A Viewer Sent Me a MYSTERY Vintage Les Paul! | What IS THIS?

welcome back troglodytes to your daily dose of guitar information the trogley's guitar show i've got a guitar in on consignment today from the same guy that i purchased the melody maker that we documented a couple of weeks ago the joan jets signature black hearts that was kind of a cool guitar it ended up finding a new home all right so he wanted me to consign this one rather than just selling it because he wanted to get the most money that he possibly could and basically the story goes is when we were first talking he thought this was maybe a 73 but then i think he changed his story to he thinks it's a 69 and he thought it was a les paul standard but the photos that i've received were a gold top guitar that had p90 pickups in it so i was trying to work it through with him what this thing was because you know he thought it was stock original p90s and in order to be that it would have to be a true 68 maybe an early 69 or a later 70s deluxe pro model or pro deluxe as it's correctly said other than that it was ridiculously common for people to swap out the mini humbuckers on a deluxe to put p90s in it so today's episode is i don't know what's in here i told them this is going to be worth somewhere between 2 000 to 5 000 bucks because it does have a head stock repair and i only had a few kind of dimly lit photos to help him id it past that so we're just going to have to figure this all out together so rectangular case looking good for him so far because that's late 60s early 70s so let us see what's in here missing one latch but the two main ones are good to go still have a handle blue gibson logo on that side white one on that okay let's cut the suspense what is this thing okay definitely 70s because i saw the pancake body already but how cool is that you don't see the les paul rectangular case too often oh [Music] okay all right looks like we have a very small volute on this thing the headstock repair not looking anywhere near as bad as i thought it was going to so it's like it only broke on a portion of the guitar because it's a three-piece neck it's got a small volute he might have actually been right this very could well be a 1969 whoa it might also be refinished i'm not sure we're gonna have to blacklight that because this almost looks a little bit more lemony than most gold tops that i'm familiar with so this is just going to be a big mystery day where we tear this thing apart to you know just see what we can find are the p90s actually stock and original i mean if it's an early 69 it makes sense like we've got that kind of older looking gibson logo our tuners have definitely been replaced so that means somebody had probably grovers on here at one point in time so far i'm thinking he's gonna be happy with the evaluation of this guitar so if you are interested in it feel free to continue watching the rest of this video but it'll also be available on my website after we do our documentation here so i think we'll save all the detailed forensics for the workbench but you know first impressions yeah this is actually pretty cool we have a gibson manual here these things are worth quite a bit all filled out kind of in average shape they're worth about a hundred bucks especially when you have things like writing in it they're worth more if you can find one that hasn't been filled out the warranty card because that's what this was so this is just like an average like 50 to 100 example but what's cool here is it looks like the shop owner actually went through this manual with the guy who purchased it originally because there's so many things underlined like as the instrument ages the tone becomes sweet and mellow and things here like to prevent slipping make sure you do this which is not the way you should string a guitar anymore maybe this is just how the guy learned he would underline the most important stuff but what i like to see is the original serial number written in here eight nine one zero four five yep that matches now i mean anybody could do that with a guitar and say yeah that's the original but we'll just call it a nice little bonus there it looks like we have some fresh strings that he wants me to put on here ghs guitar boomers and this might be the original truss rod cover in here maybe full disclosure there is a very slight smoky scent to this case but all right i think we need to throw this onto the workbench to take an individual look at its parts and specs to find out exactly what this thing is [Music] all right what do i think this is it's a late 1969 les paul deluxe now let me prove it to you why i think that so first off just like i thought these are not the original pickups i was pretty confident that they wouldn't be but flipping over to the back side of it you can see it's labeled neck and has this other sticker with other numbers on it now this is just stuff you learn being in the business looking at guitars that have been modified these are seymour duncan antiquity series pickups i see humbuckers with these markings put in guitars aftermarket all the time and sure enough if you look them up on sweetwater 249 bucks a set exact match here what's funny is the bridge pickup even has the same cutout on the pickup cover that you can see right here as well so just because it's replaced p90s does not mean it didn't start life as a p90 gold top right well that's when you look in here you see all these extra holes these are left over from the base plate of a mini humbucker and those secured to the guitar i believe using these two it's been a while since i've seen those but then the mini humbucker legs rest right here they're height adjustment springs so those don't actually get mounted directly to the body the way p90s do so you can always tell if a deluxe has had p90s in it because they'll have extra holes drilled in right here and that's present in both pickup cavities so that tells me right away it's a deluxe so it can't be in 1968. but the way these ones are currently secured they have two screws and then a modern day foam in here because this originally didn't have any foam and if it did it'd all be decrepit foam that's falling apart by now that's definitely modern day stuff next thing we're looking at here is a transitional neck tenon now if you don't know what a transitional neck tenon is there's two main tenons for gibson necks there's the short neck that you don't see at all within the cavity and then there's the long neck tenon that normally goes to about right here transitional is somewhere in between there that they didn't use for too long and that's exactly what one of these things looks like now my best guess is this has either been refinished or at least re-sprayed with a new clear coat because i don't know something just seems off the color not quite what i normally see but it might just be because of the overspray over top of it i mean it doesn't look like we lost any of our body contours as far as like the belly of the beast goes i mean that still looks good but the condition of this guitar mixed with you know how much it was played and stuff it it's just given me red flags so i'm going to advertise it as at least resprayed potentially even completely refinished because generally you don't see it completely covered over in gold like you'll see some areas that get it but this even has gold within the pickup channel routes and that just doesn't seem right to me that's a quality finish don't get me wrong it feels good gibson quality just not quite gibson gibson so next thing i wanted to check out was the bridge itself i took off the thumb wheels to see if a is this actually a real abr one or is this double thumb wheel actually hiding a stud underneath it like is this actually a post like 1975 deluxe made in the nashville factory with a nashville bridge no it's a true abr one now if you're wondering why do you have two thumb wheels some guys do that to prevent post lean so over the years sometimes abr one bridges have a tendency to bend this way which kind of destroys all this and then you have to repair it so you can prevent that by adding another thumb wheel that you secure down to the body as tight as you can go and it just acts kind of like a stud but you still get all the abr one benefits so if you ever see double thumb wheels on something it's because they're trying to prevent future damage from happening then we've got a regular stop bar tail piece on this one now as far as the hardware 6869 sometimes you can find nylon saddles on these and i noticed these are brass so that's possible somebody just replaced the nylon once but then when i flipped it over to the back no this is just a generic cheapy abr one rip off so not a real abr one looks pretty darn good though it's a wired version as well however the tailpiece to me anyways looks about what i would expect in 1969 feel free to correct me if i'm wrong but i think that might actually be original to this guitar lightweight aluminum next up we've got our beautiful knobs just like the knobs i was trying to hunt down for my blue sparkle top deluxe that i eventually found these are looking great they've got a good golden aging to them now granted some of them have some chips out of them i mean they're not too bad and i think this one might have been cracked in half at one point in time or at least right there and somebody glued it or something but they appear to be functional here and they read volume volume tone tone and then to me it looks like this plastic has been replaced the switch tip has been replaced essentially everything on this has been replaced except for maybe the tailpiece and our tuner bodies that we'll see here in a minute so while i'm getting our own readings here just in case you're not familiar what's so significant about a 68 and 69 les paul that's the first year that they came back after you know 1960 they went to the sg body shape before bringing all the stuff back and there's so many many many small minute differences to learn more about this i really suggest checking out late60s les pauls.com that's where i learned a lot of my information on these and now i can just kind of recite it by heart but i still have to visit it sometimes just to you know get the nitty-gritty details love that sight thank you for making it man so our bridge pick up here reads 8.33 k ohms our neck position reads 7.63 and our middle 3.98 let's see if everything's working here yep looks good to me so condition wise here there's definitely some nicks and dings put into the top you can see a small impression there you've got some finish just missing here which that's actually kind of a heaven send that that's there it kind of shows you just how thin this finish is but you've got some impressions here i mean remember this thing's for sale it's on consignment i'm really really happy for him that it turned out to be a 69 because this is definitely worth towards the upper end of what i was saying it could be if i remember the stories correctly he's not working anymore i think he was a veteran so you know he's selling a couple of guitars to keep him afloat here it looks like our pickguard has left an impression right there and you've got some other stuff going on and it's this area right here that makes me think this might just be over sprayed because you can see these dings but i'm having a hard time feeling them like they're just barely there it's like they're almost in the finish or something and of course we'll check this out under blacklight to also show you some stuff the pickard itself does not look vintage correct me this looks like a cheapy part nothing too fancy here but this does have a maple top we can see that in our bridge pickup cavity you can see it's got a little bit of a gold paint over top of it but you can see the color difference between the mahogany body and the maple top and then the body itself is what we call a pancake construction so it's still one piece of mahogany as far as like the whole guitar goes but it's layered so you got a mahogany layer a maple layer and another mahogany layer so it's still a big chunk of mahogany it's just stacked up like a birthday cake that's something you start to see in 1969 and then we can move over here we actually have a three-piece mahogany neck that's another 69 spec that starts to change because this is when new orleans starts to take over they're you know trying to figure out what they should do they're trying to cut costs some things actually cost more but they're just trying to make the most of the wood that they have and pretty much when they came back in 68 all the specs were still like 50s so those things are worth a lot on the used market we're talking like 20 000 plus dollars sometimes whereas just one year later a few spec changes and they're worth maybe you know 9 000 bucks at best obviously example to example condition to condition it's hard to generalize but it gives you an idea but this still has a rosewood fretboard you get the acrylic inlays 22 frets the frets actually appear to be in pretty darn good shape on this example i know he said he just had his luthier look over this and make sure everything was good so i would assume that maybe meant a level recrown because these are looking very nice to me nice dark rosewood fretboard on this one there's a possibility that this might actually be a refret too like these older guitars the fret nibs are tiny sometimes they can crack off or be taken off when somebody's level recrowning i mean it's very similar fret wire to what you would find in this era but it's potential refresh this might confirm my refret theory looks like it's closer to a 14 inch fretboard radius than it is a 12 because there's a slight gap with that so it's gotten a little bit flatter 24 and three quarter inch scale length looks like we've got a bone nut on this one instead of nylon and 1.69 inches at the nut width and by the 12th 2.04 first fret neck depth 0.83 and 1.01 by the 12th it's definitely more of a 60s slim profile but it's got a real roundedness to it it is a comfortable neck and with that full width nut width there it doesn't feel strange to play i think this is actually pretty comfortable here's that neck on the first fret and the 12th fret stays a very nice c-shape profile doesn't get too wide but has a good thickness to it all right now we move on to the face of the headstock obviously this is not original some of them would have one that looks like that but the font is way different this is just a modern day replacement part to make it look cool but thankfully our truss rod considering the age is actually in really good shape not much threads past the top there and now the headstock as i was telling you guys earlier whenever somebody puts grovers on a guitar they have washers and if somebody takes them off to convert it back to klusens you get to see these ugly rings around it for me that's a deal breaker on collectible models but a player's great one i could like really care less but i'll show you some other evidences of that on the back side that's why i took this tuner off but we can see les paul model right here and then take a closer look at our logo we've got the dot it's the open b it's the open o that helps us further date this guitar to the time period that i'm looking at here besides the logo you can also look at the size of the headstock early 68s they'll have the smaller one that's more desirable versus what is known as the 70s boat paddle up here now we flip over to the back side pot codes can be very very helpful in the late 60s early 70s to date guitars unfortunately we don't have those this has been completely rewired looks to me like 500k cts pots we've got the ground wire looks like 50 style wiring to me but we can't at least see the original markings right here that you would find from the factory now i'm not the best at looking at the control cavity to see when it's made that's not my strong suit because i haven't really seen enough but it does look like we can see some of the original finish here and under black light that'll become very apparent now as far as the jack plate cover i'm guessing that's been replaced too i mean i know they do kind of look like that originally but pretty much everything on this guitar has been replaced so i i don't have much confidence for all this other stuff but strap buttons in your regular locations and then i don't know what's going on with this toggle switch i've never seen something like that but the back plates are black on these they say made in japan so obviously that's probably where our bridge came from was a made in japan type guitar and so is that back plate so my best guess is this was probably a husk at one point in time that somebody just pieced back together or they took all the expensive parts off and sold it but you've got some buckle worming back here nothing that appears to go too far deep into the finish looks like like some dings over here so it was definitely played from the time that all these modifications were done but it just it looks really clean like a little bit too suspiciously clean that's why i still think it had some sort of a respray or something let's take a minute to look around the side of the body you can see that pancake body a bit better and the wide binding in the cutaway so no more of that historic spec stuff with the thin binding and we'll follow it along the side looks like you got a couple of deeper impressions on this side so now we got the neck it's three pieces of mahogany so that's a undesirable speck of a 1969 as compared to a 68 so they just layer the mahogany up like this generally you don't have issues with like actual separations like sometimes you can feel a slight line however it got broken here definitely caused some trauma right there so it seems very likely that at least the neck had to have been over sprayed or something because you can feel a slight line but i don't think it's going to be anything that's like ah i don't like playing this guitar because of that but you stop feeling that about right about right here i would say which lines up with about your fifth fret and when he told me this thing had a headstock repair and didn't show me any photos i i just always assume the worst this honestly i wouldn't even care about this myself i mean you can still feel a slight gap right here but it was only one portion of the mahogany neck that broke so this laminated neck actually ended up saving it and there is a very tiny little bump volute right here you would miss it if you didn't know you were looking for one so that's another little speck that also helps us date this one to 1969. it looks like they went as far as like sinking a little dowel into the headstock so my guess is what that does is it goes through to here and kind of like you know lincoln log connects it glues that all together so that's secure in that way as well as how it's glued there so it wasn't a complete break so i have no fears i mean this thing came to me from canada shipped by usps and that's the true test of a headstock repaired guitar if it'll survive shipping it's going to survive pretty much anything you throw at it that is a good lighting spot to see the small bump faloot so now onto these tuners the bodies i mean they look like they have a chance they could be original they look decrepitly old right but the tips 100 replace those are modern parts here's what the back side of the tuners look like i don't see the normal pattern numbers that you would normally see in this era but honestly i'm not an expert on klusen's i know just enough to get me by but that's what that looks like so i took that tuner off to show you what happens when you put grovers on instead of klusens thankfully generally speaking the grover imprint will be pretty well hidden by the klusens when they're put back on however taking it off if they were installed correctly the securing hole will fall a little bit lower than the klusen one you can see somebody dowelled that hole correctly and then drilled a new one so that tells us it was a professional installation of these new ones but the grovers have a larger shaft so you actually have to ream the headstock out and then in order to install these klusens back on you have to use a conversion bushing which is currently in this to tighten that fit back up so definitely have been grovered and grovers ruined the value of these collectible instruments but for a player's model you might just decide to go back to those if you don't like these things but our serial number appears to be 891045 which also puts us within the date range of a late series 1969 according to the 60s les paul website so yeah that was fun i always enjoy getting a mystery guitar and i'm glad i ended up taking it on consignment to help him find out truly what it was because he only had so many photos to send me and this turned out to be quite a valuable piece so i thought for sure this is going to be like a 73 deluxe headstock repair refinish maybe get 2 000 bucks for him but i think we're definitely going to be on my higher end of the estimates but let's check it out under black light real quick i want to be clear that just because something glows does not mean it's the original finish it just means it's an older finish and sometimes brand new finishes also glow but here's what kind of makes me start to think over spray is because underneath here you can still see you know a significant different color and that would happen if a pickguard was over top of that area for some time the knobs yeah no doubt about it those things are vintage the headstock we could be able to see if like it snapped the holly veneer or anything but no nothing like that but you can see some touch-ups on the edge of the instrument so that tells us this guy was not afraid to touch up some spots and you get like a little bit of an anomaly right there with the lacquer not really quite sure how to explain those ones i mean a rubbed finish maybe uh something was on top of it part of the overspray process there you can kind of see that ring around the tuner here's what started to make me think that it's been over sprayed look at the lacquer inside of the guitar how much more vibrantly that glows now remember it's underneath the cover it will glow differently than the body's finish because it hasn't been exposed to as much uv light but that finish looks different as compared to what we're seeing here so that's something else that kind of makes me go hmm then we move over to our neck here i mean there's there's no way that this hasn't had something done to it because of the repair i mean you can see it's got new lacquer along it even in these areas but looking at the back of the headstock that's what everything's looking like i mean at the top you can see a whole whole bunch of lacquer touch-ups and whatnot but thankfully doesn't look like our pancake body's separating or anything that's actually a lot rarer than people want you to believe meaning these don't separate very often unless they've been abused the blacklight segment got me curious so i decided to actually take a look at the top of the headstock so i think what broke this guitar was a large impact right here because there's actually an additional crack right here along the edge of the headstock it might have even extended all the way down to there so when i was saying that we saw this dowel right there i don't think it actually goes diagonal like i thought i think it runs up through the headstock and might even come out to right here it almost looks like some sort of a rosin material or something in there i don't understand why they would do that though unless they were using that to anchor this i don't i don't get it but it's got some sort of a repaired crack here and that weird headstock tip actually looks like it was recrafted out of that same rosin material you can really see that right there so they got crafty when repairing this i feel it's also worth noting that there are some gouges on the side of the neck here you can feel it while you play i don't think it's too obtrusive but there's definitely wear and tear up and along the side also looks like there was a small crack off the nut right here on the treble side of the instrument and here's another good indication of an overspray see all those black dots that's underneath the finish but i think we already knew this area would have some sort of an overspray but since the glow of this matches almost everything else i mean they probably just went for the full on refinish this must have had like a top that was not looking so good at that point i mean there's no way a gigged instrument would look still like this now granted this is a reissue es295 but this is really trying to capture that original gold top finish i guess in this case all gold that the gold tops would have but then you swap over to this one you see how it's more of like a yellowish green that's what's making me think might not be the exact same color but then again gold tops have changed hues so many times it's kind of hard to tell but it just doesn't quite look right to me all put back together it doesn't look too half bad now there is a little bit of a color difference between your pick guard and your pickups and just want to let you know but let's go ahead and grab the weight which honestly it doesn't feel too bad how much nine pounds 10.5 ounces that's a lot heavier than i would have guessed it feels light but i guess there is some heft to the body so now that we know what it is let's go ahead plug it in and hear how it sounds as a player's grade vintage model all right let's go ahead and grab the tones of the seymour duncan antiquity pickups in a 1969 gold top body [Music] [Laughter] [Music] uh [Music] i'd say that sounds pretty good i especially like the neck pickup out of the antiquity set so it blends well with the middle pickup too [Music] [Music] let's go ahead and kick on some distortion see if that bridge pickup comes to life [Music] hey [Applause] [Music] [Music] hey [Music] so [Music] um [Music] [Music] hey [Applause] [Music] [Music] man [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now that we know all about this 1969 les paul gold top what are my final thoughts on this thing there's a lot of lore and stories behind the late 60s les pauls and i think this is the first one i've had that's you know not a reissue of some sort i've got to say despite this one you know not having the original parts pretty much everywhere you can tell there's a certain characteristic to this guitar that's just a whole lot of fun to play even though this one might not have the most desirable specs out of all the 60s les pauls it was still a lot of fun i enjoyed it the headstock repair absolutely nothing to worry about on this one i didn't notice any like bad tuning stability or anything like that and it feels good it still has that old feel to it but you can tell there's just there's something that happened to this i don't know the full story of this one but looking on the workbench at all of its specs obviously pretty much everything has been changed on this except for some tone plastics but anyways i hope your troglodytes enjoy checking this guitar out if you're interested in being the next owner it is in on my shop on my website it's on consignment you can also find it on reverb listed at a higher price it's just reverb fees that's the name of the game all right troglodytes thank you for tuning in today don't forget to like comment and subscribe and we will catch you tomorrow on the next episode take care [Music] as always if you're interested in being the next owner of one of these demo guitars you can check them out on my website trogleysguitarshow.com there's some links in the description [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Trogly's Guitar Show

Views: 181,147

Keywords: the trogly's guitar show, gibson les paul, the troglys guitar show, trogly guitar show, troglys guitars les paul, trogly gibson, 1969 Gibson Les Paul, How to ID 60s Les Paul, How to ID a Les Paul, Mystery Trogly, Mystery Les Paul, 1960s Les Paul, 1968 Les Paul Standard, 1969 Les Paul Deluxe, Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, Les Paul Deluxe, Vintage Les Paul Deluxe, Vintage Goldtop Les Paul, Goldtop Les Paul, Gold Les Paul, p90 1969 Gibson, guitar unboxing, trogly guitar unboxing

Id: BIt2gbMVonA

Length: 33min 37sec (2017 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021