TONES @ The Guitar Rack #2
Gibson Les Paul Custom
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Soldano SLO 100, Crunch to High Gain!
Welcome back to the next installment of TONES @ The Guitar Rack - very happy to have you! Doesn’t the smile above just say it all? :)
If you’re new to this series, please see the link below for the introductory blog post:
What is 'TONES @ The Guitar Rack'?
The Guitar
If my terrible intro ‘joke’ didn’t scare you away from the video immediately, I hope you appreciated this stunning Les Paul! The Gibson brand is an interesting one for me as a guitar player. From my guitar influences (Mark Tremonti being the biggest), I landed in the PRS camp from the start. Playing more and more PRS Guitars, I somehow never found myself landing a Gibson that felt ‘right’. They always tended to feel clunky, uncomfortable, and just didn’t play as well overall. In retrospect, I never really gave them a fair chance - I had a small set of bad experiences (which seems to be more common with Gibson over the years, unfortunately), and continued to feed my PRS addiction instead of branching out. Just last year, I took a chance on a 2012 Gibson Les Paul Standard that 100% changed this perception for me. This LPC is my next attempt in the camp of Gibson guitars, and it DOES NOT disappoint.
The guitar plays REALLY well. Separate from various comments I could make on its great mechanics, if just has a great VIBE. That is really what I’m finding sets a good Gibson apart - this ‘x-factor’ in its overall resonance and feel that just really shines through as you play. The top and finish on this one definitely don’t disappoint - blue guitars do sound better, right? May try to take a swim in that quilt on one of our next hot Arizona days!
The guitar is in Eb Standard (Eb Ab Db Gb Bb eb) using D’addario Skinny Top Heavy Bottoms (EXL 52-42-32-17-13-10). The strings seem to balance out very well with shorter scale of the guitar slightly tuned down. The pickups are stock Gibson 498T and 490R, and they just work for the vibe of the guitar. This is a great example of a Les Paul Custom, in my opinion, and I feel very privileged to get to share it with you today!
Please see the gallery for more pictures of this stunner: The Archive - Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul Custom
The Amp
How much needs to be said about the legendary SLO 100? I’ll be short - WOW, what a thrilling amp to play! While the amp has definitely inspired many others in tone (5150, Rectifiers, etc.), the overall feel and response of this amp is something special. To me, it has a very raw character to it under gain - almost as if wanting to explode with harmonics, but still somehow just barely contained. The low end is also very interesting to me - JUST tight enough for high gain applications, but retaining a super elastic feel/bounce overall. Having a good guitar interact with these unique characteristics is SUPER exciting to play - hopefully that came through as I went through some of the tones. Ultimately, it’s a simple amp, but very effective at what it does. If you have a chance to play/own one, I would highly recommend it.
My settings for this tone are in the picture below. This is the high gain ‘Overdrive’ channel, with Bright switch On.
Cabinet, Speaker, & Recording
The tone you’re hearing is again using my Suhr Reactive Load into my Axe FX 2 as an external IR loader. For the time being, I’m keeping this part of the chain as a consistent reference point, so same Mesa V30 cabinet IR as well. I may consider swapping the IR at some point in the future if it’s an amp that I WOULD NOT pair a V30 Mesa cab with in real life, but we’ll see how it goes. More details on that setup can be found in the Tones @ TGR #1 blog post.
The delay is from the Axe FX 2 - nice and easy, and functions exactly as if I were adding a studio delay in post. Sometimes, you just need to add some ‘grease’ to the tone!
Final Thoughts on the Tone
This was a lot of fun for me. GREAT tone that was really addicting to play, and inspired some cool riffing. For high gain, I tend to go for the balance of big/organic/responsive while also being tight/punchy for the faster riffing, and this guitar/amp combination really nailed that overall vision. In typical Gibson fashion, the G-string did go out of tune on my earlier in the video (go figure), but I got it back eventually, :)
Watching back, I can clearly tell that I’m not as ‘familiar’ with this guitar as with my others, and I feel it impacted my overall creativity & fluidity in this play through. An interesting thought comes to mind that I think may be a good topic for another video.
I hope you enjoyed ‘Tones @ The Guitar Rack #2’ - looking forward to your thoughts and feedback on the YouTube channel.
— Eric, The Guitar Rack