Locking units from TonePros are another popular retrofit. On the subject of stop tailpieces, some vintage tonehounds profess to prefer the sonic properties of lightweight aluminium. Top-wrapping also allows you to screw the tailpiece right down for maximum resonance without creating a break angle over the saddles that’s too steep and risking string failure as a result. Billy Gibbons is a fan, and Joe Bonamassa swears that it makes a set of 0.011s feel like a set of 0.0105s. Instead of threading the strings through the back of your tailpiece in the traditional manner, thread them in from the front and wrap them back over the top. A heavier set will also help with stability if you have a vibrato installed.įor a slinkier feel with a stopbar tailpiece, try ‘top-wrapping’. Our preference is a set of 0.011s on a Gibson as the nominal 24.75-inch scale length allows for easy bends while still offering a little fight. It’s a good, old-fashioned domino effect: a guitar that is comfortable to play will help you relax and play better, and you’ll sound better into the bargain as your playing becomes more confident, fluid and articulate.Įxperiment with different string gauges and action heights and find the combination that you like the best.
Modern entry-level versions have been responsible for many a guitarist’s first encounter with an ES-335 type guitar – the Epiphone Dot (street price £349) is still one of the best bang-for-buck electric guitars on the market and it offers huge upgrade potential – turn the page to find out how…īefore you even plug your guitar in – and this goes for any electric, not just thinline semis – you can have a huge influence on your amplified tone simply by ensuring that your guitar is set up to your liking, in tune and intonated properly.
Numerous variants would be spawned in the decades to come, but early close-cousins the Epiphone Sheraton (1958) and Riviera (1961) have obtained classic status in their own right. Not so the ES-335, which was an immediate hit and has remained in continuous production ever since. In reality, the other big launches that year – the sunburst Les Paul, the Flying V and the Explorer – all crashed and burned by 1961 and had to wait to be rediscovered by new generations of players. Nearly six decades later, 1958 might appear to be the year that King Midas came to work for Gibson’s R&D department.
The upscale ES-345 and ES-355 models were officially introduced in 1959, although 10 ES-355s shipped in late 1958. Most sources agree that 317 of Gibson’s new thinline semis left the factory that year – 267 in sunburst (ES-335TD) and 50 in natural (ES-335TDN), marketed at $267.50 and $282.50 respectively. Yet when it entered production in April 1958, the revolutionary ES-335 benefited from the various technological advances that had recently been applied to the Les Paul, in the shape of new PAF humbucking pickups, a tune-o-matic bridge and stop tailpiece. In addition to its feedback-reducing properties, the hybrid ES-335 design would deliver an even balance, light overall weight and a comfortable seated playing experience – addressing the concerns of many late-50s Gibson customers, for whom the small and heavy Les Paul Model was still something of a white elephant. Yet rather than starting with a solid centre-block and adding hollow wings to make the instrument look and feel more like a guitar, McCarty inserted the centre-block into a double-cutaway, 16-inch thinline archtop – it was a natural evolution from the thinline-bodied ES-225, ES-350T and Byrdland that had arrived in 1955 following player requests for guitars that were easier to handle. This principle wasn’t a million miles away from Les Paul’s Log prototype that Gibson rejected shortly before the United States of America entered World War II.
It would get some of the same tone as a regular solidbody, plus the instrument’s hollow wings would vibrate and we’d get a combination of an electric solidbody and a hollowbody.” Applying the company’s archtop heritage to the new demand for electric guitars that were more controllable at higher volumes, Gibson’s then-president Ted McCarty “came up with the idea of putting a solid block of maple in an acoustic model.