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The Gibson Les Paul Deluxe: A Short History...

G

gary buff

Active member
Joined
Nov 18, 2001
Messages
195
FWIW Gruhn says from '72 to '75 you could order a LP Deluxe with factory full size humbuckers and it came with "Standard" on the TRC which may have been what happened here except the TRC got switched at some point.
 
Bob Womack

Bob Womack

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 8, 2002
Messages
2,298
gary buff said:
FWIW Gruhn says from '72 to '75 you could order a LP Deluxe with factory full size humbuckers and it came with "Standard" on the TRC which may have been what happened here except the TRC got switched at some point.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but they were sunburst guitars. My '74 is one of those. As far as I know, the gold tops seemed always to be Deluxes with small humbuckers and the Standards seemed always to be sunbursts with big buckers. The Kalamazoo special order Standards didn't have gold in the serial number and the gold top Deluxes did. The sunburst was on the front, back sides, back of the neck, and back and sides of the headstock. I bought this one back in 1977. Because I found that they were weird birds, I have researched these 3000-some-odd guitars for forty five years. But Gibson was such a hodge-podge at the time anything is possible. I just haven't seen it yet! Anyone who has studied the period nows that things pop up that confound you. The name "Kalamazoo Small Script Standard" has been applied to these because the script "Standard" on the truss rod covers of these guitars was smaller than the script used on the TRC of the official Standard model that was introduced in Nashville in 1976. You see a lot of factory Deluxes with a Standard truss rod cover and large buckers but the "Standard" TRC is always a Nashville Standard TRC. Why? Because Gibson didn't offer the Kalamazoo Standard TRCs for sale in the accessory department but they DID offer the Nashville Standard ones. When I bought this guitar, there were already Nashville Standard TRCs available in the accessory rack in the store I bought it from.

A changed TRC (to blank, Nashville Standard, or something else) is just one of those flags that catches my attention.

Really, the best way to date one of these is by the serial number, the pot codes, and a few features. I'd love to see the pickup cavities of the above guitar to see if there is a trace of sunburst.

pauly2.jpg


Bob
 
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