by Saiichi Sugiyama.

I was messing around with my newly acquired 2003 Brazilian fingerboard Historic 1958 Reissue (R8) Les Paul – my friend Koji Mori at Ishibashi Guitars in Tokyo had set this one aside for me when it came in, but, me being in the UK, it took us literally years to hook up and for me to pick it up from his shop in Tokyo. I hadn’t bought a brand new guitar for some ten years previous and it was a treat.   I love the playability of this new guitar as the fingerboard is dead straight and it has the right sort of tonal colour.  I personally think, although it is a matter of personal opinion, that the fingerboard wood has something to do with the acoustic tone of a Gibson solidbody electric guitar.  My hunch is that that is the reason why (a) a ‘68 Les Paul Custom with its maple top acoustically sounds very different from a Goldtop from the same year; and (b) ‘50s Les Paul Customs with their mahogany body still have those tight treble harmonics.  Sound is something totally subjective and it may be my ears are deceiving me – but that is my humble opinion on which I base my personal purchase decisions.

Getting back to my ‘03 R8 Les Paul, I thought I heard different tonal colour from other Historics that I had tried and I attributed it to the Brazilian board. That’s why I had to have this guitar. However, as I started paying it regularly there arose one reservation in my mind. There was a certain characteristic in the acoustic sound that I can only describe as a sort of a hollow metallic resonance. Then I started hearing it even when the guitar is amplified. It began to get on my nerves.

From my past experience of making “messed about” vintage guitars “sing” to my playing style, I was somehow convinced the sound had something to do with the resonance of the metal parts so, I thought I would try swapping them. I put on my spare ABR-1 bridge and Kluson Deluxe tuners from circa 1965.

As I suspected, the swap tightened up the sound considerably and got rid of the hollow ring - but it also made the amplified sound too bright for my liking. It lost some of the harmonics that I first heard and instead it got as sharp as a razor blade. I was dismayed and began wondering if the “PAT number PAFs” that I put on the R8 had developed some problem – but a problem could not have started on two pickups at the same time...

It was my 13-year-old son who solved the mystery in the end. He plays the drums and is often tapping things in a rhythm – his desk, chair etc. It can be quite irritating at times. He walked into the room when I was tearing my hair out trying to put the sound right on my R8. I told him about the sound change. Without saying a word, he just went around tapping the guitars I had out in the room one by one. Then he pronounced the resonance on the R8 was much brighter in comparison to other guitars. He was right. What he was doing was what the foreman at Gibson showed Ted McCarty when he joined the company. The time-honoured “tap tone” method. I told him that that was a good thinking. He said I had told him that luthiers can tell by tapping wood what the final product will sound like and that was what exactly he had done. How did I miss that? Well done that boy.

It taught me a lesson that the tone is in the wood after all. That was what made the vintage guitars from the '50s so great: quality wood that was naturally dried over a long period of time – a luxury that cannot be had for love or money now.

I am not sure where that leaves me with my 2003 R8. The replaced metal parts were good and they brought out the true character of the wood. That tone, however, was unfortunately what I did not want. That was the end of a love affair with this brand new Les Paul. I am back to the chipped (should I say “player’s condition” to be politically correct?) old wood again.