anniversary ‘58 335 as received with a new set of Pyramid strings for a couple of days just to get the original sound set in our mind. Weighing 8.4 pounds, the ‘58 represents a medium weight based on the actual measured weight of selected vintage 335s that ranged from 7.5 to 9 pounds. For more information see Tom Hollyer’s excellent site dedicated to the ES-3-series vintage guitars at www.es-335.net.

Given the consider-able mass of the maple center block that extends

from end-to-end in the 335, the weight of the block seems to be the most likely source of random weight variation, with the 1-piece mahogany neck also contributing to those variances.

Again, no one in Kalamazoo would have ever thought to sort maple center blocks by weight… McCarty no doubt chose maple for its stability, hardness, density, price and availability. Whatever he was thinking, the structural design of the ES-335 was a brilliant stroke of genius…

Kerfed spruce boards are glued to the top and back of the maple block to achieve a solid bond with

the curved laminated top and back, and in vintage models a mahogany end block was glued between the end of the maple block and the bottom rim. Inside the body, kerfing made of Spanish cedar is used to support the top, back and rims where they are joined. Much of the original tooling from Kalamazoo remains in use in Memphis, like the press used to form the laminated and arched top and back in the Es-3 series guitars. The original specification for the laminations in the 335 was 3-plies consisting of maple, poplar or basswood, and maple, although there are vintage examples in which four plies of maple were used. The thin veneers supplied to Gibson to construct the ES 3-series guitars are actually ‘peeled’ from entire logs. The two outer maple plies measure fifty thou-sandths of an inch, and the middle ply of poplar or basswood one hundred thousandths. If the factory periodically ran short of poplar or basswood veneer, they would have just doubled up with four veneers of maple at fifty thousandths to meet the required thickness of 200 thousandths for the presses and kept on rolling. All the 3-series ES models made in Memphis are also built with the vintage-correct long neck tenon. This is another ‘vintage’ feature that gets a lot of attention, not unlike true bypass in effects pedals. As a point of interest, the ‘82 ES-335 we bought was built with a long neck tenon as well. When viewing the neck tenon beneath the neck pickup, you’ll see a small gap between the mortise and tenon that can also be seen in vintage Gibsons. We noted with interest that someone had filled in the gap in our guitar with glue and wood shavings,

which we had never seen before.

The uncommonly huge neck on our 50th Anniversary ‘58 certainly was no accident – you just don’t make an

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Thinking Inside the BoxThinking Inside the Box

‘58 Neck tenon

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‘accident’ of those proportions, and while the girth of the neck definitely contributes to enhanced resonance and sustain, if bigger necks aren’t your thing we sug-gest you consider a ‘59 or ‘60 Custom Shop Anniversary 335, as the neck shapes will reflect the gradually smaller profile found during those years. We love ours, however, and the action and feel of the fretboard is flawless with perfect intonation and absolutely no fret buzz or compromises in playability. The ES-335 Fat Neck model was also introduced by the Gibson Custom Shop in 2008. As the Gibson info sheet states: “For players who prefer a larger,

heavier neck with a rounded profile for any reason – playing technique, larger hands, resonant characteristics, or just a true vintage look and feel – this historic reissue is the perfect instrument.” We’re betting this is the same profile on the ‘58.

Here’s a very cool find… Roy Bowen at RS Guitarworks found a small supply of new old stock nickel ‘Posi-lock’ strap but-

tons used from 1981-1985 by Gibson. As you can see, they completely eliminate the need for strap-locks. We had an original set on our old ‘82 ES-335 and why they aren’t made by someone today escapes us. Roy is selling them on eBay as of June, but they aren’t listed on the RS site.

The Indian rosewood fingerboard on our ‘58 is an excep-tional slab of oily fig-ured wood. One of the things we

have sometimes not liked in Memphis ES-335s we have seen over the years are dry rosewood fingerboards with an odd, light color and grain that just doesn’t look right and seems to repel lemon oil, remaining dry and unappealing. Fingerboards are a real make or break issue with us. Call us rosewood snobs

if you wish, but if the rosewood is funky, we pass.

We elected to keep the stock, lightweight aluminum tailpiece, since this guitar didn’t seem to ‘need’ the additional bottom and mids that a heavier stop tailpiece usually provides, nor did we feel that new tuners were needed. If they had needed replacement, we would have used TonePros Kluson TPK33-N vintage-style tuners available from WD Music Products, among other sources.

We selected the Holmes pickups for the 335 because they had already been installed in at least half a dozen different Les Pauls over the past two years and we knew what they could do. Tom Holmes stamps and plates his own nickel-silver covers, and if you request ‘aged’ covers as we do, he simply doesn’t plate them. Not only does the thickness of a humbuck-ing cover affect the tone, but the thickness of the plating can significantly change the sound as well. This was first noted by Seth Lover when he developed the PAF, and he has been quoted as having warned Gibson not to use heavy plating on the original PAF covers.

We felt that the higher output of the 455 bridge pickup (8.3K ohm) would work best with a semi-acoustic guitar. This is a matter of taste, but in our experience the open acoustic sound of the 335 seems to benefit from a bridge pickup with slightly higher output. Holmes’ 450 rhythm pickup typically measures a little low, at 7.3K. It’s interest-ing to note that we’ve heard

more than one veteran with experience repairing and dissect-ing original PAFs comment that many of the ‘double cream’ versions of the PAF they have seen measured higher in resis-tance (above 8K), and an inordinate number of them seem to have been installed in 3-series thinline models. This is surely mere coincidence, due perhaps to more 3-series guitars being built at the same time Gibson’s supplier was unable to ship black bobbins in the late ‘50s, but the correlation between cream bobbins and higher resistance and output is interest-

ing…

The one drawback with a 335 is that pickup swaps are no longer so easily

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21TONEQUEST REPORT V.12 N.9-10 July-August 2011

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accomplished. You can do ‘em, certainly, but unless you’re experienced and have assembled some cheater tools like those used in the factory, it’s a time consuming bitch. We felt fully prepared to install the Holmes and new tone caps, but reposi-tioning the tone pot for the neck pickup was a challenge. The tone cap is soldered on top of the CTS pot, and should you leave any space whatsoever between the capacitor and the pot, getting it repositioned beneath the mounting hole in the top will test your patience. They don’t spare any solder in fixing the braided pickup ground wires to the pots, either. Even using our Hakko at full power with a heat sink, we worried about cooking the volume pots as we heated the thick mass of original solder to remove the ‘57 Classic pickup leads. Fortu-nately, the ‘58 was built with the post-’61 center block design with a 2-inch space cut in the block below the bridge pickup rout in the top. Prior to ‘61, the pickup leads were snaked through two tiny channels drilled in the block, requiring the harness to be pulled and reinserted through the lower f-hole. The Vari-tone stereo wiring eventually required more room, resulting in a cut being made in the block.

In the process of optimizing the ‘58 we experienced another stroke of luck that must be mentioned as well,

compliments of Mr. Valco, aka Terry Dobbs. Southern Indiana is often referred to as ‘God’s Country’ (yes we’ve said that before, but we know places there where you would just bow your head and agree), and all kinds unexpected surprises await those who possess the presence of mind to simply pay attention (lose the f’ing cell phone). ‘Country’ Hoosiers are by necessity a practical and frugal bunch whose skills include the art of growing garden vegetables in quantities sufficient to feed their families and neighbors for an entire summer, while city folk would be dead from starvation within a month without access to a debit card and a grocery store. Old-fashioned swap meets also remain popular in rural Indiana, so when some old joker spreads out a bunch of new old stock vacuum tubes and capacitors on a camp table at a rural swap meet, fair deals will be made – for cash, maybe, or a bushel of home grown tomaters and sweet corn, apple butter, cider, or a freezer full of grass-fed beef and venison sausage. The

currency of the realm in Bean Blossom, Indiana is ‘Whatcha got?’ Mr. Valco had scored

some new old stock capacitors, and he kindly sent us a small bag with typical ‘guitar’ values of .022 and .015 mf. We were particularly intrigued with a couple of vintage Cornell-Dubilier .015 ‘Dwarf Tiger’ caps, which would be the smaller cousin to the original ‘Gray Tigers’ found in ‘50s goldtops. We could tell just by looking at them that something good was about to happen, and we installed both for the rhythm pickups in our ‘57 goldtop and the 335. People, people, people… Now, please don’t pester Mr. Valco, ‘cause whatever’s left he ain’t sellin’, but should you be capable of finding any ‘Dwarf Tigers’ at .015mf, we urge you to stick ‘em in the neck position of every humbucking or P90 guitar you’ve got. Hearing the little Dwarves on the neck pickup is a transforma-tive experience as the plain strings suddenly display amazing treble presence and snap, as if you had walked over to your amp and zeroed the bass while turning the treble on 10. The problem with that is when you jump to the bridge pickup you have to reset the controls on your amp again. If you want the usual muted sound of a neck humbucker, just roll the tone control back, but for vintage rock and blues, the Dwarf Tigers are insanely good.

We couldn’t be happier with the 50th Anniver-sary ‘58 335, and it is by far the most lively and responsive 335 we have ever owned. The big mahogany neck, maple block and body generate intense reso-nance and sustain in response to chords, and the acoustic tone is rich with vivid harmonic overtones. Plugged into our vintage Fender amps, the 335 possess-es the woody and vocal

acoustic character that is so unique to the 335 – bluesy and expressive in a style that mimics the human voice so beauti-fully played clean. At higher volume levels where the Holmes humbuckers can push our amps into breakup, the sharp attack and sustaining qualities of the 335 design create an animated singing tone that has no equal. The bridge pickup provides

The Dwarf TigerThe Dwarf Tiger

components

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a perfect balance of musical treble, robust upper mids and lush harmonics. The neck and bridge combined produce a more hollow character with a little quack available on solos with the neck pickup volume backed off, and the neck pickup with that Dwarf Tiger is simply the best we have ever heard – bright, anxious and urgent on the plain strings, deep, solid and threatening in the bass frequencies for rock and blues, or smooth and seductive played at lower volume levels with a softer attack. The 335 offers an entirely unique and essential dimension in the tone of an electric guitar, reminding us again why we have come back to them so often over the years. This guitar plays like a dream, the tones are a mile wide and deep, and in every way it meets and exceeds our expectations for a Gibson Custom Shop guitar. The Memphis Custom Shop also got the appearance details right, from the VOS sunburst fin-ish, aged binding, mahogany stain on the rims, neck and back, and the long pickguard. Best of all, as the original Gibson ad proclaimed, the Thinline just ‘feels right.’ We hope the journey we have taken together in this edition of the Quest will result in you discovering the joys of playing a 335-style guitar your-self, if you haven’t already. Quest forth…

ResourcesFor a video tour of the Memphis Custom Shop: www.gibson.com/_microsite/electricspanish/memphisVids02.html

Need a Plek treatment? Joe Glaser, Nashville, TN1-615-298-1139, [email protected]

Excellent Larry Carlton lessons can be found on Youtube titled “Larry Carlton - 335 Improv”

Recommended Shuggie Otis 335 tracks on Youtube include “Slow Goonbash Blues”, “Shuggies’ Boogie”, “Me and My Woman” and “Sweet Thang.”

See “Cream Farewell Concert 1968” on Youtube (51 minutes)

For information on vintage 335s and great pix see: www.es-335.net

We realize that some of you may already own a comely ES-thinline, or perhaps you don’t and won’t for some perfectly good reason unknown to us… That’s fine, and for you we’ve added a lagniappe that in many ways is every bit the sonic equal of a great 335, but in this case one that thoroughly

captures the classic liquid tones of Leo Fender’s Jazzmaster, which is kinda the polar opposite of a big 335, in’t it?

We also dedicated nearly an entire issue to the Jazzmaster in February 2007, and for good reason. Yeah, the tremolo and bridge assembly were not the best, but the tones certainly

were and remain so if you’re fond of the full fidelity of the Ful-lerton sound at its finest. The Jazzmaster doesn’t quite sound like a Tele or a Strat, but there is a lot of both lurking in those big pickups, along with a signature tone that is just bigger, wetter, sweeter and more organically orgasmic, and that’s why we love to love the Jazzmaster. Roy Bowen and his partner Scott Leedy at RS Guitarworks like ‘em, too, so they set out to see if they couldn’t create their own unique design with a nod to the original Jazzmaster minus some of the quirks, and a few unique touches of their own. Listen…

“As much as I love the Jazzmaster from owning over thirty of them, I’ve never bonded with the rocker bridge and trem and it was the single reason Scott and I had not built one. Taurus Corporation (our distributor in Japan) asked us if we would build some Jazzmaster-inspired guitars with the RS twist to them, so from that came the Surfmaster ‘57 (a fictional ‘what if ’ ash with maple neck version) the Surfmaster ‘61 and the Surfmaster HT. The HT was our spin on what a hardtail Jazzmaster would have been like and we really love how it

turned out.

The pickups are basi-cally Lindy Fralin’s standard vintage Jazzmaster set, but with a slightly underwound neck and weakened Alnico V magnets. I love them because they really capture the sound of the best vintage Jazzmasters I’ve owned, but with better detail.

The bridge used on the HT is made right here

RS Guitarworks Surfmaster HTRS Guitarworks Surfmaster HT

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TQ

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in central Kentucky just for us and it’s a variation of the bridge we use on our SolarFlair guitar. We call it a ‘Sustainmaster’ bridge and it’s machined out of a solid billet of 7075 alumi-num for the best transfer of string vibration into the body. We offer the ‘61 and 57 models with roller bridges and a modified traditional Jazzmaster Trem, but we wanted the HT to be a solid guitar without all the bugs that come along with the vin-tage guitars. Like all RS guitars, the Surfmasters are built to order and sold direct here in the US, so the customer can pick any vintage color (from just about any company) and many custom colors and sparkle finishes. Neck shape can also be chosen from four other standard shapes we offer. The radius can be ordered in 10” (standard), 7.25” or 12” with any fret size (6105 is standard) as long as they are not stainless. The HT retails for $2695, the ‘57 and ‘61 retail for $2795, but our direct price is slightly less running in the $2200-$2400 range.

Review Imagine sliding into the deep end of a shimmering cool blue pool and that’s what we experienced playing the ice blue me-tallic Surfmaster through our ‘66 Deluxe Reverb. We love the Surfmaster, and especially for what it does beyond the realm of typical ‘surf’ guitar tones.

Of course the contoured alder hardtail body fits like no other whether you are standing or sitting, and at 7.2 pounds the Surfmas-ter exacts no tolls on the torso. The neck and fin-gerboard are a work of art with a perfectly rounded shape that is larger than a vintage Jazzmaster neck, with taller frets, and a dark rosewood slab that feels and plays like a custom-built guitar should, and far better than any Jazzmaster

we’ve ever played. They nailed the neck.

We also really like the simple hardtail bridge and 3-barrel saddles, the single toggle switch, volume and tone controls. Nothing fussy or unnecessary. Oh, and they couldn’t resist placing a 2-position slider tone switch on the upper horn – down for ‘normal’ and up for treble roll-off that makes the Surfmaster sound kinda like an old Harmony Bobcat. Call it the ‘cheap guitar switch.’ You can milk some very interesting bluesy stuff there, and especially with a fuzz or overdrive for 1965 garage band tone. It’s actually very cool.

The Fralin Jazzmaster pickups are ridiculously sick, which

doesn’t surprise us because we know Lindy Fralin and he is a huge fan of Fender clean tones. The bridge pickup is bright, but not in the metallic micro-phonic style of a Tele, or thin and piercing like many Strat bridge pick-ups. There is some seri-ous depth and clarity in the Surfmaster bridge, and when you combine it with the under-wound neck pickup, game over (as in “Wicked

Game.”) No other guitar sounds quite like this, except this one switched to the neck pickup. The clarity, fidelity and depth of the neck pickup is stunning, so lush, reedy and defined that you can almost hear the wrap on the wound strings vibrating in concert with the shimmering, quivering treble overtones on top. The Surfmaster beautifully claims its own space in panoramic wide-glide high fidelity, perfectly crafted and con-ceived, versatile beyond words with a big, woody, translucent hardtail voice that will never be mistaken for another guitar. Yes, Jimi, we shall hear surf music again… Surf’s up, ya’ll…

www.rsguitarworks.net, 1-859-737-5300

It’s been five years and change since we first spoke with founder Mike Robinson about the evolu-tion of myrareguitars.com and Eastwood guitars for our February 2006 cover story. Since then Eastwood guitars has expanded well beyond Robinson’s original vision of produc-ing reproductions of rare guitars that are “better than the originals.” An ob-session with ‘wacky’ Japa-nese models that could be bought for $100-$300 ten years ago evolved

TQ

guitars

Eastwood GuitarsREVIEW

Eastwood Guitars

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to include Mosrites, Valco Airline models, Ovation Ultra-GPs, designs by Univox and Tokai, Supros, and obscure ‘60s guitars from Europe like the rare Wandre. Today, Eastwood remains a successful and vibrant manufacturing and distribu-tion operation based in Toronto, and we asked Mike Robinson to comment on the remarkable growth of his company…

TQR: Your catalog of different guitar models has grown quite a bit since we last spoke six years ago. Are the guitars still being built by the original factory, and what changes or enhancements have you made in design and manufacturing? What should play-ers who may be unfamiliar with your guitars know about the quality of construction and components?

Yes, our catalog has grown significantly since then – we now have over 50 different models, each in 3 or 4 colors – back then we had about 15 models. In the very early years, most of our budget models were made in a Chinese factory. As we added the Airline brand to the Eastwood stable, we migrated most of these to a high-end boutique Korean factory to ensure a consistent quality. Today, the bulk of our top selling models are still being produced in the same Korean factory.

These days most Ko-rean guitar factories are producing very high quality guitars and continue to im-prove year after year. However, some guitar brands are migrating production to China in order to cut costs, while we seem to be moving in the opposite

direction. I’ve found that it is all about relationships with the manufacturer. We have built a solid working rapport with our Korean engineers and this is paying off with consistently out-standing product reviews. We continue to expand production and each year introduce some new models – some of which are produced from alternate factories in China and Indonesia, but the design and quality control for these projects are still man-aged by our engineering team in Canada and overseen by our Korean factory. They have full responsibility for the production and final quality assurance for all production facilities.

Over the years we have also continued to take steps to keep ahead of the technological curve. Quality components such as Bigsby licensed tremolos and custom made Airline pickups are found in the full range of guitars. We recently started shipping our Airline ’59 Custom series with TonePros bridges, Wilkinson tuners and other minor upgrades that keep our guitars at a professional level.

TQR: Do you feel that you have managed to cover all the retro designs that first inspired you to create Eastwood, or are there more ahead?

You might be surprised to see how long the list of guitars is on my “to-do” list. Even if we did five new models every year, I’d never get through this list in my lifetime! Many of our new models come from recommendations from our employees and customers; they understand the style and vibe of Eastwood. When researching new models, there are always three basic hurdles that need to be achieved before we consider moving forward. First, is it possible from a trademark and patent point of view? This hurdle shuts down most ideas in the early stages. If we get past that step, I look at the value of the original ver-sion we are trying to replicate. If we cannot bring to market a better guitar at half the cost, then we will not proceed. As many of the originals still sell for under $1,000, why would someone pay almost as much for a replica? Thirdly, I then look at the market potential. This is a gut feel procedure, but after 20 years of www.myrareguitars.com and www.eastwoodguitars.com, I would like to think I’m getting pretty good at this.

We have been expanding our existing range in other ways, taking our top selling models and finding ways to take them up a notch. Rather than just make a cool replica, we’ve found that a lot of professional players are starting to take notice of the brand – not just for its cool replica value, but for its profes-sional design and playabil-ity. For example, last fall Randy Bachman contacted us to share his ideas about

his Airline Tuxedo guitar. He loved the guitar, but offered a few ideas to make it even better. So this spring we introduced the Tux Deluxe which incorporated Randy’s upgrades – a zero fret, headstock binding, upgraded tailpiece and a unique coil tap in the P-90 pickups. So now we have something that has taken the cool retro look of a late 50’s guitar, but made it much better than the original could ever have been. We also released the Warren Ellis Signature Tenor guitar this year. It was ridiculous-ly successful. Who would have thought? Not me, but as a music fan and long time follower of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, I had to follow my gut and go with Warren’s idea. It has opened up a whole new group of players/customers to our brand and I plan to continue looking for new opportunities like this.

TQR: Which models are the most popular, and do you have any particular favorites?

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Historically, the Airline 2P and the Classic series have been the most popular. Our initial suc-cess with the Airline brand was certainly helped along

with the popularity of The White Stripes. That little 2 pickup red Airline model just flew off the shelves from 2003-2008. It still does, as we upgraded it to the ’59 Custom, adding some nice cosmetic touches – rubber body binding, vintage style chrome switch plate and we also add the Airline Vintage Voiced Single Coil pickups. Jack White might have helped kick start it, but the guitar now stands on its own and will continue to be one of our top sellers.

The Classic series of 6 and 12 string models have always done well. Perhaps because of the “poor man’s Gretsch” appeal, but with many bands using these guitars, I think it holds it own with any semi-hollow body guitar under $1,000, and ours is under $500! The Classic 4 Bass is also a hot selling model. Simple design, short scale semi-hollow bass is really a 60’s retro hit and is by far our top selling bass.

More recently, the Airline MAP and the Tuxedo have moved up into the top five ranking. Both of them are finding homes with professional players. I think this is because they are com-pletely unique in a player’s arsenal. The MAP has somewhat of a Les Paul feel, but a zero-fret gives the neck an incredibly comfortable touch and the balance of the guitar is quite re-markable. It is perhaps the most comfortable guitar we make, and the tone is monstrous. It continues to get great reviews. The other interesting thing about the Airline MAP is you can see it being used professionally in country bands, rock bands, shredder bands, and even out on tour with Lady Gaga.

The Tuxedo – which is my personal favorite – is the one I am most proud of. It is like nothing else out there. It is a full hollow body guitar but without f-holes. It is much smaller than most hollow body guitars, so it quite comfortable. It has P-90’s which is rare in a full hollow body guitar, and with this design you can have the most exotic controlled feedback I have ever found in any guitar. This is why this guitar is so suc-cessful because it is like nothing else you have and when you play it, you begin to realize how versatile it can be compared to all the other guitars you might own.

TQR: What have been the most significant challenges and surprises that have come with the growth and suc-cess of Eastwood?

There have been many challenges along the way, but surpris-ingly none too big to discourage me in any way. Of course with all the successful models, we have had a few duds. It is inevitable. I look at these duds as “one day collector items”, but that is perhaps overly optimistic. There are a few models out there where we made small initial runs – less than 48 pieces – and then they were cut from the lineup right away. So perhaps in 40 years someone might wonder, “What the hell is this Eastwood guitar? When was it made? How many? I wonder if it is worth anything.” Who knows? All I know is that I’ve kept one of everything, so hopefully my son Troy will hang on to them when I’m gone!

I very pleased with the way things have gone for us here at Eastwood. Even with the 2008 credit crunch – which was as painful for us as everyone else – we have managed to continue to grow the brand and introduce our cool stuff to new custom-ers every day. At the heart of it though is one thing - it is still so much fun to be doing this. I like the direct contact with customers, artists and bands. It’s always been about the music for me. I listen to music 90% of my waking hours (except on the golf course, my other passion) and it is constantly inspir-ing me to grow this business. I remember thinking back in my early 20’s that this whole “rock ‘n roll” obsession would surely wear off as I grew older. I was wrong. Thirty years later I still get excited about seeing a live band, meeting pro players and just being involved in this industry. We all feel this way at Eastwood – although many of us have different tastes, it’s still all about the music – it happens that the business affords us the ability to stay in the sandbox.

Airline Map Memories of

our first electric, a ‘64 National Westwood (the cheaper single pickup model) came to life when we opened the case for the Eastwood Airline MAP., which true to Mike Robinson’s vision, does indeed seem better than an original. The

Eastwood MAP is designed to honor the top-of-the-line dual pickup ‘62 National Newport, and while these Korean-made guitars neither feel or look cheap, bargains they are. As usual, we noted the buzz-free, low factory setup and promptly raised

guitars

27

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the action, which, as usual, enhanced the acoustic volume unplugged and allowed us to get under the strings a bit and also break out a slide in G. Low action is so overrated… The 7.85 pound Airline MAP is built to a standard that feels and looks comparable to a contemporary Gretsch from the Terada factory. Available in seafoam green, red, black and white, the nicely contoured Airline body is chambered mahogany with a bound, bolt-on maple neck, rosewood fingerboard with block inlays, 24 3/4” scale and 1 11/16” nut. The pickups are described as Alnico ‘Hot-10’ humbuckers with a 3-way switch, dual volume and single tone controls. The bridge is a licensed Bigsby tremolo with roller bridge, tuners are nickel/chrome Grover style. Price $799.00 US.

Airline TuxedoThe $799.00 Tuxedo pays tribute to the original mid ‘50s Barney Kessel sold as both Airline and Kay models. Fully hollow with a maple top and back with ma-hogany sides, the Tuxedo weighs just 6.75 pounds and feels

extraordinarily comfortable and familiar straight out of the case like few other guitars we have played. Like the Airline Map, the neck is bound maple with a rosewood fingerboard and block markers with a longer 25 1/2” scale. The Tuxedo features two ‘Custom Hi-Output’ P90s, dual volume and single tone con-trols, tune-o-matic bridge, a trapeze tailpiece and vintage-style open back tuners. In all respects the Tuxedo is a dynamite little classic with a look that is just too cool, right down to the funky trapeze that extends nearly to the bridge. Both Airlines feature moderately slim necks, and were we to wish for any changes, we’d ask for a slightly chunkier neck shape.

ToneWell, well, well… If you should happen to be one of those finicky guitarists who turn their nose up at anything from Korea other than Bulgogi or Kimchi, it’s time to get your mind right, because passing up these Airlines would be wrong-headed on all counts. Yes, there was a time when Asian guitars were plagued with horrible pickups, but these Eastwood Air-

lines are not among them. The guitars and the pickups rock.

Like our old National, we feasted off the neck pickup in par-ticular on the Map guitar. Measuring 8.13K, it’s a huge sound-ing beast with surprising clarity, and when you move your pick attack closer to the bridge at the front edge of the pickup, the Alnico humbucker jumps with a solid dose of treble presence and bite. The combined middle setting is equally satisfying for a great rhythm chunk tone. The bridge pickup measures a whopping 13K and sounds more like a single coil than the usual humbucker, with strong treble presence and a reedy vocal tone that is quite unique – sharp in a good way and anything but shy. Further reflection led us to conclude that it is similar to the sound of an old ‘60s humbucker found on National guitars and lapsteels, but with stronger output and a more aggressive tone that is bolder, more confident and stri-dent than the old pickups ever were. Our sole complaint with the Airline Map is the rather stiff feel and narrow range of the Bigsby – you really have to lean on it to get a good wobble. Otherwise, the Airline Map works for us in every way. It’s a great $800 guitar that won’t languish in the case.

The Tuxedo is a phenomenal instrument for blues, rootsy toneful music, slide and anything else short of metal and high gain rock. The better your ears and chops, the more likely you are to love it. We immediately cranked the bridge much higher than the original setup, the guitar came to life and we can say with confidence that you probably haven’t heard a guitar quite like this. The lightweight maple and mahogany closed hollow body really produces a unique acoustic-electric tone – loose and jangly on the top, deep and vocal on the bottom. The stout 8.72K neck and 8.56K bridge P90s add focus, defini-tion and upper midrange overtones that create a captivating soundstage, buoyed with a hollow acoustic dynamic sag that

spills over into subtle harmonic feedback at higher volume levels.

We love both of these unique and exception-ally cool guitars. They are extremely well built and easy-playing, with tones that deftly marry the benefits of modern quality control and con-sistency with the musi-cal mystery of ‘vintage cheap’ at its very best. Quest forth…

www.eastwood guitars.com

www.myrareguitars.com416-294-6165

guitars

TQ


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EDITORIAL BOARD

The ToneQuest Report™ (ISSN 1525-3392) is published monthly by Mountainview Publishing LLC, P.O. Box 717 Decatur, GA. 30031-0717, 1-877-MAX-TONE, email: [email protected]. Periodicals Postage Paid at Decatur, GA and At Additional Mailing Offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to:TheToneQuest Report™, PO Box 717, Decatur, GA. 30031-0717.The annual subscription fee for The ToneQuest Report™ is $89 per year for 12 monthly issues. International subscribers please add US $40. Please remit payment in U.S. funds only. VISA, MasterCard and American Express accepted. The ToneQuest Report™ is published solely for the benefit of its subscribers. Copyright © 2011 by Mountainview Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced in any form or incorporated into any information retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright holder. Please forward all sub-scription requests, comments, questions and other inquiries to the above address or contact the publisher at [email protected]. Opinions expressed in The ToneQuest Report™ are not necessarily those of this publication.Mention of specific products, services or technical advice does not constitute an endorsement. Readers are advised to exercise extreme caution in handling electronic devices and musical instruments.

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