Dustin Wainscott might wonder why he’s deliberately scratching up a brand-new electric guitar – and not just any guitar, but a Gibson, one of the most famous names in the business.
“People want the look of a guitar that’s been played at every major venue in the world for the past 50 years,” says Wainscott, a guitar-maker at the company’s headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, and director of its customisation workshop, Made to Measure.
“They want the experience of owning an original vintage model – not just the look, but all the wear marks that it might have too.” That is why Wainscott finds himself working with some specially made, if eccentric, tools: railroad ties fitted with bunches of keys, for example, or belt buckles mounted on a handle to form a kind of flail.
Carefully applied, they wear away patches of lacquer on a guitar’s body, even adding the occasional scrape or score. The same lacquer can also be treated to create what vintage-guitar obsessives call “checking” – the fine cracking that develops as brittle finishes age and the wood beneath expands and contracts over decades.
The result is a guitar of yesteryear, made yesterday. Such instruments are constructed entirely from scratch as part of Gibson’s new custom programme, which allows fans to commission the guitar of their dreams. It begins with selecting the very blank of maple or mahogany from which the piece will be cut – choosing just the right “flame” in the grain – before settling on the precise shade of Gibson’s signature sunburst finish.
“Customers usually want to hand-pick materials themselves [which they can currently do online, or on-site in Nashville or London], or match the colour to a photograph or even a specific Pantone reference,” says Wainscott. “We had one customer who matched his guitar to an old MG sports car. And while some just want a certain colour or a certain detail changed on their custom model, we also get clients who just go into custom overload and change everything.”
That might include selecting a particular neck profile to suit the player’s hand size. And since Gibsons aren’t modular – unlike rival Fender’s guitars – a great deal of work goes into such bespoke mixing and matching. Then come choices around pickups, jack plates, whammy bars and fretboards, sometimes inlaid with initials in mother-of-pearl. If a customer wants diamonds set into the body, or parts fashioned from gold or titanium, the Gibson custom workshop will attempt it.
“It’s very rare that we’ll say ‘we can’t do that’,” says Lee Bartram, Gibson’s head of marketing and cultural influence. “And if we do, it’s usually because of engineering parameters that might negatively affect the sound. We don’t want to mess too much with the overall Gibson vibe.”
Depending on the complexity of the order, a completed custom guitar takes anywhere from four months to a year to deliver, and costs between Dh40,000 and Dh80,000. Even then, it may never be played. Gibson guitars are sufficiently design and craft icons that some buyers acquire them simply to hang on a wall or stand in a corner – a silent suggestion of a rock ’n’ roll life their career in finance never quite delivered. Just look at the cover of Blues on the Bayou to see how a guitar can sometimes outshine even a player with the soulful face and untouchable talent of American blues musician B B King.
“But most of our customers are huge guitar fans, naturally, and some even sell the guitars they have in order to buy this one custom Gibson,” explains Wainscott. “This type of guitar tends to be ordered by people who have been playing the instrument for some time and really know what they want.”
And what they really want, he says, is an original Gibson – something incredibly rare and expensive. “Few people will ever get to see one, let alone play one,” Wainscott says. The next best thing is a custom guitar made using exactly the same processes and materials as the vintage models. That includes less durable, less efficient – but more romantic – animal-hide glues and nitrocellulose lacquers, finishes long abandoned by much of the modern guitar industry.”
But these outmoded materials allow the instrument to sing in a way that new styles of finish won’t,” Wainscott explains. “The result is a guitar that feels old in the hand. It has to me the feeling I get from an old baseball glove that’s been properly broken in, that’s been with me over the years, and that, in contrast, makes a new glove just feel horrible.”
But why the fuss over a Gibson guitar? If recommendation is persuasive, it may help to know that there’s barely a rock star who hasn’t favoured playing a Gibson, including Queen’s Brian May, Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, as well as Joan Jett, Jeff Beck, Angus Young, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend. Sound quality is part of the appeal, but so is history.
Gibson pioneered the electric guitar with the EH-150, developed in 1935, and 75 years ago, effectively invented the modern solid-body electric by partnering with Les Paul on the single-cut mahogany design that still bears his name. The company also introduced some of the most recognisable shapes in guitar history, from the “horned” body to the Flying V, launched in 1958.
Les Paul himself embodied the same obsessive devotion now seen in Gibson’s made-to-measure customers. After a car crash in 1948 left his elbow shattered, surgeons offered to fix it permanently in a single position. Paul chose the angle that would still allow him to play guitar. When they appear at auction – which is rare – 1950s Les Paul guitars sell for more than $1 million.
Not, Bartram is quick to point out, that owning a Gibson – even an original – will turn you into a guitar hero. “A customer who orders a guitar built to the exact specifications of one played by Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green isn’t suddenly going to sound like Peter Green,” he says with a laugh. “It’s great to own a guitar associated with a legendary artist, but their sound ultimately came from the player, not the instrument.” Budding Jimmy Pages have been warned.
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