Larry Mal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 5:35 pm
Which brings me to the ES-339. I had one in my possession for a month or so, from my man who I bought the brown (now there's a color I don't like) Stratocaster. Same deal, he needed to put some money together, and it would have been a good deal for me, easy payments, he probably ended up dumping it at a huge loss which he tends to do.
I hated it. I remember flipping it over and seeing "Custom Shop" on the back there, which at the time I believed it to be, it was a new model. Turns out that Gibson was just slapping "Custom Shop" on non-custom ES instruments (my ES-330 has it) for no clear reason, regardless I was marveling at how such a piece of shit could be a custom instrument.
I was pretty anti-Gibson in those days, and unskilled at setting guitars up, I might get along with it more now. But at the time I found it to be a heavy, uninspiring, overwrought piece of junk that I didn't want at any price. I hadn't learned how to reconcile with PAF pickups, regardless I hated the way it sounded, played, and felt. I do not remember it having a pleasing acoustic sound to it. I don't remember it having anything good about it.
I hope your experience is different and it very well might be.
Frankly it set me back from Gibson for a few more years. I didn't get the Gibson thing until I got my Firebird, and that ES-339 and my previous uninspiring Les Paul Studio were so lame I might have never reconciled with Gibson if they didn't make the Firebird, which I always loved the looks of and just had to have. Turns out they are wonderful, but I bought that based on my eyes falling in love. I had never played one.
And like you, when I played my ES-335 for the first time, which was immediately before the 2020 election, I thought that it played in a way that I hadn't quite found before. I think that Gibsons as a rule play great, somehow the ES-335 was a grade higher. It makes me feel like some chording is a little more possible- I also got that from the ES-330.
And I also wondered why it had taken me so long to get there... I mean, the guitar is legendary, it's one of the very few Gibsons that they have never quit making for a reason (the other is the SG). Sometimes you just gotta go along with what everybody else says, you know?
Ok, so I have to circle back around to this because this evening, I went and played a 339. Someone offered me the 339 and cash for the 335, so I thought, "if it's as nice as this 335 but smaller, and I can get some money back in the process, that's a win-win!"
Oh boy. Was it ever not a win-win. I had never encountered one of these mythical "shameful Gibson QC disasters" you read about, until I beheld this guitar.
It was a 2008 "Custom Shop" that wasn't made in the Custom shop, just like yours. I'll get the good out of the way. The neck was huge and felt amazing, and acoustically, it was nearly as vibrant and lovely as my 335.
But man. I'm going to have trouble using words to paint an adequate picture of how this thing looked.
At probably 30 different points along the binding, there were these weird, light-colored voids or bubbles in the finish. Totally flat to the touch, but looked as though the finish had separated from something. Never seen anything like it before, but they were everywhere from the neck through the body in varying sizes.
The finish in general was also so badly checked that it was starting to flake off in places. Several spots around the edge of the headstock and nut had finish crusting up and separating from the wood like a sunburn that was trying to peel. All the finish edges around each letter of the Gibson inlay and the decorative shape in the center of the headstock had cracked and were lifting and turning opaque. You could feel the edges around the letters.
And the neck heel. The guy had had the guitar since 2012, and wasn't aware of a neck reset but either it already had a neck reset in its first four years of its life, or something was massively wrong. Half of the heel (treble strings to the middle) looked OK with just a slightly noticeable linear joint in tangential lighting, but then from the middle to the bass strings, there was this massive, jagged finish crack with more of those clear crusty edges on either side.
So either it was a neck reset where only half of the overlying finish repair blended properly, or the glue joint was so badly unstable that it was shifting and caused the grand canyon of finish cracks.
I've seen nitro guitars that were moved between hot and cold, left in zero humidity, etc, but never in my life have I seen a 13 year-old finish in this disastrous a state. I can't believe it was massively abused climate-wise since its setup and functional status were so great.
It really just looked like something was chemically wrong with how they finished it. The guy was hoping to get "mint condition ES-339" trade value for it and there was just no chance I'd ever consider taking on a guitar that so clearly is screaming, "not all of my problems are as easily spotted as my finish." Especially that probable neck reset. This is obviously a guitar that has been busy imploding since the day it was made.
It gave me a deeper appreciation of how perfectly my '95 335 was built. 26 years later and other than some patina, it's no worse for wear than the day it was made.
I'll definitely never consider an ES-339 sight-unseen, that's for sure. It's such a shame, because it actually felt and sounded great. If I could find as lively an example as this one, it would be a perfect smaller and lighter 335 substitute for my purposes, as long as it wasn't trying to shed its skin or implode or explode or whatever the hell was going on with this one. It was so sad seeing such a nice guitar with such fatal flaws. It was like one or two of the people who worked on it wanted to quit but decided to try doing such a bad job that they get severance pay for being fired first.
The artist formerly known as mbene085.