Black Beauty

[sk8rat]

17 hours ago, Rembetis said:

Out of curiosity, when roughly do you think that this occurred?

edit: I thought you said how. the original p.a.f. pickup was replaced in 1972 with a t-top after the orginal crapped out after their tour in australia. the t-top was replaced with a custom wound seymour duncan in the 90's.

11 hours ago, babysquid said:

There is a reason why the original 57 to 60 Les Paul's are so sought after (and why Gibson's custom shop tries to reproduce them) and that is because for the most part they were excellent guitars. 

they are more sought after because of the folklore than anything. look at all the useless stuff people collect and pay way more for simply because its old and has some sort of historical attachment.  from guns to instruments and a lot of the time they either dont work or are rarely used. everyone wants to be like famous rock stars and what is a better way than to buy the same exact guitar their heros used?

sure these instruments were well built but just because it was built over 50 years ago doesn't mean that something cant be built just as good if not better. some '59 les pauls are duds but people are still willing to pay a ton of money for them regardless of how good they play and sound.

a lot of these people who praise ''59 les pauls are just parakeets who mimic what they have always been told. two of jimmy page's main guitars were a danelectro and a norlin era les paul, guitars most guitar snobs would laugh at someone for owning. a guitar can only get you so far, you have to know how to use it too.

what gibson does in the custom shop is more on par with how they were built back in those days, hence why adjusted for inflation the prices are about the same. the normal runs guitars are mass produced so obviously there are going to be some quality control issues with them from time to time.

[sk8rat]

21 hours ago, sixpense said:

It is an opinion.

The myth that vintage guitars are way better quality does not always turn out that way. They made average/bad guitars back then too. The thought that the aging of wood adds to the tone of the guitar is subjective. You could say that about a Stradivarius violin which is much older than the Gibson in this tread. The advancements is electronics (pickups and wiring) cannot be ignored. The technology for producing various types of pickups has grown in leaps and bounds since the 50's. And Yes, I do believe they do produce very good "P.A.F" pickups today. 

When Jimmy's treble pickup crapped out in his #1 Les Paul he didn't replace it with a vintage P.A.F. He replaced it with a Seymour Duncan.

The value of this guitar to Jimmy by far is a sentimental one, not that he didn't have a guitar with THE sound of the original.

he replaced it with a gibson t-top then replaced the t-top with a custom wound seymour duncan, not just one off the rack.  last I heard he still has the original pickup and someone was working on getting it fixed but that was quite some time ago.

also he replaced the neck pickup with a vintage 60's p.a.f. sometime in the early 2000's. I think that goes to show that even jimmy thinks that there was something special about the early seth lover p.a.f.'s.

[Dirty Work]

So the last IMO credible source said it has been located? If true, I doubt he'd ever find a guitar stolen then unless he's been looking for it for some time.

 

As far as the post about snobs and Les Pauls, there are two types of Paul owners, players and Les Paul fans who can play and afford a collection of Gibsons if they want one. I know in my experience, it was the playing part that sold me on a 2000-something Les Paul Standard. Was in the market for an electric, went to a few stores and Guitar center and played everything they'd let me, including the double neck , and to me the Les Pauls felt like the most playable and best sounding of any guitar played by a long shot. 10 times better than my 2nd favorite, some fancy semi-hollow Telecaster with a humbucker. Its just like its the right sports car. The right surfboard. The right woman. I'll never be a snob about Gibson Les Pauls, they're all butter to me.  To be fair, haven't played more than a handful classics, and was lucky enough to be invited to a classic shop open mic that had new reproductions and originals on the walls and you could take your pick (still thank my lucky stars for that day) but the old ones had the same high standard, as far as how well they were made. Definitely the Porche or Corvette of guitars, the best by far. All Gibson Les Paul Standards new and old were great! 

[Reggie29]

6 minutes ago, Dirty Work said:

So the last IMO credible source said it has been located? If true, I doubt he'd ever find a guitar stolen then unless he's been looking for it for some time.

Page had been looking for it for 46 years.

[Ed A]

5 hours ago, sk8rat said:

edit: I thought you said how. the original p.a.f. pickup was replaced in 1972 with a t-top after the orginal crapped out after their tour in australia. the t-top was replaced with a custom wound seymour duncan in the 90's.

they are more sought after because of the folklore than anything. look at all the useless stuff people collect and pay way more for simply because its old and has some sort of historical attachment.  from guns to instruments and a lot of the time they either dont work or are rarely used. everyone wants to be like famous rock stars and what is a better way than to buy the same exact guitar their heros used?

sure these instruments were well built but just because it was built over 50 years ago doesn't mean that something cant be built just as good if not better. some '59 les pauls are duds but people are still willing to pay a ton of money for them regardless of how good they play and sound.

a lot of these people who praise ''59 les pauls are just parakeets who mimic what they have always been told. two of jimmy page's main guitars were a danelectro and a norlin era les paul, guitars most guitar snobs would laugh at someone for owning. a guitar can only get you so far, you have to know how to use it too.

what gibson does in the custom shop is more on par with how they were built back in those days, hence why adjusted for inflation the prices are about the same. the normal runs guitars are mass produced so obviously there are going to be some quality control issues with them from time to time.

I agree with some of this and disagree with some of this.... Yes, some of the folklore about original vintage Les Pauls is based on snobbery and collectibility..... For years I played nothing but custom shop '59 reissues and convinced myself that they sounded just as good as originals... Until I had opportunities to compare, and not just a couple of guitars, but MANY comparisons and it was undeniable that there was a difference in tone.... So what did I do?... I dont have the money to get the same 200k '59 burst as famous rock stars.... I bought a '53 goldtop with a repaired headstock for around the same money as a high end custom shop '59, converted it to accurate humbucker specs and have never looked back. Ive had three of them.... That's not snobbery, thats me searching for the best tool and staying within a reasonable budget. I still have my '05 Jimmy Page R9 which is a really nice guitar but it just doesnt sound like the old wood.... NOW some may prefer the tone of new reissues, they tend to be thicker and more aggressive. Gibson has come a long way with the reissue, using hide glue, removing the truss rod condom and continuing to refine their pickups. We are very lucky that the Les Pauls they produce today blow away the LPs from 25 years ago. But they are too big of company to source whats left of the real old-growth mahogany, flame maple and brazilian rosewood used on the originals...

[Rembetis]

On 04/03/2016 at 9:00 AM, sk8rat said:

edit: I thought you said how. the original p.a.f. pickup was replaced in 1972 with a t-top after the orginal crapped out after their tour in australia. the t-top was replaced with a custom wound seymour duncan in the 90's.

 

Thanks for your reply. I was aware of the 1972 replacement but not the subsequent replacement. I know that I have read about the 1972 episode before but from memory this is my recollection as related to me around 30 years ago when I spoke to the person who actually did the job.

We have no recording of the Perth concert so we don't know if the back pickup was playing up over there or not but definitely during the Adelaide show you can hear it with this high pitched 'chiming' sound, which is quite annoying. By the time the band got into Melbourne a guitar technician had been contacted to do the work. The person in question is Merv Cargill and he is a fair way out of Melbourne too. The issue as he explained it to me was that because Jimmy had taken the cover off the pickup, over a period because of heat the wax surrounding the pickup had melted slightly and Jimmy's sweat had gotten into the copper windings and that was causing the squealing sound. One thing that I don't think has been mentioned is that Merv totally rewound the pickup but it was not with any new copper winding. When the original Gibson Kalamazoo factory closed Merv purchased an amount of copper from them that dated a fair way back and that is the copper that he used.  At the time he mentioned that Jimmy's roadie went down to see him in a cab and waited for the job to be done. Since then the legend seems to be that Jimmy went to see him. I'm sticking with what I was told some 30+  years ago.

[Ed A]

Well as far as the Merv rewound the original pickup thing goes, lets just say that stories can be bent through the years. The simple fact is way back in the 70s Jimmy said that the pickup failed while on tour in Australia and he had it replaced with a newer Gibson pickup.  A newer Gibson pickup at the time would have been a T top. The pickup we see in the guitar after Australia has a chrome cover not a nickel one which was what Gibson was using by the late 60s. Now you could say maybe they just put a chrome cover on his original pickup except for when Jimmy took the cover off in the 80s Pictures in the original Tony bacon book and GW poster clearly show the T marking on the double black pickup.

[sam_webmaster]

A new pic of the Black Beauty...

[cosmic_juice]

On 11/16/2016 at 4:00 PM, sam_webmaster said:

A new pic of the Black Beauty...

that is sooo cool... Thank you