Gibson introduces the Joe Walsh 1960 Les Paul, based on the 1960 burst LP standard that the Eagles guitarist owned.
Joe allowed Gibson Custom to carefully study and replicate the look, feel and tone of his vintage 1960 Les Paul Standard in a limited run of 250 guitars.
Following traditional LP builds, this guitar has a mahogany core body carved into the familiar single cutaway shape. The body is topped by a hand selected maple top that has a grain similar to that of Joe’s guitar. The body is covered with a thin nitrocellulose “tangerine burst” finish, and is available either as hand-aged by Tom Murphy, or aged using Gibson’s VOS treatment.
The neck used on the guitar is made of a quarter-sawn mahogany, following the same profile as the original guitar, measuring 0.8″ at the 1st fret and 0.854″ at the 12th fret. The neck is topped by a one-piece solid rosewood fretboard, featuring traditional trapezoid inlays made from cellulose nitrate.
Gibson Custom equipped the guitar with a pair of Custom Bucker pickups with Alnico III magnets, wound to the same specs as Joe’s original PAF humbuckers. Controls include a three-way pickup selector and independent volume and tone knobs for each pickup. To help it get more precise tone control, the guitar comes with “bumble bee” tone capacitors. Aesthetic embellishments include four gold top hat knobs.
The tune-o-matic bridge is setup with its saddles slanted to the same angle as the ones on Joe’s 1960 Les Paul. The strings are then held in place by a lightweight aluminum stopbar tailpiece. The other end of the string is handled by Grover kidney-button tuners, which were the favorite upgrade choice of Les Paul players in the ’60s.
Everything about the guitar feature period-correct shape and color, including the body and fingerboard binding, pickguard, truss-rod cover, switch ring and the control cavity cover. The volume and tone inserts are made of silver. Other features include aniline dye back and sides, period-correct truss rod assembly with no tubing and hot hide glue neck joint.
The Joe Walsh 1960 Les Paul is limited to only 250 guitars: 50 hand-aged by Tom Murphy and signed by the artist (MSRP: $17,645), a further 75 Murphy aged (MSRP: $14,115), and 125 treated to Gibson’s proprietary VOS processes (MSRP: $10,351).
For more information about the new Gibson Joe Walsh 1960 Les Paul, you can head over to Gibson.
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How many times can Gibson milk the Les Paul cow? 3 and a half large for Joe Walsh’s signature? They were right in 1961 when they dumped this boat anchor from the line. but Clapton just HAD to use one on “Beano”… How anybody thinks that any guitar made by Gibson today will be collectible, I can’t imagine: they only make about 47,000 different variants. In 58-60 you had the Standard and the custom. that was it! Now… This is almost as bad as the guitar mags having to do at least one cover story annually about Hendrix! Every time I see one I think, “FLASH! Jimi Hendrix is STILL DEAD!!!!” (But the whores at Hendrix Industries, keep finding “Amazing new recordings!” from Jimi’s underwear drawer…