Re: Interested in a Gibson Les Paul Junior
It's really all about attention to detail. The time consuming (thus costly) fine detail work that turns an okay guitar into a great guitar just isn't done right (or at all) there. Things I notice a lot are: Boxy, barely crowned frets. Boxy fret ends. Out-of-level frets. Poorly polished frets. Sharply cut nuts with rough, ill-sized slots, and the wrong slot angles. Rough bridge saddles, often incorrectly slotted so the strings aren't spaced right. Extremely sharp fretboard edges. Sanding marks on the fretboard. Router flash in the cavities. Orange peel or otherwise not smooth finishes. Thick finishes. Finish scraping mistakes which should have been rejected and redone (these mistakes are easy to make, but letting them continue on down the production line is another issue). Bottom line for me, they reek of being total rush jobs, especially in the areas of final assembly and setup. It's some combination of cutting labor costs by rushing the builders, and perhaps poor builder skill, as many of the good, experienced builder have moved on due to the harsh working environment.
As for tone...I never make the argument that they sound better than they did back in the "good old days." They sound the same to me. My gripe is with the low amount of final build quality you get for the high price you pay. When you buy a Gibson these days, you are basically buying an unfinished guitar. You have to have the frets dressed, the nut reshaped/slotted or replaced, the bridge saddles correctly slotted and deburred (if not totally replaced due to bad string spacing), and often the fretboard edges rounded over, all before you have a guitar that I consider "complete." With what the guitars cost, the customer should not have to finish building the guitar properly for Gibson. But people keep shelling out and thinking they are great, because they are blinded by the name on the headstock, and likely ignorant of what a truly well built guitar is supposed to be like.
At any rate, they can be very good guitars with some work, such as that I mentioned above. And some actually come out better than others in these regards. Not every one has all of these problems...but IME, most of them have most of these problems. Points being, just try before you buy to make sure you are getting a good one, and when deciding what to pay, factor in the cost of the improvements it will likely need. In general, I would say don't pay over $550 for one that happens to be pretty well built. One that needs a lot of fret work and the like, I might pay $400-$450 for.
