Goldtop

[F16SUNSHINE]

You would not know from the B+W but both the Guitar and guitarist are goldtops. Both Originals as well not re-issues.
This one is from a Yashica Electro GSN and Tmax400 shot at 400 and developed normally in tmax developer.
Yeah, it's dirty and was a poor scan. The image is very expressive and sometimes content counts more than technical perfection.

[cooltouch]

[F16SUNSHINE]

Thanks for stopping in Mike.
My re-issue comment was just to be colorful not provided for any historical information.
Certainly I'm no guitar expert such as yourself.
KSK is I'm sure fully aware of his guitars status.
This one is in fact a '71 and has been in the hands of a couple of greats including the one in the picture The "Bigbird" opens it up!

[Katastrofo]

Great stuff, Andy, both the photo and the stories. i've seen a few of these
in operation and knew about Gibson/Les Paul being at to top of the heap,
great sound.

Michael's tidbits were savory, too. Let's see some frying pan Rickenbackers
to fill out the set!

[cooltouch]

Heh! Roger McGuinn with his 12-string Rickie when he was in the Byrds was the Man back when I was a kid just learning how to play.

Can't leave out the other biggie either: the Fender Stratocaster. It came on the scene just about the same time as the Gibson Les Paul and is the "other" enduring heavyweight of the guitar world.

I've owned many guitars, including a couple of Les Pauls and a few Strats. Actually one of my least favorites to play was the '68 Les Paul Custom. Back then its other nickname was the Fretless Wonder because the frets had been filed almost flat from the factory. This might have been the way Les Paul preferred the fingerboard to be, but for me it made things very difficult. I developed a soloing style that involved a lot of string bending, and trying to bend strings with very low frets is hard! So, I came to hate that thing's playability and after four years of ownership, I traded a guy straight across for an SG plus $100. The SG was so much easier to play and, to me, sounded just as good.

The Gold top in the photo didn't have that problem. It was just the LP Customs, and even after a few years Gibson began offering them with standard frets and a few years later with jumbo frets. To me, the LP Custom with Jumbo frets is still one of the most desirable solid body electrics Gibson has ever made. And just in case you're wondering what a Les Paul Custom looks like, here ya go (found this pic on a Swedish website -- a '69 model):

[Katastrofo]

Michael, how does Taylor Guitars fit in the line-up? I know their acoustic
guitars are decent, wondering about their electrics.

[cooltouch]

Heh, I haven't a clue. I've never heard one, never played one. Taylor builds a good acoustic guitar, and building a solid-body electric is about as hard as falling off a log by comparison. The semi-hollow-body electrics can be trickier, but in these days of CNC-processes, it shouldn't be too difficult even to put together good semis. So their electrics should be good, I would think.

There's a lot of nuance and tactile impressions involved with a guitar, though, and sometimes all these things come together just right, and other times they don't, even though there might not be anything one can point to analytically that will reveal these attractions -- or lack of them. So it's impossible for me to pass judgement on a guitar until I've played it for a while, and played it through an amp (in the case of electrics) that allows me to get the sorts of tone curves I like.