There is, however, one glaring error in this series. Can you spot it? If so, leave a comment below the article.
Larry Manch is an author, teacher, guitar player, freelance writer, and columnist.
His books include: 'The Toughest Hundred Dollars & Other
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Sports Junkie', 'The
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great find on these videos Larry - maybe not enough coffee yet but I didn't see an error - maybe an omission or two but that's subjective I guess.
ReplyDeleteI thought Ted McCarty designed the 335 and was the Les Paula slightly earlier?
ReplyDeleteNot entirely sure he has all this in the correct chronological order
That's correct, Nige. When Les Paul was fooling around with the "fence post" is invented the Les Paul guitar. The ES 335 came later!
DeleteThose arent soap bar p90s. They're dog ears. ;-)
ReplyDeleteTom Minet
ONE????
ReplyDeleteThe 335 came aftser the Les Paul; Ted McCarty designed both the 335 & the Les Paul; the Tele was before the LP (and originally the Broadcaster); the P-90s in question are dog-ear, not soapbar.
But the two big ones? Putting tape over the logo does not make that lovely Epiphone Sheraton II a pedestrian Gibson ES-335-TD, and that's not an ES-295, it's an ES-225-TD.
And Randy shouldn't sing without a monitor.
he called the whammy bar a wang bar?
ReplyDeleteOur 'Anonymous' commenter is correct - black tape over the headstock of an Epiphone Sheraton and passing it off as a Gibson ES-335. Even so, it's a very interesting series with some great historical information.
ReplyDeleteThe black tape disappears later in the same sequence to expose the Epiphone logo.........
ReplyDeleteIt's actually funny how many things Randy gets completely wron... is slightly inaccurate about (cough-cough) besides the downright offensive thing with the poor Sheraton. Here's another one: His short explanation of how a PAF humbucker works is just so incomplete that it's nonsensical. He didn't mention that you need a reverse wound coil and reversed magnetic polarity on one of the "pickups" or you'll actually get MORE hum / noise when you wire them in series than with a simple singlecoil. And he didn't mention the "in series" part either. A PAF with the coils wired in parallel sounds completely different and nothing like what the regular listener would recognise as that popular Gibson sound all those late 60s / early 70s players had.
ReplyDeleteAnd as the other commenter wrote, Les Paul contributed next to nothing to the Les Paul Model (and absolutely nothing to the ES 335) besides his name, the original colour choice (gold) and that abortion of a tailpiece that made the guitar almost unplayable because he apparently didn't know that the designers at Gibson were making a guitar with an arched top. His tailpiece only worked (badly) on flat tops. I've even heard anecdotes that he really wanted a maple guitar with a flat mahogany top, not a mahogany guitar with an arched maple top. A guitar that has the strings running under the bridge instead of over it! And that would have weighed a ton if he had got things his way. Wonderful! Every all-original '52 Les Paul I've personally ever been "up close and personal" with in my life (only three in over four decades of playing, though) was in excellent, near-mint condition. Maybe because nobody ever attempted to play these things longer than a few minutes? Because they are an ergonomic nightmare... A converted '52 or a '53 in a reasonably acceptable condition or well-restored are two of the very few guitars I would be tempted to "sell the farm" or commit a crime for, though. I would never do that for a '57-to-'60 humbucker Les Paul. I like to be able to sleep at night too much...
Les kept telling the same ol' fairytale that he designed the damned thing all by himself with almost no input from Gibson's R&D people in every single interview with him I ever read! I have a lot of respect for him as a musician, inventor and producer, but he was so completely full of it in his self-promotion, sometimes it bordered on obnoxiousness. I'll never forget the painful, embarrassed look on Chet Atkins' face when he had to sit next to him while he was (over)doing his "Lester the genius who invented technology - ALL of it" schtick in an interview they did together. He looked like Les was bragging about torturing puppies and pushing prams into oncoming traffic. It was hilarious!
Thanks, Larry - but, as that was intentional, I really think the worse ERROR was calling a 225 a 295.
ReplyDelete