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Jimmy’s final signature guitar should not be a Fender.

Flogger

Active member
Joined
Sep 23, 2008
Messages
555
It's like a maroon or plum red-purplish painted over gold top, I believe. Likely 50s gold top, it's been conjectured, right?

430744a7309c8571d6a65eb7aa56a046.jpg

There were at least two, the 50s pictured, and a sandwich bodied early 70s red sparkle top.

One year at NAMM I got roped in at Transperformance to demo their system for an hour or so, no one on the booth knew the Page tunings. I would prefer a G Force ststem, frankly. A sizeable hunk (most of the back is hollowed out and replaced with electronics and servos) is removed, and plastic and metal are heavier than wood. Add in the AC cable along with the output cable and they're pretty unwieldy.
 

mos6507

New member
Joined
Sep 18, 2020
Messages
4
The red Les Paul with the B-Bender is known as #3. I've read (maybe here, maybe elsewhere) that it's actually a Norlin era sandwich body and that Gibson decided it wouldn't make sense to reproduce something of such dubious reputation, despite its connection with Jimmy. The reason Jimmy used it was probably more pragmatic than due to its tones. This may sound like heresy but when I first hooked up my VG-99 back in 2007 the very first thing I tried to do with it was assign a +2 pitch shift to the footpedal and started playing Ten Years Gone live. It works wonders and doesn't require routing out your guitar.

That being said, for completist's sake would I like to see Gibson do a Jimmy Page Les Paul with B-Bender? Sure, but it should not be done as a slavish recreation but rather a new model built with his input, similar to the tweaks that were made to the pickup selector on the Black Beauty.

As far as the Transperformance, it seemed like a dream gadget back in the day, but much of that functionality can now be done digitally. Gliding gradually from tuning to tuning the way he used to do during the Page/Plant tour, well, that's pretty hard to do on a VG-99 or SY-1000 but most of the functionality, yes. So from a practical standpoint it's hard to justify and that's probably also why the company behind Transperformance is probably just sitting there waiting to take orders these days. Coincidentally, if you look closely at how the Transperformance works it shares some electronic concepts with Roland systems anyway because it uses polyphonic pickups (actually, by the looks of them, magnetic tape heads like the very earliest Roland guitars) in order to help detect the pitch of each string. Even though the Transperformance is "obsolete" I think it's gotten kind of a bad rap thanks to the Gibson robot tuners, which, although newer tech and far less invasive, were unreliable.


So given that the B-Bender and Transperformance owe their reasons to exist to the accessories added to them more than the unique merits of the underlying guitars, it's harder to make a strong case for them. (So much of yesterday's once futuristic guitar tech is now merely retro-futuristic today.)

And you know, the thing with Jimmy is his gear really hasn't evolved much since the 90s. If he were to be involved with a new guitar I'd rather it be something forward-thinking again given that the Transperformance was the last "innovative" technology he embraced but he just doesn't seem very forward-thinking in general anymore. (He actually seems to spend more time sharing memories of his early lean Yardbirds days on his FB feed than even Zep.) And I say that as a long suffering fan waiting for that solo project he's been teasing us with for the last 20 years.
 
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