Larry Mal wrote: ↑Sat Oct 01, 2022 11:39 am
Gibson ES-339?
I don't know. You seem to be saying it's another V, but that would seem a little odd. You wouldn't buy a Les Paul. You have an SG and a V. You had a Firebird and ES-335 and sold those...
You love Gibson guitars, is what I'm realizing. I wonder if you have more than Fenders at this point.
It
is a little odd, which is why I spent a year trying to "pick one." I can't. And yes, I suppose I do really love Gibsons at this point. They're not outnumbering Fenders yet, but they've multiplied.
Flurko wrote: ↑Sat Oct 01, 2022 11:35 am
'58 style flying V, even if IIRC you didn't like them as much ? Or just a standard V.
Not a '58, but yeah. They're totally Flying Vs.
The first one I found was the black '67 style. Love it. Totally unexpected.
So I started to be open to trying more. And I happened across this Melody Maker Flying V:
It's got a maple body and baked maple fretboard with a mahogany neck. The whole body is slightly scaled down - thinner, but also a bit narrower and shorter than a standard Flying V.
It's got a nice, chunky neck and the whole thing is finished in a satin nitro that wears quite quickly. It's practically weightless. It's my first one-pickup guitar, and came with a bright but high-output pickup in the bridge. I pulled the six screws to make it more P90-ish, and that's when I realized it's a keeper. I'm going to try dropping the Creamery WRHB-style Baby '71 into it that I pulled from a PRS I got in a previous trade (and moved on, after putting the stock pickups back in), and I'll pick up a proper wraparound bridge for it at some point (for better intonation, and probably a locking one to eliminate the bridge lean).
They were only made for one year (2011) and aren't highly sought-after, and it's honestly such a nice and fun guitar that I kept getting cold feet every time I thought about selling it. The neck is thicker than my other Vs, and it practically floats away like a helium balloon but somehow isn't neck heavy. I kept thinking about how I couldn't find a nicer guitar for the money I might make if I sold it, and I finally realized that that means it's a keeper. It's a lightweight US-made Gibson with a nitro finish that I got thrown in to a trade for Squier money...what's not to love about that?
On the other end of the spectrum, I received another V as part of a trade, and told myself I had to choose between it and my black one. The reality is that letting either go would pain me, and I once again found myself asking the question, "What could I find that I like more than this for the same money?"
It's a 2020 "70's" Flying V, though none of the features actually line up with the 70's Vs. It's just a '67 V with neck binding, and they threw on some pickup rings to make it look more like James Hetfield's V (which was a '70s model, but was a knockoff and not a Gibson).
I just discovered that I don't have any photos on my computer of it, so here's a stock one:
I think I've gone on about how much I love the feel of bound Gibson necks, and I know Larry's voiced a hypothesis that Gibson basically tries harder on any model with binding, and they seem to play better than the lower end models without.
Well, that was exactly the case with this one. The neck is absolutely divine, and it came to me in mint condition with the intense vanilla "new Gibson" smell intact. The guy who traded it to me also had a nice bone nut cut for it, which is a weak point on seemingly any Gibson with strings that exit the nut at an angle. The new nut is perfect, and it plays like an absolute dream.
The thing is, it's got a
very "warm, fat Gibson" feel to it acoustically, while my black V is unusually snappy feeling. The net result is that the black on feels closer to my Fenders as I play it, and the white one feels a lot more like the 335 I had (or the couple of Les Pauls that have transiently passed through my collection).
Like the black one, the pickups are too hot for my taste, and the white-on-off-white looks aren't to my taste either. I kept trying to convince myself to sell or trade it for those reasons - not loving its looks and knowing I'd need to at least swap the pickups to be happy with it. But I keep finding myself playing it even in its stock configuration, and it's such an exceptional player that I realized I can't let it go. It's the best-playing Gibson I've yet to encounter, and when you have a guitar that feels that inspiring to play, I've learned that you don't look a gift horse in the mouth and just
keep it.
So, to celebrate its transition to "keeper," I've gone and ordered a black pickguard and truss rod cover to rid myself of its Hetfield impression it's doing. I've got two sets of nice alnico-poled humbuckers on hand (D'Urbano Big Birds and Fralin Twangmasters) to try in the two Vs, and haven't decided which to put in this vs the black one, but they're both covered so the idea is for it to end up looking kinda like this:
And thus concludes my baring of my dirty, Flying V-loving soul. I have three of them now. I would not have seen this coming a couple of years ago. But a great weight has been lifted, admitting how much I love them. I've kinda been hiding these two, trying to convince myself that they're just trade fodder passing through. But I really think both are going to stick. The odds of finding a guitar that plays better than the 70's V are near-zero, and the odds of finding a more fun guitar than the Melody Maker for the money are similarly low.