Gibson (Accidentally) Sent Me a FREE GUITAR! | 2021 Gibson 60th Anniversary 1961 Les Paul SG Custom

welcome back troglodytes to your daily dose of guitar information the trogly's guitar show hey gibson sent me a free brand new guitar to unbox review and demo for you guys except for they didn't realize they were doing this this is such a good story it's forcing me to review this guitar it's so sinister maybe gibson planned it this way so earlier this year i had unboxed the 60th anniversary sg custom and standard in an unboxing episode and i said hey if i have time i'll review it unfortunately i never had time i just reviewed something very similar the hendrix sg custom so i was really tempted to do that standard but they ended up selling but i got a message from my gibson guy that i talked with and he was like did you ever get those guitars because in our ordering system it shows that they haven't shipped and i was like yeah i got him he's like yeah i thought i saw those in your channel so i thought he marked them as you know they got it and i don't know what happened their ordering system just sent me another one so i was faced with that moral dilemma do i keep it and not say anything no one would ever be the wiser but now i i sent him a text i was like not that i'm complaining but i happen to get another one of these so uh which one did i get let's find out as we review the 60th anniversary sg custom that's right i was kind of sad it wasn't the standard who knows maybe the the standard will show up for free in a couple of days but no i had to buy this and i figured i mean it's here i might as well review it because i've got a cool story to tell behind this thing and you know it's been a while since we've taken a look at one of these white sg customs at this point so this is a 60th anniversary sg custom a reissue of the 1961 model what you need to know for this is 1961 first year of the sg body shape it wasn't called the sg until 1963 because this guy right here les paul his contract ended a lot of guys say he saw the sg and he's like take my name off that guitar but according to people who actually knew less it was just because his contract ended some people even say it's because he didn't want mary ford to continue to get the money due to their divorce but they finalized their divorce in 1964 so i don't know if that really lines up or not but anyways this is called the sg but it's technically a les paul custom at this point in time so this is that reissue year where they have the cool sideways vibrola unit i love the way these things work but as far as functionality they do take some time to wear in however this one actually feels surprisingly good sometimes there's a lot of click clink plink stuff going on so actually getting one straight from the factory that's not like that maybe this one will convert me we'll see but anyways we've got three awesome humbuckers the sideways vibro as i was saying if you don't like the sideways you can also get the maestro version that's more of a 64 style rather than the 61. then of course don't forget the cool ebony block versions that you can sometimes find but it's an sg build up like a les paul custom essentially ebony fretboard with the mother of pearl inlays binding on the neck none on the body because you typically don't bind sgs not that there's never been a bound sg before it's just traditional not to because they've got that shaped body and of course our blinked out headstock here so 2021 60th anniversary year what do you get in this you get like a gibson lifton style reissue case nice padding it's that yellow interior that i think looks really nice especially in contrast to this almost like oiled black exterior but the case candy's pretty cool on these you get a reprint of a gibson advertisement that reads solid hit for solid guitar the les paul guitars and then you can read a little bit more about it right here but if this is a reprint of an article i mean does it make sense that he would see this guitar and say i want my name off of it when he sees it in a guitar shop when he posed for this ad i don't think so when i think of guitar like this i think of two different people mary ford les paul's wife at that point in time and sister rosetta tharp in fact when these things came out i thought oh man are they going to do a reissue of her guitar because that is one that needs to happen maybe they're waiting for his particular year to do it like after the anniversary run but i think that is an artist that does deserve to have one of these signature instruments because she used one with the sideways vibrola but other than that it looks like we get a coa booklet it's a solid hit for 60 years that is the interesting thing about the sg it is the only gibson body shape for their electric guitars that's never went out of production since it was introduced like the les paul's 52 to about 60 then they disappear until late 68 the sg came in you know 61 and it's just always been in production now a little bit later on this week we'll take a look at a 70s sg and see how different they are from the 60s ones but the sg has always been in production in one way or the other so cool little fact there looks like regular custom shop stuff here vintage reissue hang tags pre-pack checklists dating this to october 12th you get a spare backplate because this is pretty much the only thing that says it's an anniversary guitar model is right here on the guitar the back plate so you can swap that for a regular white one if you so desire so now first impressions i mean besides the vibrola i would say this thing feels pretty good now these things are pretty expensive they are six thousand six hundred ninety nine dollars now the standards they're only five thousand and the only main difference is the fretboard material on them and how much binding and fancy appointments they have on their headstock so you can save yourself about sixteen hundred bucks and get a red analyn dyed sg standard with the same sideways vibrola on it if you don't happen to like the three pickup look and whatnot those were both available for this particular anniversary run but i'd say uh so far fit finish feels good but to put it truly to its tests let's go ahead and throw this bad boy on the workbench to take an individual look at its parts and specs [Music] inside the sg custom that was a lot of screws to undo but let's learn about this thing this comes stock with three custom buckers they kind of make them look like original pafs they've got the patent applied for decal they even take the time to hand age each and every single one to make it look like it's old and cracked nah that just happens to some of them some guitars you get them and they don't even have the decal at all like they're pretty brittle you don't want to touch those but something that is cool is they go as far as putting the l tooling marks on the bracket right here that's a good way to identify original pafs or one of the many things you look for but anyways here's what the pickup cavities look like we have a long neck tenon with high glue construction you can see that is a very clean neck to body join right here a lot of times that can look pretty dirty that's the end of the tenon there and these are three individual cavities not all together then we have an abr1 bridge mounted traditionally with only a post in the body there's no studs and this is a non-wire abr-1 but thankfully the saddles don't fall out it's branded gibson abr one and now we get to talk about this big clunk of junk these are very very very complicated looking systems so essentially you got this bar right and it comes down here and as you compress it it pushes that lever and compresses these springs up here which creates that very slight warble effect because your strings go in through here it secures the ball end of the string right there and then it pulls on the pressure and as the string puts pressure on it it moves the bar in a little bit which i found out the hard way as i was taking the string tension off of this this bar arm touches the guitar and it just left a big scratch indentation it's like great thanks gibson should really put a little felt pad right here because this whole thing even when strung up it's sitting right against the guitar it's so hard to move i mean you're not meant to do super dive bombs on it anyways it's just supposed to be a little bit of a warble effect but i do not like these things at all they look so cool though i mean you got this giant cadillac hood right here that covers up the more mechanical nature of everything in here and it just looks so darn classy but there's a reason that they didn't produce them with these trams for very long but anyways this cover secures to the outside using three screws one here one there and then one on the other side they're actually a decent size unlike the maestro vibrolas those screws are very tiny and hard to get back in then that secures to the body using four screws right here and then this little thing sits right there so another two and then there's two screws right here to keep this whole thing in place so it doesn't flip up so i suppose you probably could add more spacers underneath there to prevent this from dragging against the body like that is doing right there i just decided to put some painters tape underneath it because i didn't have any felt pads but i figured that might help a bit but those don't actually secure all the way into the body it stops before it gets there and then this thing appears to give a base for where this always stops so this is under a little bit of tension just resting on this little metal brick essentially so if you were to take this off of one of these and install a stop bar tail piece you'd be left with two screw holes right here and four right there in the body but as we move away from our hardware it is important to note this has a vos like treatment to it so they try to lightly age it not heavy age but you can see some patina to the gold you can see a lot of the gold has been worn off the cover i mean we'll see this on the headstock a little bit later on you've got that kind of like a haze to the finish and some scratches and whatnot that's part of the vos treatment vintage original spec as they call it but now let's look at our knobs i think it has to be my favorite part of this whole guitar because you might not notice it from far away but in person they actually age the knobs like compared to the pure white pickguard you can kind of see what i'm talking about and it's not just a gold topper the whole knob has been aged there's a good comparison to a white paper towel even the numbers they look good let's go ahead and see what these pickups read so bridge pickup 7.87 k ohms neck position 7.91 middle position huh 3.97 that's because it's these two pickups together in kind of like an out of phase like tone i personally really like it you might not it's just something to know about three pickup gibsons you can't actually select each individual one now you can rewire it to have like three individual volumes and like a blend in of your middle pickup and a lot of people do that but i prefer it the way it is because it's a bit easier to demo for you guys so two volumes two tones and that's all she wrote but the pickguard only has three screws in it and it's kind of like a modified 61 style basically from the sg standard because you got another middle pickup in here instead of not having it so it doesn't have that little part that scoops in and of course don't forget your tenon cover still reads les paul custom because it was still a les paul at this time now qc i mean you don't really consider that qc that's more so just a bad design flaw in this thing but i did notice do you guys see that big discoloration area right there like it's a little bit more pure white or it's like there's something dirt in the finish or something that was a little bit sad to see because once you see it you kind of don't unsee it does it affect playability no but at six and a half thousand plus it would have been nice if they could have got that right but the body on this one is made out of pure mahogany i don't think you can really see it anywhere you can kind of see some of the wood grain right there but just check out one of the sg standards if you want to see what the wood grain looks like but it is supposed to be a one piece body with a one piece mahogany neck with an ebony fretboard on here beautiful 22 medium jumbo frets on this one and this actually looks pretty good for a brand new gibson i'm seeing minimal tooling marks which is always a good thing on these guys however one little small thing i will knock them points on is the nut doesn't appear to have been cut very well like they didn't quite finish filing out the end you can see like just a little bit of leftovers right there that needs cleaned up but all in all i would say this is actually a pretty nice example for that our nut measures 1.68 inches that increases to 2.06 by the 12. got a first fret neck depth of 0.82 and 0.92 by the 12th stays very slim and consistent they call it a slim taper 60s neck that's where it gets its name from here's what it looks like at the first fret and the 12th fret it definitely has that wide shoulder feeling to it so still kind of c-shaped but almost d-ish so slim in this aspect but a little bit wider feeling as far as the fretboard goes so if you like slim wide necks these are for you moving on to our headstock looks like our truss rod is in good shape and you get the historic style truss ride cover on these basically just a thicker version of the usa one with more of a broad border and a more distinctive ridge of when the black begins you almost would have thought that they would like slightly tint the lacquer of the headstock to match the slightly yellowish finish but you know it's polaris white so it kind of started a little bit more off-white anyway so this is probably similar to what they would have looked like brand new but i wouldn't know i wasn't even thought of yet not even my mom was thought of yet moving on to the backside i found another surprise the back plate says a solid hit for 60 years on the back nice work larry what are they all like that i am i'm not sure i would assume so i don't know if that's an inside joke or if some guy named larry actually designed the sg for gibson i'm i'm not sure like it's not written on it's actually embossed just like this is but we've got our black beauty capacitor reissues in here as they call them and we've got the gibson branded pots so everything is looking good in there now something we can kind of uh base this off of when we were talking about the sg elegant remember how they have a body that extends up to here and kind of partners with the heel cap to make it stronger this is what the original design looked like so it does have a little bit of an extended mahogany cap to the body right there but it kind of becomes more squared off so that'll change over the years but that's kind of what i was talking about in those videos in case it wasn't quite clear but strap buttons in your usual locations base of the heel and on the bottom now interestingly enough on the bottom of this one it almost looks like the the vos compound that they used to make it look older got like bunched up in these areas i know it looks like stand rash but trust me it's a brand new guitar so it must just be something like polishing compound because most of it came off but there is like a small red stain but moving up the backside of the neck not too much to talk about except for potentially some shipping damage and or just nut trauma in general you can see some finish checking right here where the nut actually ends and it's finished over that's pretty mild nothing i'd really worry about and the side that you play kind of hard to see but there's a very small one stemming like right there so at least the side that you play is a lot cleaner than the one that you don't and then we got some golden grover tuners back here and our serial number is 10-85-01 all said and done this weighs 8 pounds 0.2 ounces let's go ahead plug it in and hear how this one sounds all right so first off is it neck heavy it's pretty well balanced these trams usually help with that now i'm having about the same luck as i normally do on these fancy looking vintage trims so we'll just leave it at that i'll do a little demonstration of that at the end but let's go ahead and run through our tones starting with our neck pickup we're just going to use a basic riff compare them side by side starting with our neck pickup [Music] so so so all right so i hope that gives you kind of an idea you can really play around with the volume controls of this guitar though to get some really different sounds let me show you what i'm talking about here neck pickup full on roll it down to about seven [Music] so it's not necessarily just your volume it almost kind of uh mellows it out a bit more too like it makes it a bit warmer [Music] that's the bridge pickup that's pretty chimey too that's not even the middle position that's normally chimey [Music] so i hope this kind of helps you understand why i like three pickup gibson guitars when they're wired normally because it's it doesn't have the hum of a single coil but yet it still has that kind of brightness to it [Music] all right let's go ahead and kick on some distortion [Music] so so oh oh [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay i hope that gives you an idea of the tones now let's give the trem a test i want you to know i've stretched these strings out for a good 30 minutes did so much stretching i broke the top two strings had to do it all over again i've oiled the bridge saddles i've oiled the nuts i've really hammered away on this to get it a chance to let it set in and this is my results [Music] no nothing now granted that was a full dive bomb so let's try again [Music] all right here we are again [Music] so i mean it's okay for little war belize i'm sure if you let it sit in for a couple of more days it might just be all right but i've just never gotten along with these things but they sure do look cool right now there are guys that sell contraptions where you can actually block these off and it's just as stable as a stop bar tail piece for like the vintage ones i'm not sure if those units work on the modern day reissues but you know it's an option for somebody out there now that we know all about the 60th anniversary sg custom what are my final thoughts on this thing it's a really cool looking guitar it sounds and plays great however these things just aren't for me they look so cool but i've never been able to get along with them to be honest i think there's something wrong with this trem system like i've had two of these and i'm pretty sure the other one didn't ride up against the body as much as this one does so i think you need a a couple of more washers in here or something and some other qc things that i noticed but forgot to tell you on the workbench the top two saddles there's like a ridge here i'll detune the string you hear that right there that means it's not a full-on slot there's like two of them that might have something to do with the tuning stability there you go that was not slotted very well at the factory so a few small things with that maybe something with the trim i'm not sure i haven't had enough of these to fully know but i don't remember one dragging against the body so much but if there's one thing that i do want to commend gibson on is the serial numbers they've got them nice and deep in here you're not some sometimes you really have to hunt to find the serial numbers on white finished guitars or any solid colors because it gets all filled in it's like they took some extra time to make sure those are nice and deep however if you're going to buy one of these things it's a good idea to get an anniversary model because they tend to hold value better so if you're worried about the future resellability of your collectible instrument as well as your great playing guitar generally speaking you do want to get either a rare year a rare color or have some sort of it factor this one being a limited edition only for 2021 kind of secures its spot in the future as hey you know maybe these things were the first time gibson did them right in the new era of gibson they could become collectible in that fact however you can bet your butt when the 70th anniversary rolls around they're gonna do it again i mean you go through the reissues pretty much every single year we're moving into 2022 so we'll probably end up seeing a reissue of a 1952 gold top being a 70th anniversary and then you know so on and so forth our three our four r5r6 you know it's time to run through those cycles again but yeah great guitar kind of got tricked into doing this review but whatever it's a cool guitar i hope you guys enjoyed 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] you

Channel: The Trogly's Guitar Show

Views: 82,856

Keywords: the trogly's guitar show, trogly, trogley, gibson, gibson les paul, fender, White SG Custom, Gibson SG Custom, Gibson SG, White Gibson SG, Les Paul SG Custom, White Les Paul Custom, White SG LP Custom, Gibson 60th Anniversary 1961 Les Paul SG Custom, 60th anniversary gibson, gibson 60th anniversary 1961 sg, 60th anniversary 1961 les paul sg custom, gibson sg 61 60th anniversary, Gibson 60th anniversary SG, Gibson Custom Shop SG, Gibson Custom Shop SG White

Id: MnlvWZKPlIE

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021