Tag Archive for: Gibson

Used Guitar For Sale

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1959GibsonLP

Reverb. A dangerous place for me to hang out.

Reverb offers the best variety of tools to buy & sell gear, and the lowest listing fees of any major site. As musicians and gear lovers, we work to foster a community and make Reverb the best place to purchase music gear online.

Well, let’s see what Reverb has up for sale these days, shall we?

A very old and used electric guitar. Only 1 available. On sale for $999,999.00 plus $170 for shipping.

A bit far to check it out at Hank’s Guitar Shop of Denmark Street, London. They do have a 1959 Les Paul Standard listed on their website but it doesn’t look to be the same instrument. The wood grain and staining is definitely different. But who am I to judge? I still think the dress was white and gold.

HanksGuitars

The guitar was previously owned by Gary Grainger. Former guitarist for Rod Stewart.

I think a million dollar burst might be a tad high on the market. But then again, it won’t be the first one to sell close to that mark.

From Gibson’s take on the mystique of the 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard:

Over the past decade 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standards have sold for anywhere from $50,000 for hard-worn examples to over $1-million for Peter Green”™s and Gary Moore’s legendary Holy Grail ”” the guitar Green used on Fleetwood Mac”™s early albums and that Moore also put to the test repeatedly during his fruitful career.

Les Paul Black Beauty

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BonamassaGuitars

Joe Bonamassa is an avid guitar collector. He owns hundreds of guitars.

His favorite guitar is a ”™59 Les Paul Sunburst, a “Holy Grail” that he actually takes on the road with him.

“I tour nine months a year,” Bonamassa told Gibson.com, in a 2011 interview. “What am I going to do, come home and noodle with it on the couch? Go, ”˜Wow look at this, I”™ve got a ”™59 Les Paul that never gets used, maybe on a recording here and there.”™ I”™d rather get a nice case for it–which I did–hire an ex-secret service agent as my security guard–which I did [laughs]–and take it on the road.” In an interview with AmericanBluesScene.com, Bonamassa praised the ”˜59”™ Les Paul”™s extraordinary tone. “I have over 300 guitars, but out of all of them, that one is definitely my favorite.”

He was also asked about the Les Paul Black Beauty which is going to auction tomorrow evening. Speculation is that the guitar might fetch upwards of $2 million. Here is what Joe had to say about the guitar:

As for Bonamassa, he says he wouldn”™t pay $10,000 for it. That”™s after paying $410,000 for one of his Les Paul guitars. Those are all Standard sunbursts from 1958 to 1960.

“What it is is a carved up old Les Paul Custom that Les modified and gave to Tom,” says Bonamassa. “I think Tom has the best of intentions with the guitar but Tom, because of his closeness to Les, may have an unrealistic value in his mind.”

One more sleep before we find out for sure.

1954 Black Beauty

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1954BlackBeauty

From CNN:

The crusade to find a home for a sacred electric guitar is reverberating like a thundering encore through the music business as innovator Les Paul’s Black Beauty from the ’50s is going up for auction.

The Gibson-made instrument, called the Holy Grail of Guitars by some, is being sold by Tom Doyle, the late Paul’s longtime friend, engineer, co-inventor and guitar tech.

The story is being covered globally by the mainstream media. Guernsey’s auction house will present the guitar on February 19th at 7 p.m. at Arader Galleries on Madison Avenue. The guitar could sell for more than $2 million. We will find out in a few days time.

Lester William Polsfuss, widely known as Les Paul, was one of the pioneers of the solid-body electric guitar. He was also a pioneer in the use of many innovative recording techniques including overdubs, delays, phasers and multitracking.

Tom Doyle did a comprehensive review of Les Paul’s guitar on YouTube. He describes the Black Beauty as the guitar that started it all. The guitar left the Gibson factory in 1953 and Les Paul used it extensively for many years. Les Paul gave the guitar to Tom Doyle in 1976. And, I suppose, Tom believes it is now time to cash it in.

Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster

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GibsonES5

When it was first introduced in 1949, the ES-5 was meant for the Jazz player who needed a wider variety in pickup options, and the Switchmaster offered just that with a flick of the switch. The Switchmaster has volume and tone controls for each ’57 Classic humbucker, with an option to use all three pickups at once.

The retail list price for a new instrument runs about $6,000. In the 1950s, the original models sold for around $500.

Gary’s Classic Guitars has an original 1955 ES-5 Switchmaster up for sale at just under $14,000.

I suppose if I bought a new one now and held it for 55 years, it might be worth $170,000 if it compounds at the same rate as the original 1955 model. I wonder if Lorraine would consider such a purchase an investment? Probably not.

Gibson shares some history of the guitar here:

The Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster was truly a guitar ahead of its time. First introduced in 1949, the ES-5 Switchmaster was the first ES guitar to be fitted with three pickups, and was initially intended solely for jazz players. It was dubbed the “supreme electronic version” of Gibson”™s L-5 and offered a unique four-knob control circuitry that allowed players to manage pickup selection by adjusting the volume of each pickup, thus eliminating the pickup selector switch. Yet despite its pioneering circuitry and three-pickup layout, the ES-5 Switchmaster was not immediately embraced by jazz players while competing guitar manufacturers rushed to introduce their own similar models, including the Epiphone Zephyr Emperor of the early 1950s and the Fender Stratocaster in 1954.