Played an Eastman E10 ss alongside a J35 and a original Jumbo reissue (3 times the price of the Eastman) the other day.
I know this is very subjective but the E10 was, in my opinion, superior to both Gibsons in every department.
It has a better fit and finish. The tone was far superior. It was louder. It has scalloped bracing and a red spruce top. How good will that sound in 30 years
I hear a lot, people say yeah yeah Eastman make great guitars but not in the same league as Gibson.
I say The Eastman slope is twice the guitar the modern Gibson is.
An absolute joy to play. Narrowish neck the only complaint
that hand rubbed relic finish they do is stunning
Wonder if if anyone has thoughts on this.
Comments
No contest. I bought the Eastman.
That said, I think the thumpiness and relative quietness of J45s is what the aficionados of them like, and the E10SS doesn't really do those things - it's more like a short scale D18 that looks really cool. The narrower nut also works against it because I understand the point of the J45 to be that's a pretty good fingerpicking guitar as well as a pretty good strummer, and my fingerpicking is so shite that I really like a wider nut for that. So if I was really into the short scale thing I might keep looking for a J45 of some kind that had the good Gibson qualities plus some resonance to it - they must be out there somewhere. But yeah, the E10SS is in most ways a better guitar and a better buy than any J45 Standard I've come across.
(Weirdly the guitar I was most taken with on this mini-foray was a second hand Atkin Small Jumbo, a shape I'd never even considered - it seemed pretty do-it-all to me, balanced but with plenty of bass available - but that might have been just me feeling more at home with the higher string tension on it after trying loads of short scale guitars.)
Very hard to beat.
Nobody with a great Gibson acoustic, sits looking at it and wishes it was an Eastman. I know there are people with great Eastman acoustics that wish it said Gibson on the headstock.
It makes no sense, but it is just a fact of life.
Take the time and find find the right Gibson is a good plan. There are great ones, and not much else sounds exactly like them.
The Gibson I bought last week sounded fantastic, and after a few days I put my usual favourite strings on it, which sounded horrible, brassy and ugly.
If it had had those strings fitted when I bought it I would've said it was a duff, overrated guitar.
That alone makes it very hard to compare acoustic guitars on a level playing field, sometimes we will never know how much potential guitars we try could have.
But the 50s ones (i.e. J45s like OP describes) weren’t made with Alpine spruce, they’d switched (from Adi/Red, and briefly ‘hog) to Sitka by then.
Brazilian isn't the end of the world. I remember trying a limited edition Clapton Martin OOO with BRW. I've player 3 or 4 of the regular Indian Rosewood Clapton signatures that sounded better than that one.
They are making some guitars again now with Adirondack spruce if you want that:
https://www.gibson.com/Guitar/ACC37L866/J-45-Vintage-2019