LP Custom Look at half the price
The majority of the design and the woods were not due to Les, but Ted McCarty. Les gave them some tonal goals but the way that the guitar ended up was much more toward what Gibson had designed rather than Les.
Les had very little to do with the design of the guitar. I said Ted designed it. Then they approached Les.
But Les DID want certain things. Originally he wanted the body to be rock maple. But that would have been too heavy. So he figured that 3/4" was thick enough to make it sound as if the body was maple.
He hated the carved top too.
And the neck angle wasn't 'screwed up' necessarily. It fitted the way the guitar was intended to be made perfectly.
Nope. That's not how It works. Have you ever built a guitar? The neck angle matches the height of the bridge.
Les had invented and patented the trapeze bridge. That parent number is what appears on the humbucking pickup! Why? No one is quite sure.
But regardless, Les expected the strings to run OVER the bridge so he could palm mute. But the early models had too shallow a neck angle, so Gibson ran the strings UNDER the bridge, making palm muting impossible. The shallow neck angle otherwise made the strings too high off the fretboard.
This was corrected on later models by increasing the neck angle and later McCarty designed the Tune-O-Matic bridge and stop tailpiece so Les could palm mute.
Les was not happy with these goof ups. You can find interviews with him saying so.
The custom with its ebony fretboard used all mahogany in the body to keep the relative brightness to be similar.....the relative strength of the 2 changes is a bit debatable but there you go.
You are over thinking it. Gibson *never* thought about the tone. Mahogany has traditionally been used for guitars, especially neck, because it's easy to carve, due to the lack of grain lines. It was the traditional wood used by pattern makers too.
Ebony was used on the Custom because it's thought of as a fancier wood, and Les wanted the guitar to be black like a piano. Les specified a maple top for the Custom. That was the guitar he's often pictured with.
Gibson also never picked "special" parts for the guitars or pickups. They used what was available.
Here's the guitar that Les actually designed as his personal model.
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