IN WITH THE OLD?
The secret of vintage tone is old wood, right? It’s certainly a belief prevalent in vintageguitar circles and there are thriving businesses predicated on that hypothesis. But must you have vintage wood and, by extension, vintage guitars to achieve authentic vintage tone? And secondly, do electric guitars improve with age?
Let’s begin with Les Paul ‘conversions’ as a case study. For the uninitiated, this is an increasingly popular practice than involves taking a ‘lesser’ 1950s – or sometimes late 1960s – Les Paul and using it as a donor guitar to convert to 1958-’60 Les Paul Standard, aka Burst, specifications.
Les Paul conversions are particularly interesting, because they’re a unique instance of major structural alterations and total refinishes being deemed acceptable to tone hounds. In effect, they test the ‘old wood’ hypothesis to destruction… sometimes literally.
Owning a real Burst is sheer fantasy for most of us, but a mid-50s Goldtop is
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