I'm sick of being told I don't own a true les paul and I should sell it to get an older one!!!

Reverend

Frankly, unless Les himself sold you his own protoype and you have the documents to prove it then you don;t have  real Les Paul.


Can I join the gang then please?

Reverend

I've got a 2001 studio. It's got a thinner body and is a bright red.

I still like it though as it plays well.

Rowby1

I have a '93 ebony finish.....don't know if that was a good year or not but I love it. It plays and sounds great (to me anyway) so why should I care if it's "the one to have" or otherwise.

Just ignore the t***s!

xmrchi

hubobulous;637609" said:

@mrchi - your analogy of cars and guitars makes complete sense to me. You are a wizard of logic and your spells of illumination have worked their wonders on me :-)

@hubobulous You have trumped me sir! Does it show I have never own a car... Only motorbikes, I honestly did t know they had stopped making the escort, haha I deserve ridicule!

blueskunk

Just playing why would u give a shit what other say about your guitar ?

Surely if u r happy fuck em

blueskunk

Actually very tempted to say what u really need is a tele

Bogwhoppit

blueskunk said:

Actually very tempted to say what u really need is a tele

What is a real tele ?

blueskunk

Beautiful guitar made by gibson i believe

Bogwhoppit

I don't know what is real anymore.

The reduced size of wagon wheels has scarred me for life

mart

Bogwhoppit said:

blueskunk said:

Actually very tempted to say what u really need is a tele

What is a real tele ?

An Esquire.

jeztone2

I think you should just play it & enjoy it. I love my dentist guitars. Each to
His own

DrJazzTap

I only ever play a genuine 59 burst into an original Plexi :P

littlegreenman

Bogwhoppit said:

having a child scribble over the headstock is...

...putting the scribble of the old man who seemingly designed the guitar in the first place where it belongs? Maybe that's always been his signature and it's only now that Gibson are putting the signature on there. The Les Paul does seem to be up there amongst the first "sig" guitars.

ICBM

He didn't design it though. It was a Gibson design through and through, just based roughly on his ideas. The guitar was basically finished by the time they put his name on it, and they got the first ones wrong! The '52s and early '53s with the trapeze and the strings under the bar were really just made wrong. The real Les Paul guitar was the first Custom - that's what he used from as soon as it became available until the early 70s.

stenio83

jeztone2;638021" said:

I think you should just play it & enjoy it. I love my dentist guitars. Each to
His own

Hi Mate 'What's a dentist guitar?'

RaymondLin

stenio83 said:

jeztone2;638021" said:

I think you should just play it & enjoy it. I love my dentist guitars. Each to
His own

Hi Mate 'What's a dentist guitar?'

New Gibson Les Paul Standards.

Teetonetal

@stenio83

Well said - I don't hold any truck to purist notions of what guitars should be. Do I like it? Does it play nice? Can I afford it... ? all that matters. 

Telecasters and all that 3 saddle bridge nonsense also springs to mind..

Adam_MD

Teetonetal;638141" said:

Telecasters and all that 3 saddle bridge nonsense also springs to mind..

Agree 100% any bridge apart from 3 brass saddles on a tele is absolute nonsense

p90fool

The full fat mahogany/maple design is actually quite forgiving of detail changes while still keeping its character.

When you start changing more than a couple of components on the classic Tele design it will start to lose its inherent "Teleness" fairly quickly, but you can chuck pretty well any combination of hardware on that big old Les Paul carcass and it'll still have an overwhelming Les Paul character.

I have a 10lb goldtop with a Bigsby and the jangliest sounding goldfoil pickups you can imagine, but it just sounds like a Les Paul with fantastic string definition.

"True Les Paul" can mean anything from the sounds Les Paul himself made to the generic LP/JCM800 thing, which combined with the huge variety of pickups and bridges fitted over the last 63 years in three different factories renders the phrase meaningless.

ICBM

p90fool said:

When you start changing more than a couple of components on the classic Tele design it will start to lose its inherent "Teleness" fairly quickly, but you can chuck pretty well any combination of hardware on that big old Les Paul carcass and it'll still have an overwhelming Les Paul character.

I don't agree. I think they're equally 'robust' soundwise. A Type II Tele Thinline - two Wide-Range Humbuckers, six-saddle Strat bridge and a semi-hollow body - sounds remarkably like a "Tele" considering how different it is. And despite what the purists say, something like a USA Standard Tele sounds *exactly* like a "Tele" to any reasonable degree when not heard in isolation.

A True Les Paul is a singlecut Les Paul-shaped guitar made by Gibson, although ironically the low-impedance Les Paul Recording/Personal series as used by Les himself from about 1970 onwards are really stretching it… (They're not quite the right shape, and do really sound quite different.)