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1959 Burst Replica

renderit

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 19, 2009
Messages
10,951
Thank you. Yes...

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And my ad campaign in Guitar Player back in the 80's was a massive fail for some reason as well. It is still shown in college marketing classes as how NOT to do it. I'm perplexed...
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T.Allen

Moderator
Joined
Sep 11, 2014
Messages
2,662
Ren, you may have just been under-capitalized. You need investors. I will happily throw $2 at that. Let me know and I will have the lawyers draw up the contract.
 

renderit

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 19, 2009
Messages
10,951
Ren, you may have just been under-capitalized. You need investors. I will happily throw $2 at that. Let me know and I will have the lawyers draw up the contract.

I don't know. Looking back I don't think more capital looks gooder. I thinks I had enough. Thanks for the offer though. But you must have some cheap lawyers!

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Mars Hall

Active member
Joined
Nov 26, 2008
Messages
1,829
Recently came across a Gil Yaron replica that I purchased. I have to say it's the best "Les Paul style" guitar I've ever played. Compared to many Historic reissues, it's the boss. Although, I've never had a real Burst in my hands long enough to know the difference, I can say this guitar holds its own, in some cases, exceeds other 50's Gold top guitars I've had the pleasure to play. While on a quest to learn more about this luthier, I stumbled across the thread at tdpri about his first LP replica and consequently this thread here. As for his guitars ever being mistaken for a real burst, GY signs and marks areas of his builds to prevent this from happening, case closed.

As for the tone? There are some things GY does that I believe are crucial to making a great LP. Not sure if he used magical "old growth" wood on my example but give a look at some excerpts from his build thread on "wood selection". These are just some of the reasons GY guitars are so consistently awesome.



"Experience is a bless when selecting a piece of wood in order to get a target tone and I will not get into details about this, but in general there are a few things to consider:

For a given specie at a given size:

1) Weight (mass): more mass = more sustain, more treble, less midrange, clearer low end (in one word, "punchy"). Less mass = blurry lows, more midrange, less treble, less sustain (in one word, "warm").

2) Cut orientation: Quartered = slightly rounder tone , Slab=more "open" tone

3) Grain: even straight grain is easier to "read" as far as tone expectations while swirly and "crazy" grain has a higher tendency to surprise...(sometimes in a very good way)

4) Tap tone: long sustaining tap is always good... the pitch doesn't mean much by itself (you'll soon see why) but will give an indication to the density of the wood where higher pitch=denser and lower pitch=airy. I use tap tone mainly to find dead blanks and discard them. If it rings loud and has good sustain (bell) it passes.

5) Tap tone evenness: it's not enough to tap one area and it's crucial to NOT hold the wood in your other hand when tapping... it needs to be set on very small lifters at the very corners of the blank. The tap tone should be more or less even across the blank (it never gets 100% since tapping the center is nothing like tapping close to the edges... but you can develop a feel for this and get an idea of the evenness of the blank)

6) "Surface tone": without a better name for this weird wood attribute I just call it "surface tone"... when you move your dry hands over the wood blank you'll hear a "whishhhh" sound... if the whishhh is not crispy and strong enough it means that there will be less high end harmonics in the tone... not always a bad thing of course... but it's a great way to tell. (no I'm not insane... try this for yourselves)

This pile has passed the stages mentioned above with great success (-;"


"OK... so once done with the quick and easy tests I should have a pretty good idea of the quality and general attributes of the blanks. Now things get a little more complicated...

Any piece of wood is a non homogeneous volume of material with a lot going on inside it... Density changes, inner tensions, grain direction curves, sap % levels, sap crystallization levels, humidity... etc... every area of the blank may have different properties but the sum of all the areas together gives the entire "average" properties of the entire blank. Now here's the problem... every time the wood size is diminished by cutting it down the entire "average" may change and the volume shape is changed. Those two factors can get pretty far off from the original blank attributes.
So... what I do next is bring the rough blanks to their almost final shape."

"Once they are at their final size and shape I run a two (sometimes 3) octave tuning fork tests. This is done by running different forks all over the entire body, neck, top or board.

I note the level of each fork between 1 to 10 and mark hot and dead areas if found.
I give special attention to the neck joint and bridge area on a body and the body joint and headstock on a neck. Fingerboards have to be 100% perfect to prevent dead spots.
The bodies will be checked again with the tops attached to get the final tonal properties."

"High mids dropped and the tap tone wasn't very good any more. The entire upper area of this body bellow the waist was dead! Without this extra test I could have got me a dead-burst...

Did it ever happen to you that a great sounding rectangular blank ended up with a lemon guitar? If it did, the explanation above might help to prevent that.


Aside from the passed/failed test the response to all the different frequencies tells me what to expect from that part... and that brings me to the next and final step which is matching.
Selecting a killer body, neck and board means nothing unless they are matched.
Matching is consisted of two aspects that can be used together:
1) Cancellation
2) Resonance

A good example for cancellation is a light weight early 50's Strat where the body is warm with a lot of low mids and less treble and the neck is bright being a one piece slab cut hard rock maple with a fat profile. In that case the brightness from the neck will be canceled a little by the lack of brightness on the body. That means that the overall acoustic level is sacrificed in order to get a warmer tone. The guitar will still keep some nice brightness... but nothing like... say... if we use a bright heavy dense Ash body (70's style).

Resonance, on the other hand, is achieved by matching parts with similar EQ properties in order to get them enhanced.

A careful use of both of the above aspects can get you into the tone design domain.
It takes some practice and trial and error like anything in life... but the theory is solid and allows for some serious tools to help building better instruments. There's much more to it of course but one has to experiment and develop his own feel and taste for things.
I can only say this... it's almost impossible to get a killer sounding guitar by chance. Good and nice ones yes... but not the ones that will drop your jaw to the floor.
Even in the old days, they never did all that in the rapid production lines but they gave more attention to at least selecting the lumber quality, weight and origins. Many of the original Lesters are not so great but some are just amazing... same with Teles, Strats...etc... only some (I believe less than 20%) are really amazing guitars and it's a result of pure luck of the draw at the factory.

The next layer of tone design are the pu's which are also matched in pretty much the same way as wood to the other parts. but this is a whole other story and I think I'm starting to get tired of myself... this post is too long (-;"
 

fretboarder

Member
Joined
May 20, 2015
Messages
84
what happened to the video, does anyone know the country or region it was made??

cheers dudes..
 

Pellman73

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 9, 2016
Messages
1,762
Is a Gil Yaron les paul style guitar a replica, a fake, or just a les paul style guitar given that it doesn’t say Gibson on the headstock

do those of you that have a problem with the ones that say Gibson on a non Gibson instrument have a problem with the tongue in cheek Gilyaron logo on the headstock— that in my opinion takes the “fake” out of the equation just enough to slippery slope slide it off into “les paul style” guitar vs “fake” or “replica”

I happen to think that anything that is trying to be like an original burst is a replica. Whether or not it was made in a factory by the people at Gibson or made somewhere else the spirit of the exercise is to reproduce the magic of those original guitars. I do think it is wrong to put “Gibson” on a non-Gibson guitar. Period.... just because it could be passed off as a Gibson— and that’s fraud.

but to say that a burst type guitar made by Gibson is any more authentic than another similar attempt by someone else I think you could argue they are both essentially the same on one point— they aren’t real bursts!
 
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