This Might Be My Greatest Find Yet! | 1986 Gibson Custom Shop Original Les Paul Artisan Trans Blue

welcome back troglodytes to your daily dose of guitar information the trogly's guitar show we have a mystery upon us this could be something that i keep for the rest of my life or it could be a refinish that i don't want to keep but it's still pretty cool so while we unbox this let me tell you this tale so i was contacted on my facebook page about somebody who said hey i've got this really weird les paul here it's a blue color it's got some fancy inlays and stuff i think at first they were just interested in maybe getting some information on it but they were willing to sell it they had just purchased it from an estate of one of his friends so i got really excited when i saw this thing because it has a beautiful magical custom shop original decal on it and you guys know what that means it is a one-off custom ordered guitar and gibson utilized those decals from approximately 1982 until their demise in 1993. guess if you want to get technical some early 1994's could potentially have it as well but i love those things because it helps you identify really cool custom order one-offs in this era so naturally the big important question came up i said how much the price he told me was exactly where i wanted to be however he was shopping this around at other dealers too and another dealer was going to steal it from me because this guy he wanted to end up with like a r9 reissue with the money or to trade it and i told him i would pay that price but i can pay more if you get me some more detailed documented evidence of what this thing is because i was a little bit skeptical but today we are going to know for sure if this is what it is oh man [Laughter] i love it it's a blue les paul artisan have you guys ever heard of this okay so there's a lot to go over today and if you don't know about les paul artisans i'm going to do a quick little recap here oh my it's got a stinger too what he didn't tell me it had a stinger oh man now i'm even more scared if that's original okay let's talk les paul artisans the les paul artisan was a super ultra fancy high end model the second highest and les paul that was ever produced in the norlin era at the time of its introduction anyways second only to the last paul which you can check out videos on here so these were around from roughly 1975 until 1982 i mean the first official year is 76 but according to shipping ledgers two of them did ship in 75. so in order to tell you have a first year example you're either going to have a serial number that starts with the letter c which i've documented here or it's going to be a decal serial number that says limited edition zero zero then blah blah blah but they came in a walnut finish a sunburst finish and an ebony finish now the walnuts there's actually like three different hues that you will find there's one that's so dark it's almost black but then those can fade over time to look way different but then there's also just like light smoky walnut colored ones which are my absolute favorite and then just like a you know a general walnut walnut out there and then in 1982 there is a very rare run of approximately 10 white les paul artisans with black binding that's one of my bucket list guitars i gotta find me one of those so when this freak of nature showed up it's like it's not my white last ball artisan but if it's factory blue i will be very happy so within the les paul artisans production three pickups were standard until around 1979 when they flipped it to two pickups as standard and then custom orders can be three you can find two pickup custom orders within the three or custom order three pickups within the two pickup era but that's something else that's going to make this one special the fact that it has three famous user of this father christmas music video the kinks dave davies in there and one other cool claim to fame about artisans is they are the first model to feature those really cool flip out winding tuners as early as 1978 despite not seeing those being widespread used on customs until about 81. so far it looks about right the stinger does have me a little bit scared so obviously we're gonna have to blacklight this but i've already seen the insides of this guitar but i'm going to paint this video as if i haven't to show you everything that really makes this thing interesting so first off this was birthed in 1986. you can tell that by your serial number right there in case you can't see it it's eight one nine zero six five hundred so the first and fifth tell you that it's in 1986 it's about a mid 86 but this is another cool little thing i can teach you about there is a zero in your serial number for your production model so technically when you're looking at your production number if it's 499 or less it's kalamazoo made if it's 500 or higher it's nashville so this thing is a nashville built one but if you see your number is like 503 it is not the third guitar produced that day because there is a zero digit so five zero three would actually be the fourth guitar produced this was the first neck stamped that day because you also have to remember that's just when these things were stamped it's not when the guitar was completed so that's the first thing that makes this interesting is this was birthed outside of the artisan era how many other of these have i seen a couple in a would you rock or not episode we saw an artisan light come up for sale which is still for sale that was a white one without the black binding it's kind of cool but it's you know built to les paul custom light specs you know the smaller one then you can also find heritage series standards with the artisan fretboard but those were done i think around 82 83 so right at the end of the artisan era so that makes this really special the fact that there's an artisan outside of the artisan era and it has the full on artisan headstock not just the cool fretboard inlays as we were learning earlier the fact that it has three pickups in here is kinda cool because technically we're outside of the artisan era but if it was still in the air it would be two at this point we've got chrome hardware which mostly every single one of these ever was gold if we really look at this top it is a two-piece top which is still very rare for customs and standards in 1986 so that makes that special and all other artisans that i have ever seen in my life have been three piecers so that's cool i gotta knock off some style points for not having an artisan trust rod cover i don't know maybe i'll replace that and we lose some points for not having a chrome tp6 tailpiece randy leonard ex gibson employee made that suggestion that i should add one of these onto it and i just might but you know what guys i can tell this is legit just by looking at the wood grain on the back that's what you see in the 80s but hey let's look at the neck here's something else that's really freaky this is a three-piece maple neck outside of the maple neck era around 1982 we started to transition back into the mahogany next so the fact that this is an 86 with a maple neck in technically henry j era that makes this extra special too on top of the black stinger that i did not even know to expect i just thought it was a really dark blue finish that matches really well with these black back plates and in the seller's photos i was a little bit scared because it looked like the binding was a stark white but no it's definitely a little bit aged in person so the story i was told behind this is he purchased it from his friend who was a pro musician and i think maybe even a music store owner something like that in des moines iowa his name was tret litton and according to the seller he owned a whole bunch of one-off custom ordered guitars in his collection and he had tons of guitar knowledge and he liked to help his friends out you know similar to what i do on my show here but unfortunately he recently passed away and the seller never got the full story on this one but the few snippets that he got here and there was this was custom ordered by a rock star and then traded back in a few years later to a shop and trent just kept it ever since so naturally i reach out to randy leonard right he's the guy who worked at the gibson at this time especially in the nashville plant he's got that diary log of all the guitars he was a part of so i asked him do you have any records of this weird blue les paul artisan and unfortunately no he did not he said out of the custom shop original decals there were 24 in his book for 1985 and only two in 1986 but this one was not one of the ones that he was a part of but he did say in 86 henry j you know the guy who just came in to take over ownership of gibson until about 2019 he was hiring the first of the real custom shop guys you know when they opened that in 1993 so he thinks this was a very early build of those guys proving their worth to gibson and showing what they were truly capable of doing so now let's go ahead throw this on the workbench to see if we can verify these claims i'm pretty confident what we have here is real but let's prove it to the rest of the world a blue artisan let's dig inside this mystery les paul artisan typically artisans come with tar back pickups they look like this on the back they're epoxy coated so when they get broken it's really really really difficult to fix them i've only ever heard of like one or two people out there that can repair them but it's a very lengthy process but they're the super humbucking pickups of the day and even though they were higher end back then given the choice between those and t-tops or those and tim shaw paf's every day i would choose t-top or tim shaw over them and what do we have inside this 86 beauty tim shaw pafs not one not two but three this is a triple loaded tim shaw paf guitar how awesome is that like i was really expecting to find like new old stock pickups that they just had laying around in this thing since they were doing artisan specs but that was a beautiful find i was really excited to learn that if only these pickup rings still had the tim shaw paf stickers on that would have made it even cooler but you will notice as is common in the late 80s and especially the early 90s these plastic rings will start to bend they just weren't the best plastic qualities because it's around this time frame when they start to change who their manufacturer and supplier of the plastics were because after about 85 your knobs will stop aging with time so that means they're definitely using different products to create them but you can still tell if they're vintage due to their bold font this is a really good example of that nice bold font in fact i'm a little bit suspicious that the other three might have been replaced we'll have to see if black light will help us there but now we need to take a look at the pickup cavities themselves if you ever see one that's just completely covered over that's generally a sign of a refinish if you see that they've actually masked this off like they did at the gibson factory that's a good sign now that could also mean that somebody just knows what they're doing to how to fake a gibson and make it look pretty good if they were refinishing it but this so far is looking pretty legit but of course we need to look over everything on this guitar what's a really nice sign is everything is dusty in here but it almost looks like there's something impressed into the wood right there sometimes you will find made in usa stamps stamped in the neck pickup cavity in this era but i can't quite make out what it says it's like a t right there maybe a p i'm not sure but here we can see that maple top onto the mahogany body i guess that's something else that would be different about this one if it was produced to standard specs is mahogany started to get weight relieved around the time that the mahogany neck came back in 82. without an x-ray there's no way for me to confirm that this is one of the only les paul artisans to receive weight relief well the full-bodied ones anyways but that is something else that could make it different so everything is looking pretty good here but now the moment of truth how is this thing wired up i like it when you have neck bridge and these two together but being a custom order they could have did it with three volumes so let's see here bridge pickup reads 7.32 all right that's where it should be neck pickup 7.28 middle position nice it's the way i like it it's these two together in like a single coil stratocaster like sound it's interesting trust me guys i love three pickup les paul customs done up like this but if you want more control over that middle pickup you can wire these three volumes for each in a master tone check out the master tone mickey baker model for that it's alright i'm happy with all that and when i took the bridge off i was really happy to see this you see these guys they're little black spacers you did find those brand new stock on these guitars but most people have lost them throughout the ages you more commonly see it on the top adjust bridges but this is just your regular nashville style one right here and it has the correct made in germany markings on it however looking at the tailpiece i'm suspicious that this has been replaced so this likely did leave the factory with the tp6 tailpiece so that's the one modification i am going to do to this guitar once i can find a vintage correct one for about 100 bucks here's a good comparison of what the binding actually looks like in person to appear white you can see how it has that nice yellowed aged hue to it it's not over the top but this thing isn't so clean that we need to suspect that it's been recently refinished which is what i was kind of scared of like this color appears a lot darker blue on camera than it actually is in person it definitely has that light blue with a tint of green on it i say kind of close to that blueish color but a little bit deeper in person whereas in my camera it just looks closer to that blue but this is a transparent blue finish so you can actually see through to the wood grain so it's kind of similar to that limited colors edition blue les paul standard that we just looked at a couple of weeks ago i mean it would have been cool if this would have been a flame top but at the same time artisans didn't really have flame tops like some of them you can find with some mild figuring like i had one like that once but here is that two-piece center seam line now we'll just continue to run down the other side here you can see there is some finish tracking like right there there's some here there's some up here in the cutaway all of the common areas and unfortunately we do have some by the knobs you can see them kind of stemming there stemming from here and a little bit right there so likely this guitar might have had some light trauma at some point in time like it was lightly dropped that's normally what that is sometimes it can also be humidity it's all in the usual locations though so nothing nefarious on that that's actually kind of nice to see when you're a little bit on the edge of is this the original finish or not but here is our pickguard everything's looking nice here so moving on from our two-piece maple top with mahogany body we've got the three-piece maple neck and the ebony fretboard nothing too crazy here just your standard frets of the era 22 of them 12-inch fretboard radius i suppose i should actually measure that though being a custom order anything's possible but yeah 12 seems about right with the usual 24 3 4 inch scale length but check out our fancy inlays every other fret here it's the hearts and flowers model the artisan borrowed these off of the old banjos that gibson used to make they had these same inlays so if you ever wonder where these things came from it's those banjos they're pretty cool but it looks great on a les paul too and those are all done up in mother of pearl now on regular artisans it's actually quite common for some of these to fall out like my personal artisan i had a while ago that unfortunately i sold i think it was missing uh one of these thumbnails but thankfully everything looks in place on this one the neck feels very similar to most artisans but let's go ahead and grab those we got 1.67 inches at the nut width 2.02 by the 12. first fret neck theft 0.81 and 1 at the 12th but we're kind of hitting the heel so we'll take it at the 11th too 0.97 so that might sound big but it's just kind of rounding up a bit right there it's definitely a slimmer 60s neck here's that neck profile at the first and 12th fret stays very consistent just gets a little bit more rounded and wider up here now we move on to the face of the headstock what's kind of interesting here is the inlays have not really aged as much as the binding so we'll definitely have to black like that to make sure that's correct in comparison to pure white over here you can see the yellowness and then this is still it's a slightly aged i mean it's not pure white so it probably just comes down to this is mother of pearl it's a pure white material and maybe this binding didn't actually start pure white we can definitely see some very light finish checking within the finish here nothing too crazy though and inside here we can see our maple neck with the number four if you ever see an initial within your truss rod cavity that is whoever did your frets on the guitar but our truss rod is looking good on this one and the truss rod cover definitely has some age to it as well upon closer inspection it looks to me like the truss rod cover screws have been replaced they don't quite fit properly like you really have to screw that one down to even secure this so maybe one day i'll look into replacing those with error correct pieces and that makes sense you know somebody takes the truss rod cover off it's a careless tack they just have screws on their bench that's not necessarily a red flag but something for us to keep in mind the back side of the guitar there's a little bit more to the story than even i was shown i found something very cool so i was telling you earlier how i talked to randy leonard about this and what we had saw here was his father's signature on the base plate where the pots are attached to you can see his fl right there floyd leonard 8 21 86. seeing that was really cool but i had never seen him sign that plate before so i asked him about it and he said sometimes if there wasn't an area that was masked off right here he would sign somewhere on it because he was the sound check guy that was his sign off but look what we have here a double signature by floyd except for this time it's not in cursive i've never seen that before so i'll have to ask randy about that i've never seen that i guess it's possible it's another guy's signature that just happens to have the same initials but a rare sighting of floyd leonard initials not in cursive because i used to think he was jl because it was in cursive like that so randy got back to me about what he thought that double signature meant he hypothesized that maybe this guitar came back through to him after having to have a finish repair at the factory perhaps that explains the stinger on the back side of the headstock before it left but he was also saying at this point in time since kalamazoo was closing and they were bringing a bunch of stuff down to nashville since the cavity is actually circular where the wires come in as you can see here he's thinking that this might actually be like a new old stock artisan body or just an old gibson body that they were moving from kalamazoo to nashville because by this time they had the square channel routes because they were doing everything by cnc machine so this guitar is pretty interesting but it definitely left gibson like this but here's where he's telling me about the kalamazoo pieces that they were processing into 85 and 86 just using up all those parts so thank you randy it's great that you share the information that i can then share with other people to learn about my favorite era of gibson but anyways as far as the electronics go thankfully the pot codes are available on one it dates it as a cts pot that's what one three seven means then eight six for the year 1986 that looks like 15 for the 15th week of that year all the other ones they're pretty much covered over by stuff so we can't get any additional dates but that seems perfect it lines up with the serial number pretty well now normally if a guitar gets refinished they'll have to mess with the wiring now it's possible that they could have got 86 pots in here but that'd be you know above and beyond everything looks untouched to me in here but what's kind of interesting is the fact that this has a ground wire so this is around the time i think they start bringing that back so it might have just been a custom ordered spec but generally you see them attach it to this pot instead of coming all the way over here but we can see the vintage buffing compound that only age can make look like that the rest of the mahogany body here another good way to tell if a guitar has been refinished is look at the paint underneath the plate now i'm not going to take the whole thing out because i'm confident this is legit at this point but you can see some maple popping through there that doesn't have a finish output jack on the side is a metal plate strap button on your bottom and your top here's what our toggle switch looks like once again you can see that bare maple and some finish here it's just been masked off this thing was taken care of very well like it's got some light wear the finish is aged it's not perfect it's got finished checking but that's kind of what i wanted to see to verify that this is what it was supposed to be we've got the wide binding on this that's just a spec for these so we won't have any exposed maple top there and this is one of the few artisans made in the henry j era hey did you guys know they were going to reissue the les paul artisan check out this would you rock or not episode to see the prototype of the gibson usa artisan that never quite made it to production but now the more keen eye viewers would go hey this is a slightly darker blue color than this one i'll use my color chart here to kind of show you so this is lighter because this is a maple neck in person it gets more apparent how light it is right here as compared to the body being much darker because that's a very dark piece of mahogany here and it's so strange seeing 80s wood grain have a blue finish on it i mean when you've looked at enough of these you know what they generally look like and yep that's exactly what this is so there were blue finishes in this time period one of the cooler ones is called bahama blue i don't believe that one is transparent though so this is like translucent bahama blue essentially but bahama blue in itself is a really rare color i've never seen a custom done up in it and i've been looking so i think this is the closest i'm gonna get for that but here if you look at the heel you can see the three pieces of maple that's pretty easy got the typical binding cracks by the frets that's just caused by fret sprout it's pretty much on every single gibson after a couple of years but man i'm still shocked about this having a factory stinger on here and what's great is if you ever have a stinger on a guitar and it's suspiciously black and it's like an older guitar what you need to do is look at it at an angle if you can see the yellowed lacquer over top of it you know it probably started from the factory like that instead of it just being a cover-up job and you probably have to be in person to appreciate this but yes i can see that i have no doubts that this left the factory like this but i love that side profile so it's just the back of the headstock that's black the rest of it still has the blue color and you can see some more minor finish checking especially on that side right there and there is a pretty visible seam line right there on the wing of the headstock and all the typical lines around the binding here's a good look at the top but there we go a nice look at the custom shop original decal the rarest decal the highest and one that you'll want as a collector if this guitar didn't have that i would be scared but custom shop originals those are what i love to collect custom shop editions they're cool too but original that's where it's at there's another good look at our serial number made in usa i guess at this point in time poor old kalamazoo has been shut down so of course this will be a nashville built one it is important to note that blacklight tests don't necessarily show you that yes it's the original finish it just shows you how old the finish is and what type of finish has been used so you're looking for a uniform glow rather than necessarily a big green glow because it all just depends on how much sun this thing is seen you're also looking for discrepancy areas especially around like the neck heel or or other commonly repaired areas like the headstock everything looks good on the top and sides back is looking perfectly uniform as well perhaps most importantly is the neck and especially this transition and that looks perfect to me we can see some of that finish checking but the green over top of that stinger yeah looks like we might have a little bit of stand rash that's hidden within the finish that is there on the sides but other than that yeah we are in business and in true artisan fashion it's really heavy almost 11 pounds here that's a big chunky body all right so what is my final verdict i am 1 000 convinced this is factory original this is going to be known as trogley's blue artisan i will never sell this guitar i have been looking for a les paul artisan to add to my collection after regretting selling that other one a couple of years ago and i've been wanting something special and what's more special than a trans blue factory custom shop original artisan with triple pafs and a two-piece maple top so my future museum yeah you can visit me and check this thing out in person sure there's been a few screws replaced and probably the tail piece but i'm definitely going to put a tp6 on that thing i don't know if i'll put an artisan truss rod cover on it though because it's not really an artisan since it was birthed outside of that but anyways let's go ahead and plug it in and hear how it sounds all right let's grab the tones out of this rare beast starting with our neck pickup [Music] so [Music] all right so that should give you a brief idea of why i love three pickup less poles that are just on a three-way toggle switch so your neck pickup is just a regular juicy stuff right [Music] and the bridge pickup typical bitey stuff but then the middle position a combination of these two it's just so different it's almost stratocaster like is the best way to put it single coil [Music] so i've always said if you're like a die-hard les paul fan but you still want a single coil-esque sound or you don't want a fender in your collection check out a three pickup les paul custom [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right let's go ahead and try some distortion [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] i hope that gives you an idea honestly the bridge pickup i want it to be hotter [Music] maybe just a little bit rounder like i like tim shaw pafs and t-tops right but the bridges they never do much for me it's always about the neck pickup personally and single coils sound great distorted i think but the middle position on the les paul's not quite as much [Music] now that we know about this rare unicorn custom ordered les paul artisan what are my final thoughts maybe not my favorite playing or sounding les paul i've ever owned but definitely one of my favorite custom orders i've ever found like we found that really weird sg that one time in a ruju rocker not episode that was birthed around the same time but this is like a desirable guitar to collectors like i am so happy i got it and i got it in the era where you know i'm starting to build my own personal collection for that future museum i think the main reason why i didn't like playing this a lot is that middle pickup is way too high up to be comfortably played it says all those pickups are in the way so if i was going to continue to heavily play this i'd probably lower that down a bit i guess it makes sense why there's picking where right here even before i was playing so yeah one day this will be on display for everyone to see and just to clarify just because it's a museum museum doesn't mean i'm not gonna have special artist guests like come and play them have a good time do like live shows we're a couple years out on that yet it's very expensive to build buildings right now but hey maybe in the future you can visit me and check out my blue les paul artisan no it's not for sale i mean even if somebody offered me like thirty thousand dollars i i don't think i'd be able to take it on this one because it's just that cool not only is it blue not only does it have all those other weird specs that we were talking about that made it special but the stinger is just the icing on the cake i love stingers and you just never see them in the norland era outside of high-end arch tops and a few custom orders so now i can happily say yup i own one of those all right troglodytes i hope you enjoyed checking out my blue blue blue artisan and we will catch you tomorrow on the next episode take care [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: The Trogly's Guitar Show

Views: 275,716

Keywords: the trogly's guitar show, trogly, trogley, gibson, gibson les paul, fender, Gibson Les Paul Artisan, Trogly Blue Artisan, Blue Les Paul Artisan, Rare Gibson guitar, 1986 Gibson Les Paul, 1986 Gibson, 1986 Les Paul, 1986 Gibson Les Paul Artisan, Les Paul Artisan, Hearts and Flowers Gibson, Hearts and Flowers inlays, Custom Shop Original Decal, Custom Shop Edition Decal, One Off Gibson, One Off Custom Order Guitar, Blue Les Paul, Blue Gibson Guitar, Tim Shaw PAFs

Id: JEsnqdqrIaE

Length: 33min 5sec (1985 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022