The Gibson ES-335

 

I don’t even get to the table when the guy with the guitar case and the ever present friend (just in case I’m the one with the gun, I guess) walk in. I’m pretty sure they were in the parking lot when I got there and were just waiting for the guy with the Yankee hat to go in. It’s a nasty world out there and you can’t be too careful. Yankee fans can be dangerous, I hear. I head to a table and wave them over and a few handshakes later, everybody seems calm and ready to close the deal. The owner, a self described “hillbilly” has already launched into his pitch. He has a drawl that speaks perhaps of a more Southern upbringing. “Bought this git-tar in 2001 from a farmer who bought it from another guy who was the original owner. I haven’t played it much.” I opened the case and it looked pretty good. And out come the screwdriver, magnifier and flashlight and I start pulling the pickups and loosening the strings. “Not yer first rodeo, is it…the friend says.” “Nope”, I says.  The pickups checked out, there were no extra holes anywhere, the ABR-1 was the correct era and the neck was a bit  flat but the truss was tight, so I know it would come back to a little relief. Generally, the monetary end of the deal is made before either of us show up -made with the stipulation that if anything isn’t as described, the deal could be undone. I once drove 5 hours to New Hampshire and turned around and drove home empty handed because the guitar was a refinish. I don’t like to start negotiating at this point but there was one issue that concerned me and it was an unusual situation. The fingerboard was pretty rutted at the first few frets but there was virtually no fret wear.  Who played this guitar? Freddy Krueger? Edward Scissorhands?  How do you rut a board like that and not put any wear on the frets-which were absolutely without a doubt, original. The ruts don’t really affect the playability, they’re just unsightly. I’m going to guess the farmer never trimmed his nails and played a lot of cowboy chords. Sometimes, asking for a few hundred dollars off the negotiated price for an issue like this just doesn’t make sense. I’m sure I could have gotten the guitar for less but I was also sure it was still a good deal as is.  Folks appreciate a man of his word. Would I perhaps have to price it a couple hundred less due to the ruts or pay to have them repaired? Probably but here’s the thing. People are appreciative when a deal goes exactly as planned. Everybody’s happy and you shake hands and walk away new friends-promising to stay in touch if something cool comes along. Guitar people are tuned into the guitars in their communities and sometimes can be a big help. Once the payment was made, my new friend said, “ya know, I know a guy who has a 58 Les Paul. He just went into a nursing home and his sons have it now and don’t know what to do with it.  He’s also got a 55 goldtop.” I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have known this if I had decided to try to knock off a few hundred for the ruts. Maybe something will come of it and maybe not. But this is why a dealer acts honorably and reasonably. The guitar world is a very small place. After half an hour, we drained our coffees, shook hands and were on our ways back home. I  had a few hours to kill, so I had another conversation with the  disembodied voice in the Fiesta-telling her about my experience. “Please speak a command” she said. “I command you to listen and not talk,  and give me a foot massage, while you’re at it,” I said. On the way back to O’Hare, I stopped at the offices of Gelber Group in downtown Chicago,  the financial services firm owned by my little brother where 3 other brothers work as well and had a nice visit with brothers Brian, Frank, Mike and Bob.  They made a lot more money than I did that day but I’m guessing they didn’t have nearly as much fun. I got back to O’Hare in plenty of time to start my my begging, pleading and cajoling to get them to let me take the guitar on the plane. A few hours in the cargo hold is not good for an unchecked guitar. It can get pretty cold in there. Fortunately, they were very nice about it and let me carry it on and didn’t even charge me the $45 bag fee. So, a tip of the Yankee hat to Spirit Airlines. No frills but no surprises either. Sixteen hours after leaving my house, I was back home with a “new” 64 ES-335. I spent an hour on setup and adjustment and restrung it and went to bed. Sixteen hours later, it was sold.  I never even got to photograph it. Turned out to be an awesome player with a perfect neck angle. I did get back one of my favorite SGs ever in trade though.

 

I love going out into the great wide open to pick up guitars from sellers-especially the higher end stuff that I don’t want to have shipped. It’s always a crapshoot, it’s always interesting and it’s always a little scary. This time it was a fly/drive affair going from New York to Chicago and driving to Indiana-where I seem to find a lot of guitars, although I have no clue why. Getting to and from a major city the same day can be a little tricky. I don’t stay over because the expense of all of this travel gets paid for by the guy who buys the guitar and I don’t want to make it any more expensive than it needs to be. The guitar in question is an all original very nice 3 owner 1964 ES-335 in sunburst. I considered just driving but it’s 800  miles so each way so if I could get a cheap flight, I could do it. I found a flight to Chicago for $110 round trip on something called Spirit Airlines.  This was less than the gas for my old Volvo would have cost for 1600 miles of driving. Even if I borrowed my son’s Prius, it would have been a big investment in time and gas and a place to stay. Well, actually, the place to stay would have been easy-I have 4 brothers in Chicago. I had never flown Spirit Airlines and was a little apprehensive, given the low fare. It’s kind of like a Greyhound bus with wings and extra charges. Got a bag? $45. Want some water? $3. You get the idea. No frills, although I never considered a reclining seat a frill but apparently, on Spirit, it is. Anyway, I didn’t need frills and dragged myself out of bed at 0 dark :30 and headed to LaGuardia and got on the plane. Once at O’Hare, I would rent a car and head to a predetermined public location. That’s in case the guy decides to stick a gun in my ribs and rob me. This would be a problem for the would be criminal since I usually pay by check and I normally carry around $20. The public location is usually a Starbucks. This one was in Schererville, Indiana on route 41. I think every state has a route 41. I think it’s one big strip mall that runs from Washington State to Florida. This 41 was no different-I could be in Arkansas for all I could tell from route 41 .Ya know, it’s hard to tell what someone is like even after you’ve spoken on the phone and emailed back and forth and dozen times. It’s also hard to tell what’s wrong (or right) with a guitar from the photos most folks send. So, I bring a tiny screwdriver, magnifier, truss wrench, flashlight and dental mirror. These things will not help if someone sticks a gun in my ribs unless maybe I could aim the magnifier at the sun, temporarily blinding the robber and stabbing him with the screwdriver or hitting him over the head with the truss rod wrench.  There are thousand things-OK not a thousand but at least 50 things that can be wrong with a guitar that don’t always show up in the photos. Things like wrong pickups, changed pots, extra holes under the bridge or stoptail or Bigsby, bad fret jobs, cracks, repairs, rutted fingerboards even refins. So, it’s always a bit of a crapshoot, especially after spending many hours traveling and hundreds of dollars. “How will I know you?” the seller asked in an email. I said “You don’t have to. You’ll be the guy with the guitar.” But I said I’d wear my NY Yankee cap figuring nobody else in Schererville , Indiana would wear one. Anyway, I got to Chicago without issue and rented a roller skate sized car called a Ford Fiesta. I don’t know why they would call it a Fiesta since there isn’t room for much partying in there unless you want to party with the voice module that somehow turned itself on and asked me to speak a command. “Please speak a command”, it said. I was looking around trying to figure out where the voice came from. A genie? God? (and God was a woman!). Once I figured out it was part of the technology, I still had no idea what to say, so I said “off”. “Please speak a command”. “Go away!” Still nothing. “Leave me alone!!” “Please speak a command…”, she insisted. It sounded to me like she was getting impatient like the lady in the GPS who every time she says “recalculating” she seems more and more angry. I keep thinking she’s going to say “just pull over at this fucking gas station…” Finally, I said “cancel” and it worked. But the GPS repeated “recalculating” in her exasperated, angry voice. Finally I arrived at the local Starbucks, got a tall coffee, which, incredibly,  is a small in Starbuckspeak and waited for the seller to arrive.  Part 2 tomorrow.

I keep seeing this and it’s pretty subtle. It’s not a difficult fix-any decent luthier can do it, I’m just amazed at how often it shows up. When you sight down the neck, do you see a little upturn right where it meets the body? It’s no accident that this happens either. Consider how much time (out of its very long life) a guitar spends in its case -often flat on its back. The forces of gravity are counteracted in two places. One is the neck rest and the other is where the body meets the bottom of the case. The surface area of the body that actually sits on the bottom off the case is a lot less than it should be in those old cases so more of the guitar is subjected to these gravitational forces that they would be in a modern case. Consequently, quite a lot of downward gravitational force is concentrated in one place-where the body and neck join. It’s like those “bookshelves” you had in college made from cheap lumber and cinder blocks. Eventually they kind of sagged in the middle, didn’t they? Same deal here. Leave gravity to its own device for long enough and something has to give. Gravity wants to pull the guitar down and it can only do so where it isn’t supported and will do so at the thinnest and weakest point which is right behind the heel. I’ve also seen the problem just below the neck rest at the seventh to 9th fret but not as frequently. Surprisingly, the problem shows up more often in mint guitars. Counterintuitive? Not really. the mint ones spend most of their lives flat on their back under a bed. If the guitar is stored standing up, the problem is not likely to occur. Let me refer you back to the red ’61 dot neck I found in Indiana that had been in its case for 47 years-unopened. It didn’t have the rise because it was standing up in a closet all that time. I will note that the lower strap button was completely corroded away probably from all the moisture flowing downward. So, you’re about to buy the 335 of your dreams and you sight in the neck and there it is. Just the very slightest rise from around the 18 fret to the end of the fingerboard. Then you play it up there and it sounds kind of plunky or it frets out when you bend. You adjust the truss but it doesn’t help because the truss doesn’t adjust all the way up there. So, what,  you don’t buy it? If that was the case, you’d be eliminating an awful lot of spectacularly good guitars. They just need a little “anti gravity”. The easiest fix is a fret level-remember you play the frets, not the fingerboard. It’s usually slight enough that a simple fret leveling will take care of it. If it’s more pronounced the next thing to do is have your luthier just shave the tiniest bit off the board at the rise. I’ve seen this done completely invisibly because the amount of rise is so slight. A friend of mine brought over a 59 ES-355 (not the one I have) that looked like the off ramp of I-95 at the body join. He took it to a very talented young luthier in our area and when I saw it again I couldn’t believe it was the same guitar. I couldn’t see any sign of any work at all and the fingerboard was as straight as a Nevada highway. So when you see the upramp, don’t reject the guitar. It’s normal, it’s ubiquitous and it’s fixable.

Here’s my dilemma. when I get a guitar for myself -one that I like so much I have to keep it (a rare occurrence by the way), I like to clean it up. That means a bit of either naptha or Virtuoso Cleaner, some lemon oil on the rosewood (NEVER on the Body). The idea is to get the organic crud off the guitar. Really, do I want to go eat my dinner after playing a guitar that was sweated on on 5 or 10 or 20 different players, some of whom washed their hands once a month whether they needed it or not? OK, I wash my hands after I play (usually) but I think that cleaning up a vintage guitar is not an unreasonable thing to do. Then there are the purists who want every speck of dirt and “mojo” left alone. No cleaner, no polish. no oil on the board-just the pure filth of a 50 year old guitar. I hear things about “if this guitar could talk-oh, the stories it would tell.” Well, guess what. Unless you’re Peter Frampton, your guitar can’t talk. And it won’t tell stories even if you are Peter Frampton. So, I like to clean ’em up (for myself). I like my guitars to look good. Don’t get me wrong, a guitar that’s been played to death can be a very cool thing but that doesn’t have to include dirt and organic slime. Here’s the thing-I can make a guitar look really good with a bit of  Virtuoso  Cleaner and sometimes Polish and most people don’t mind this. But, long ago, I decided not to do this to most guitars I get. Not because I don’t like a clean guitar but because, unless you tell me otherwise, I want you to get the guitar in the same condition as I got it. Yes, I’ll do a setup and replace the wrong parts with the right ones-I’ll make sure it plays right but it’s up to you to clean off the crap. If you ask me to do it, I will- but if you don’t ask, you don’t get me applying the elbow grease. It’s just that some folks get upset if it’s done. I don’t think that cleaning a finish diminishes the vintage value one iota and I think it can improve it in certain cases. This policy seemed to be working just fine until last week when I sold a consigned 63 ES-345. The buyer was very particular about fingerboard wear and fret wear and I assured him that both were exemplary-which they were. But he was most upset because of all the crud on the guitar and fingerboard. He really couldn’t believe I would send out a guitar in that state. I explained that I used to do some cleaning but decided to stop doing so because some folks complained about “destroying the mojo”. It’s mostly a Fender guy thing but not exclusively. It’s funny that some collectors are absolute fetishists about the originality of their guitar. “Are the solder joints original?” “Have any screws been turned?” “Are the stickers intact?” (answer: how would I know if I didn’t turn any screws) it goes on and on and I accept it because these folks are spending a lot of money on an old instrument and  deserve to be happy. But if they ask me “is the dirt original?” I’ll  get a little  annoyed. What could the answer to the question actually be “No, I buried it in the garden for a month?” “No, I did a lube job on the old Mustang before I went in to play the guitar for a while and forgot to wash my hands”. Silly, right? You would think. But it’s happened. I’ve been asked if the guitar has had years of crud removed when  a guitar looks too clean and shows wear. On the other side, the buyer of the 63 345 nearly decided to return the guitar because of the dirt. He didn’t and I hope he loves the guitar. The trend toward distressed finishes -mark my words-will soon include authentic dirt, sweat and fromunda. At an additional cost, of course. I can actually see the Gibson ad…The New Eric Clapton 335 with authentic EC sweat and fingernail grime. They would probably call it “mojo.”

That’s truss rod cover to those who don’t have the space to write stuff out. I hate it when my titles go on two lines. Anyway, this 10 cent piece of plastic, which you can buy on Ebay for as much as $250, is kind of overlooked. hey. I’ve pretty much overlooked it for about 18 months now. I coulda sworn I already wrote this. Surprisingly, the truss rod cover can tell you a lot in some instances. If you aren’t sure you’ve got a 64 or a 65, look at the truss rod cover. If the bevel is narrow it’s almost certainly a 65. If it’s wide, it’s 99% certain its a 64. I’ve never seen an all original 64 with a narrow bevel cover and I’ve seen one 65 with a wide bevel and it was a very early stoptail from just before they went to the trapeze. It is a part that didn’t change much over the early years-in fact a 58 looks just like a 64 on a 335. When you look at the 345, there’s something else to consider. All 345s are stereo but not all truss rod covers say “stereo” on them. The tricky part is that it isn’t exactly clear when they did the change since there is so much overlap. I’ve seen mid year 59s (A310xx) with the “stereo” cover and yet my early ’60 blonde doesn’t say “stereo”.  It appears that by very early in 1960-probably January, they all said stereo. That’s a very long transition. ES-355 stereos seem to follow a similar schedule. Here’s the weird wrinkle in 355’s. An unusual number of mono 355s have the stereo TRC. Probably laziness, although it’s pretty easy to spot the Varitone that gives it away. I’m pretty certain the truss cover would go on after they drilled the hole for the Varitone. But, what about the ones that say “Custom”. They seem to show up a fair amount as well. Here’s some conjecture since I’ve got no hard evidence…Anytime something was done for a customer that was out of the ordinary be it a custom color, a varitone on a 335, different fret markers, ebony board on a 335 or 345-stuff like that, the TRC often say “custom”. Clapton’s 335 did but there wasn’t anything custom about it. But keep in mind that this is a really easy part to change out, so who knows for certain what cover was originally on what guitar. Moving past 64, they were all narrow bevel and if you flip them over, they were black on the back-not white like the 58 to 64s. The earliest narrow bevel TRC’s are also two ply with a white back but later went to three ply b-w-b.  So, it’s a bit of a quagmire. Look for the horizontal roll marks to authenticate your really early 335 TRC but my 62 doesn’t seem to have them, nor does my 63. More research will be forthcoming on the “mysterious disappearing roll marks”. Probably the most useful bit of information here is that when you have an ambiguous 64-65 serial number, the TRC is perhaps the best way to sort it out if all else fails.

 

 

 

Martin guys and most other high end acoustic aficionados don’t give neck resets much thought. They kind of go with the territory on these old acoustics-partially because there is some much more movement over the course of years with a hollow body spruce top guitar than there is with a solid or semi hollow guitar like an ES-335. As I understand it  (and I’m no expert in these things but I can read and everything you read on the Internets is true right?)  they don’t affect the value of an old acoustic.  This isn’t true when it comes to most electrics however and not because it necessarily affects the playability but because it just isn’t “original” Well what isn’t original? The glue. Just the glue. That’s what a reset is in a solid or semi hollow guitar. It means the glue gave up and the neck came loose. I can’t think of a single instance that the neck angle on an ES-335 changed because of environmental issues like an acoustic.  I hadn’t even seen a reset 335 until recently. You see them on SGs all the time-more often than not these days. And there’s a good reason for that. The SG tenon is a flat tongue that is glued on one big surface and maybe a teeny bit on the very thin sides. The glue eventually gives up and the neck comes loose. Or the guitar gets knocked over and the week tenon gets busted. This just doesn’t seem to happen much with a 335 and there’s a good reason for that as well. The neck tenon (see this post) on a vintage 335 (up to mid 69) is pretty darn huge and has glue on three substantial surfaces. Beyond that, it’s glued to a big ol’ piece of maple that’s as solid as a tree. So, as a result, these guitars don’t generally need a reset because the necks just don’t ever move from their very secure pocket. But glue is not eternal. It is subject to the environment and age, just like the rest of us, and as a result, the neck can simply come loose on its own. So whaddya do? You take it to your friendly neighborhood luthier-be careful-I had a reader explain he was taking his guitar to a Lutheran which can be a real mistake-and have him reglue it using hide glue as was done at the factory. In my mind this should have a very minimal effect on the value of the guitar. the thing that affects the value, to me, isn’t even the fact that the neck was reglued-it’s the fact that the lacquer between the heel and the body has to be broken and either left broken or touched up. If you have it touched up, the black light police will know and will think maybe its a reneck or a repaired break. If you don’t touch up the lacquer and the job is done right, there is a hairline of space between the heel and the body on the back and sides. That’s usually the giveaway right? Well, no -not exactly. I’ve had a fair number of ES-335s and their brethren with that same space and no sign of any work at all. That joint can get a lot of stress over 50 years and the lacquer in there is pretty thin and can flake away on the side and split on the back. What I do if I see a space there is this: I pull the neck pickup and look in the rout. If there’s a clamp mark or two or three, it’s probably a reset. Gibson may have used clamps but they didn’t leave marks in there. If there a lot of extra glue in there, it’s a tossup. I’ve seen some really sloppy glue work on Gibsons. You want see really sloppy glue work? Look at the bottom edge of the center block. It usually looks like they hired trained (and not very well trained) gorillas to do the glue work there. I guess they just figured no one would bother looking. But here’s the thing. It’s a reglued joint not a break. If the nut came unglued and you stuck it back in with some Elmers you probably would give it much thought. If the guitar in question is solid and you like it (and if you can get a couple hundred off), then don’t worry about a reset. Glue is not eternal. Nor, probably, are Lutherans, but don’t tell them that.

 

 

We all think we know the product line pretty well since it really hasn’t changed much since 1958. It’s pretty simple-a 335 has a 3 way switch and dots or small blocks, a 345 has stereo wiring, a Varitone and parallelogram inlays and a 355 is red, with a trem and usually stereo with a Varitone but not always. That pretty much sums it up  until you start looking at what is actually out there. A 335 could be ordered with a Varitone. The probable reason there aren’t very many is because you could just buy a 345 at your local music store and be done with it. Custom orders took time. I love it when these oddities come up. Some are truly strange-like a short scale ES-345 that was sent to me from the UK. It kinda looks like a full size 345 but the stoptail is an inch or more closer to the neck. Look at the photo. The pickups are very close together as well. This is the only one I’ve ever seen. I don’t know the scale length-whether it’s like a Byrdland at 23.5 or something in between. When I sent the photo to the venerable (and enigmatic) Gil Southworth, he sent me a couple of oddballs that he has run across.  First he sent me a trap tail that looked pretty normal until I counted the strings. Yep. it’s a tenor ES-345 and the only one either of us has ever seen. But wait, the Great Gilvis wasn’t done with me yet. he also has a photo of what appears to be a 3/4 scale ES-335. On this one, the stoptail is lower than usual-not so low as the LP Jrs and Specials that came in the 22.75″ scale but still a half inch or so lower. But look at the neck length. It’s tough because of the angle and perspective but it sure looks like a tiny little neck to me. Time was when Gibson would make you whatever you wanted. When you consider that the volume of guitars that left the factory was pretty low until the mid sixties, so I’m guessing that they spent more time on each guitar and they had the time to make you what you wanted. You can still have that done-call a skilled luthier because I think that if you called the Gibson Custom Shop and asked them to build you a short scale 335, they’d laugh at you. I had a hard enough time getting them to just put a new neck on a 60’s 335 that had been broken (and they charged me $3500). They did a very good job and explained that the new necks don’t fit, so they had to use a Clapton leftover (too bad, right?).  While these guitars are great fun to look at, they don’t command anywhere near the dollars that the unusual colors do. Next, we’ll take a look at a very unusual ES-355 and a one of a kind EB-2 sent to me by a well known collector in California.

What’s the heck is this? Here’s a very original 64 which is complete with all of its original paperwork-including the invoice and it seems to have an extra piece of plastic between the neck pickup and the neck. Now, Gibson has been know to “adapt” partially built guitars to become slightly different guitars. Most of you are probably familiar with the “goof rings” on some 70’s goldtop Les Pauls that fill the gap between the mini humbuckers that were apparently placed in the P90 routs.

Waste not, want not, I guess. But, while those aren’t particularly common, they aren’t exactly rare either. But the “goof strip” if that’s what it is on this guitar is a new one on me. It was sent to me by a reader who asked me if it was original and I have almost no doubt that it is. I asked him to pull the neck pick to see what the rout looks like. I’ll update the post as soon as I get it. It would make sense, I suppose that if the router slips on an already completed 335 body, that it wouldn’t automatically hit the trash bin but I would expect maybe a “2” stamp to indicate a flaw. Not here. We all are aware that weird stuff happened all the time and if any one of you out there has some oddball feature like this, I’d like to see it. The first thing I though was that perhaps they were messing with a new way to do the neck join at the tenon. Gibson did do some unusual things like that-I had a 335 that appeared to have been stained using a rag rather than a spray gun that was authenticated as original. I guess the sprayer got clogged and he needed to hit his quota. It was, perhaps, the darkest cherry 335 I’ve had. Back to the “goof strip”-it occurred to me that it was sort of like the upper cover on an SG which covers part of the tenon. But I really think it’s covering an oversized or misplaced rout , in fact, you can see a little bit of unfinished area at the lower left hand corner as well. But, generally the pickup ring is pretty much butt up against the fingerboard so you couldn’t even fit this strip in there. So, here’s another theory-perhaps the buyer wanted the neck pickup to be slightly farther from the bridge for some sort of tonal reason and asked Gibson to make him a custom. Gibson being Gibson, instead of custom routing one, maybe they just took one that was completed, enlarged the rout to accommodate the move and put in the strip.  Sounds a lot like Gibson, doesn’t it?   What would we do without all these silly minutiae that occupy so much of out time and make this all so much fun.

In case you’re wondering what “goof rings” look like, here’s a 70’s Les Paul Deluxe probably routed for P90s that got minis. Cheap bastards.

 

You would think that the nice folks at Gibson wouldn’t do anything to diminish the value of their vintage guitar market but at the same time, their clientele is clamoring for more and more accurate reproductions. The aftermarket parts makers-especially in Japan-have gotten really good at making parts that are nearly indistinguishable from the original vintage parts. Clever aging make it even harder to tell just what the heck is on that 62 you just bought. To make matters worse, Gibson is also doing a pretty good job reproducing their own vintage parts. Recently I bought a 62 ES-335 that, to my eye, looked exactly right. It’s always tough to buy a guitar over the internet or even over the phone depending solely on photos and descriptions. I’ve had original owners swear they never changed a part other than the strings only to find out that it’s got the wrong bridge or the wrong pickups.

The 60’s were a time of “forgetfulness” it seems and those of us who were there and were old enough to partake remember it well. Or, uh, don’t remember it well. Or maybe remember that there was some illicit stuff going on and maybe you did something to your guitar that seemed pretty cool at the time but that you’ve now conveniently forgotten. OK, you get it. typically, when a “new” guitar arrives at my house or ay my studio in New York, I try to go through it immediately so that if something isn’t what it’s supposed to be, I can get it packed back up and on its way back to the seller. The seller is usually pretty indignant or pretty embarrassed. It’s pretty hard to tell which over the phone. The louder they protest, the more likely it is that they got caught doing something unseemly. Or not. Like I said-it’s tough to tell. The problem was the bridge. This guitar was in great, great shape, so I really couldn’t use wear patterns to distinguish what parts were original and what parts were correct or what parts were repros without some pretty close scrutiny. The bridge looked perfect. The old Historic Gibson ABR-1 didn’t have the mark on the back from the company who did the manufacturing, nor did it have the serif (the little line) on the bottom of the number “1”. Then they added it but the  edges of the rectangular indentation the words “Gibson ABR-1” sat in were kind of sloped and that gave the repros away. Then, it appears that they fixed that too and I had a bridge that looked awfully good. To make matters worse I have terrible eyesight. I wear contact lenses AND glasses most of the time. I can’t see close up worth a damn unless I take the lenses out and take off the glasses and put on magnifiers. So, I’ve got a bridge that I think is a repro but it looks perfect. Too new looking, but perfect. Then I got real up close and personal and started finding all sorts of little things. First was the font-it was just a little too narrow and the relief of the letters was wrong. On the real ones they are kind of flat. On the repros they are sharper.  You can also note that the “A” in ABR-1 has a lower crossbar in the repro and appears a good bit narrower. When I removed the saddles, I saw something else. In the pockets where the saddles sit, there are no markings in the original. They’re usually full of crud from years of playing but I have a pretty clean one here. The repro has three circular tooling marks in the high E, the G and the low E slots. Then I looked at the notches where the saddle adjustment screws go. On the original the sides are sloped -still “u” shaped but with sides that head slightly outward. the repro had u shaped notches too but the sides were dead straight up and down. So now you know. Look closely and always, always be suspicious of parts that look too new-even on a mint guitar because even if the guitar sits in its case for 45 years unplayed, the nickel will still tarnish and should have a patina. You won’t always have a couple of real ones to use as a comparison, so these photos should help.

The question I get most from readers is: “What’s it worth if…” You can finish the sentence yourself. The one that seems to vex a lot of people-especially the folks selling Grampa’s old Gibson is why an original Bigsby devalues an all original guitar by that much. Why would an extra cost option do that? And then they might ask, “then why is a hardtail Strat worth less?” I’ve asked that one myself. It all comes down to what folks want. There was a time, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when a Bigsby was a desirable option. You couldn’t do a lot of the really self indulgent, feedback laden, psychedelic stuff without a whammy-although they weren’t called whammys back then. But that was then. Now, the Bigsby isn’t so desirable. Whoever it is who decides what options players and collectors really want has decided that a Bigsby or other unit on your ES-335 is a big downer and knocks up to 25% off the value. That seems high but I don’t make the rules. But there is a silver lining. Most early ES-335’s that came with a Bigsby or Maestro were already drilled for the stoptail studs and they were covered by something. You’ve all seen the “Custom Made” plaque. There are also pearl inlays (my favorite), black plastic covers and even nickel covers. The conventional wisdom is that a Bigsby equipped ES is worth 25% less than an original stoptail. That made some sense when these were under $10,000 but is my  1960 ES-345 in blonde worth 25% less than an original stop? On that guitar, that’s a $10,000 reduction which is nuts.  On a ’64 ES-345, that’s a difference of maybe $2500. I don’t think an arbitrary percentage makes sense here. There’s no “official” guide to these kind of things although the Blue Book would like you to stick with the 25% (which is probably where it came from). I propose a separate price scale. I’ve found that on most ES-335 and ES-345 models, the Bigsby/studs option seems to devalue the guitar by around 10-15%. There aren’t very many Bigsby only block necks but there are quite a number of 345s and some 58-61 335s. With no factory stoptail stud holes, the option to convert to the more desirable stoptail is gone unless you want to start drilling holes in your guitar. In this case, the difference seems to be the 25% that is generally accepted. That begs the question: “Which is worth less-a factory Bigsby with studs or an original stoptail with Bigsby holes? I honestly don’t know. It can be tough to tell which came first. You can tell on the red ones by looking at the bushings to see if there’s any red finish on them. If there is, then they are original. You could look for lacquer on a sunburst. But, really, how big a deal is this? It goes back to the value of a hole which I’ve covered a few times. A Bigsby/stud 335 has 4 holes in the top. But a Bigsby only has just two. A stoptail also has two. A 335 with the Bigsby removed has 6 extra holes in it. None of this affects the sound or playability by very much. What about tuner holes or reamed out tuner shaft holes? 10%? 5%? I guess it also depends on what other issues there are. A mint 335 with Grovers would be affected differently than a beater. The question is how? Percentage-wise, the Grovers on the mint one would be less but dollar wise they would affect the value more. There are no rules. For example, we all accept refins and headstock repairs at around half price but why is it when I price a refin that way, it disappears in a day or two? Supply and demand? Maybe, but I think the real truth is that, while the convention is for 50%, the reality is that buying a refin is a great way to get a vintage piece that you otherwise couldn’t afford. If done well and with the proper materials, it will look as good and sound as good as one that is all original. And while I don’t usually go for headstock breaks, the same can apply-if it’s done right, a headstock repair can be almost irrelevant on every front except value. Frankly, it gives me a headache. It’s enough to make you ask the question: “What’s it worth if…?”