The guitar plays perfectly as is, and the frets are a light dressing away from perfection. Since this guitar has not been used heavily, the wide and medium height frets have plenty more miles left in them and very few flat spots. The fingerboard is in similarly fine fettle, and an absence of dirt shows the colour and complexity of the Brazilian rosewood in all its beauty. Although there’s one dent on the front edge of the lower bout, between the pickguard bracket and controls, there’s almost no playwear on the back of the neck and the headstock has never needed to be repaired. There’s lacquer checking all over, but we’re talking fine lines rather than finish flakiness. It has a standard width, it’s fast, comfortable and oddly contemporary. There’s not a great deal of depth and it feels more like a flattened D than a C. It bears no resemblance to the fatter 50s profiles and instead feels closer to the type of neck carve you might associate with Fenders of 1963. The cherry back and sides are no less vibrant, and while the top veneer is a single piece, there’s a centre join at the back.Ĭlearly these are all 1960s Gibson features, but the biggest giveaway is the neck profile and this example is fairly typical of the era. The cherry sunburst is much the same, too, and removing the pickguard confirms that the ‘tomato soup’ redness has barely faded. Outside there are four ‘mirror’ knobs identical to those used on the last of the Bursts. Peeking inside with an inspection mirror, we see four intact original potentiometers and a pair of Sprague ‘black beauty’ capacitors. This feature, which gave the ES-225 some of the sustain characteristics and feedback resistance of a semi-solid, was dropped for the ES-330 and all the ES-125TC models. The ES-225 had a substantial maple block glued under the top, right between the parallel braces.
0 kommentar(er)
