The Most Underrated Les Paul from the Gibson Custom Shop?

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Full Transcript

Hi Sam from Guitar Village here and today at Center Stage we’ve got the Gibson Custom Shop 54 custom reissue also known as the Staples

at the time when the originals were being released in 1954 Gibson had their gold top their main Les Paul and Les Paul himself wanted a black guitar something that looked like a tuxedo so they came up with this the Les Paul Custom now this does differ from the gold top Les Paul standards in a few different ways some of the main ones being that this is a solid mahogany body it doesn’t have a maple cap underneath this obviously the ebony finish we’ve got Gold Hardware throughout with waffle back tuners on there you’ve got multiply binding around the top binding around the back that the standard didn’t have binding around the headstock so lots of binding on there and this really gorgeous split Diamond headstock inlay as well now the fingerboard is a different material too you’ve got an ebony fretboard with these big block inlays on there and the lesbo customer has been upgraded somewhat so in 1953 when they originally released the Les Paul Custom they decided to fit one of these an abr1 tuna Matic bridge to it as well which the Les Paul Stander didn’t have now for those of you who are kind of familiar with the differences between a legible standard and a custom one thing that makes the 54 very different from a 57 Les Paul Custom are the 2p90 pickups well the P90 and the bridge and the alniko 5 which is nicknamed the staple

from the custom shop especially the reissue stuff they tend to be around nine pounds and this one is pretty close to that it’s 8.8 pounds so it feels nice and light even though it is very solid and put together really well it still feels agile I think having this chunky C Nick fits the hand like a glove along with the ebony fretboard and historic medium jumbo fret white make it a real pleasure to play it’s really smooth and responsive to your hands

the range of tones you can get from these two pickups is incredible you can roll the volume back on each one and they clean up really nicely the neck pickup the onico 5 has got this big powerful sound while the bridge is a slightly softer but it has more clarity to it as well when you combine both together you get this really nice kind of open Woody tone

this is for someone who wants a guitar that has a completely different sound to your regular Les Paul Custom I think if you already own a Les Paul Standard this is a must-have it gives you something so different it’s got these open single coil tones that you don’t really get even from a path which is a great sounding pickup but this is something different and I think it’s one that everyone should try at least once for the tones today I was using a couple of panels going into the house Cornell we had The stryman Deco and a boss rc30 Looper the Cornell itself was set pretty flat with just a smidge a Reverb on there and the volume set clean it was great getting to know a little more about this 54 Les Paul Custom if you haven’t tried one I urge you to check one out it’s a really different experience if you do want to find out any more about this guitar the link will be in the description below and as always thanks for watching