Gibson Les Paul Signature "T"

2013 is Gibson's year of the Les Paul and their celebration starts early with the new Les Paul Signature "T" tribute guitar.

The Signature "T" is a "Tribute" to the artist with the most successful signature guitar in history - Mr. Les Paul.

To honor his innovation and legacy, this guitar combines traditional tone woods with modern construction techniques for enhanced playability and versatility while maintaining the look and feel of the original design. Since Les Paul was known as an innovator, you can avail of the optional Min-ETune mechanism that can tune your guitar quickly and automatically. It will be added to your guitar with no internal modification.

The new Signature "T" guitar starts with traditional Les Paul tone woods. The body features a carved solid figured maple top paired with a mahogany back, and a quarter sawn solid mahogany neck is glued into the body.

To give it a modern twist, the body comes with Gibson's weight relief system, where in some parts of the body are hollowed out to reduce the weight and increase playing comfort. The neck is carved in the '60s SlimTaper profile and is topped by a brown granadillo fretboard. It has 22 medium-jumbo frets with traditional trapezoid inlays.

The Les Paul Signature "T" also comes with other traditional components, including the pickup rings, pickguard, cream fretboard and body binding, and gold speed knobs. The guitar follows traditional Gibson Les Paul measurements - 24 ¾” scale length, 1 11/16” nut width and 12-inch fingerboard radius - which gives it the smooth, easy to play and bend feel that Gibson guitars are known for.

Gibson Les Paul Signature "T" Violin Sunburst

The electronics of this guitar is meant to blend modern versatility with vintage tone, it comes loaded with '57 classic pickups that are mounted "open coil". They were designed based on the PAF humbucker of the late 1950s featuring Alnico II magnets. The bridge position pickup features slightly over-wound coils for a slightly improved output, for churning out leads. The pickups are wax potted to avoid microphonic squeal and they feature Gibson's latest coil splitting technology, controlled via the push-pull tone knobs.

As usual, this Les Paul comes with a Tune-o-Matic bridge and a Stopbar tailpiece, and string tuning is achieved via the Grover locking tuners. You can avail of upgrade options that include gold-plated hardware and as mentioned above, you can have the auto-tuner mechanism Min-ETune factory installed.

Wrapping up the guitar's features and giving it its distinctive mark is a black "bell" truss-rod cover with that highlights a commemorative “T” engraving.

The guitar is available in a variety of finishes - Goldtop, Vintage Sunburst, Translucent Ebony, Alpine White Burst or Wine Red, all in high-gloss nitrocellulose lacquer. The MSRP is at $3,199, but you can go get it for just under $1,900 at Amazon.com.

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Learn more about the Min-ETune Auto-Tuner