My Gibson Les Paul was voted the most hated guitar
In a community vote on thefretboard.co.uk, my ‘Blueberry Burst’ guitar was one of the most hated guitars out of hundreds of guitars owned by members.
I remember speaking to a member of staff at World Guitars in Gloucestershire, England and whilst standing in awe of a 1958 reissue Les Paul, as traditional a looking guitar as there ever could be. I was told in no uncertain terms that “Nobody wants a blue Les Paul”. I immediately felt slightly aggreived because at the time, the only Les Paul I owned was blue!
“Nobody wants a blue Les Paul.” — a guitar salesman.
Maybe he was correct, in many respects traditionalists don’t really want blue guitars, fewer still, a blue Les Paul! Maybe it was indicative of the demographic of the clientele that frequented his store, but I was not representative of that notion and nor did I subscribe to it. I found the statement ignorant and misrepresentative of the guitar community, even if just a small minority share a different opinion.
It’s a statement that has stuck with me ever since and unfortunately it made me start to re-evaluate my tastes and lose a certain amount of my identity with regard to unique things I used to look for in guitars.
Gibson Custom reissue ‘the ultimate Les Paul’
In 2017, I sold my Gibson Les Paul Standard, a beautiful guitar that had a Koa top, a rare feature of some of the obscure experiments made by Gibson in the 2013 line of Standards.
The person who I sold it to put it back up for sale shortly after stating that he “prefered the thicker neck profile of the Gibson Custom reissue guitars”. This got me thinking. It was at a time where many were discussing the virtues of Gibson Custom guitars and how they seemed to naturally fit the mould of what we, as guitarists, believe is the ultimate version of a Les Paul.
But that realisation came too late, I’d already bought a Les Paul that I felt would be a good replacement for my Koa topped Standard. A Blueberry Burst Gibson Les Paul Standard made in 2017.
Blue.
I watched an Alanis Morissette concert on DVD years ago, the lighting shone on the guitarists Les Paul, making it appear blue. Electric blue. It looked stunning. I can’t remember if that was the colour of the guitar or just the way the light shone on it.
Blue was my favourite colour, so since then, I was addicted to the idea of a blue Gibson Les Paul and I searched for years for one. I got a blue Epiphone Les Paul in the interim and searched endlessly for a Gibson until 2013. I gave up after years of fruitless attempts at trying to get a custom made Les Paul or trying to find a standard line blue Gibson. There was a the Manhattan Midnight edition (below), but they were rare and even then, it didn’t really fit the idea I had in mind. I wanted a blue burst.
In 2017, Gibson released a bunch of wild and weird colours and I first saw the Blueberry Burst in a Las Vegas guitar shop and I kind of liked it. My interest had waned over the years but I felt like I could easily replace my 2013 Standard with a blue one and be very happy with the swap, as we all know, that usually turns out to be a mistake and regretted later in life (which is true in this case, too).
I returned home and made the purchase of a Blueberry Burst from Peach Guitars. I loved it. I kept the Koa for a period of time, but ultimately, owning two Gibson Les Paul’s felt overindulgent and I sold it on.
The pain* of owning a blue Les Paul
*I say “pain” in jest, of course. In the face of what seemed like a guitar everyone else derided, I loved that guitar. I adored the way it looked and went about my life without a care in the world, enjoying my purchase.
I had trouble with tuning, what Les Paul doesn’t, and attributed that to the raised tailpiece which seemed to be a “feature” of Gibson’s production and quality control back then. A completely unfixable and deliberately deeper neck break angle that meant that the tailpiece had to be raised almost a centimetre above the body so as to stop strings touching the back edge of the bridge. It drove me wild.
That aside, I liked the guitar and how it sounded. I became a massive fan of Gibson Burstbucker Pro’s pickups.
In 2018, the sale of the century happened and I managed to get a 2017 Gibson Les Paul R8 for a very good price, as did many others in what seemed like a massive blowout of Gibson old stock, the largest sale we’ve seen in years and not seen anything like it since.
I had found myself gravitating toward the R8 more than anything else in my collection, including the blue Standard and ultimately, the blue wasn’t enough to save the guitar, in my eyes, and the tailpiece was still a bug bear, starkly different, I might add, to the build on the R8, which set the tailpiece dead set against the body, which, ultimately, felt more solid.
Rate My Guitar
Shortly after the sale, I decided it would be a good idea to start a forum thread, asking people to post pictures of their guitars and by way of a vote, everyone could up or down vote their favourites. The thread generated hundreds of posts within days, and now stands at around 900 posts across 43 pages. One of the most successful threads of 2018, alongside the aforementioned Les Paul sale thread which helped everyone buy great guitars at a reasonable cost.
Of course, like many, I posted pictures of all of my guitars, previous and current and waited for the results to come in. Within hours the picture of my beloved, but now ex-blue Gibson Les Paul was getting hammered in the ratings. The polls unanimously rendered it hated, reviled and scoffed at. It turns out that in general, the guitar community dislike blue Les Paul’s.
It must be said that the guitar community generally disliked many other guitars that didn’t conform to one’s notion of what a traditional guitar should look like. Dozens of beautiful, but unique guitars were slated and receieved poor ratings, like mine did. And of course, conversely, guitars which adhered to tried and tested rules of looking vintage and had nice, respectable burst-like hues, were upvoted accordingly.
What does this say about our community? Not a lot, except that maybe we’re of a certain age? Maybe the majority have their guitar heroes who played “normal” (traditional) looking guitars. Maybe we just despise something that looks different. Maybe we don’t despise anything at all and we’re merely just clicking vote buttons for fun. It was an interesting experiment nonetheless and it got the community together in a way that we hadn’t really experienced up to that point.
It must be said that since the thread started, many members of the community have approached me to say that the blue Les Paul was beautiful and that they couldn’t understand the result. But quite why it got so many down-votes, I don’t think we’ll ever know. Maybe I’ll put a questionnaire out next time.
Here’s the “Rate my guitar” thread. https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/145818/rate-my-guitar/
Do you have any stories about guitars that you find unique? Maybe you don’t care about what others think. Where do you stand on the blue guitar debate?
