This Was an INCREDIBLE Find! | 1982 Gibson Les Paul Artisan

it's time for my yearly tradition welcome back troglodytes to your daily dose of guitar information the trogly's guitar show that's right every December I seem to get a Les Paul Artisan I don't plan it to be that way but for the past five to six years of my life I always happen to buy one during this time and it's just funny because I associate these guitars with Christmas because in the music video for Father Christmas Dave Davies there is playing a Les Paul Artisan so it's just funny how that always works out last year we documented this really cool blue Artisan that's still in my Personal Collection this year I found an interesting one Live While guitar hunting it was kind of funny finding this live when I was recording because at first I didn't purchase it and I told you everything that made this thing special however when my editor finished the video or the day that I knew that it was going to be there I looked at it again and I decided ah I need to seal the deal on that because this ended up being so special I talked myself into it so it's one of these very oh man this is just gorgeous I love it it's not like active flame top or anything but it's got a lot of nice wood grain here it hasn't faded like sometimes these really dark ones do and it's not so dark that you can't actually tell it's a walnut color that happens sometimes but this is a Les Paul Artisan in case you haven't seen one before it's known as the hearts and flowers model it has really fancy inlays they're pretty gaudy for what they are but let's go ahead and fill you in with the whole history here the Les Paul Artisan was a super ultra fancy high-end model the second highest and Les Paul that was ever produced in the Norland era at the time of its introduction anyways second only to the Les 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 ball nuts 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 19 82 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 it's not my white Les Paul Artisan that I'm searching for yet but this was still a custom order how did I know that 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 3 pickups within the two pickup era which this one definitely is because it's a three pickup done up in the year 1982. now the other kind of cool thing for the Les Paul Artisan is they were the very first model to feature these flip out winding tuners so in that hunting episode when I first saw this I thought this was a 1978 and it just happened to have those features and that's why it was a three pickup model but then I noticed the bridge that's an 80s part that's known as the three-point adjust-o-matic bridge and then I saw the diamond posi lock strap buttons and it just made me so excited this was definitely a last year Les Paul Artisan that has all the cool 80s specs all we're really missing here are the Tim Shaw paf stickers on here but you gotta remember most Artisans actually came with tarback pickups so I'm excited to tear this thing apart to see did it actually get Tim Shaw pafs or does it have the regular pickups of the era however the other thing that makes this one special is the fact that hey we still have a maple neck 82 is kind of a transition Year back into mahogany but you're going to notice this is an artisan that does not have a Volute stock from the factory again 82 is a transition year so it just happened to be made late enough in production that it didn't get the Volute but here we go two beautiful Les Paul Artisans how most people think of them either two pickup or three pickup variation with the different Walnut colors here you can kind of see what I was talking about earlier had the the Smoky ones even though this one hasn't aged too much and the slightly darker one without fading so this one shipped to me in a Gen 2 chainsaw case aka the absolute best case Gibson has ever made in my opinion they kind of reissued the wrong ones but I'm sure these are more expensive to make if you need help learning the difference between the generations check out this episode right here but inside our case compartment here unfortunately just empty strings and and a fender pick no cool case candy but first impressions here oh my goodness this thing is a boat anchor it will not surprise me if it's 12 pounds but that's okay that's just to be expected they are usually pretty heavy guitars but it looks like all our inlays are intact this thing is in pretty good shape I want to call it minty we actually do have some marks on the back but since this is such a cool late special order 1982 I will be adding this one to my Personal Collection as long as it all checks out on the workbench so that's our next step here let's throw it on up there to take a look at its parts and specs the process of cleaning a guitar is so labor intensive and it really hurts your hand but I'm just addicted to the results of it I mean this thing came back to life and I found something that I didn't realize was special about this one it has a two-piece Maple top so in the northern era everything was three pieces or more for the most part occasionally you will find a rare Center seam or if you're really lucky like in this episode you'll have a one-piece Maple top but that's generally a super special example finding a two-piece is definitely special so outside of the whole three pickup thing and everything else we just learned that's another feature that makes this one incredibly special but let's go ahead the moment of truth what kind of pickups do we have in here well it's the regular tarbacks so these guys get their name because they were epoxy coated so unfortunately when these go bad you really can't rewind them because getting the covers off is nearly impossible like I heard there's one guy in Germany or something that can do it but your average Tech won't be able to help you and it is common for these pickups to die so we'll have to make sure these are working but I love these pickup cavities they're so clean and you have a very interesting color combination here because you can see the solid mahogany body well actually it's 82. it is possible this has weight relief whereas all the other ones will not because 82s around when they started that when they started transitioning the neck and like getting rid of the Volute so maybe just maybe because just because your guitar weighs 13 pounds doesn't mean it doesn't have nine holes in it still I love that cross section it reminds me of like a fancy brownie you got the dark finish on the top then you get your Maple and then the Mahogany it's just a cool scene but as far as our readings within the circuit the bridge is 15.59 K ohms that's pretty hot the neck 15 0.77 and then our middle uh oh that's very low do we have a dead pickup no it's just how Gibson does their wiring for three pickups so the middle position when it's wired traditionally for Gibson instead of being these two when you have the third humbucker they wire these two together and kind of an out of phase tone it's not exactly out of phase but basically it gives you a Stratocaster like tone so if you only like humbuckers you don't want a single coil Stratocaster or Telecaster in your collection get yourself a three humbucker Les Paul or get one that has a coil splitting option but this can be a lot more fun so this is known as the three-point top adjust Bridge top adjust because instead of having your Saddles here and you adjust them on the side you adjust it from the top whether that's more convenient or not I'll leave that up to you but the most unique feature about these guys is the fact that they have three places that they can mount to the post so most bridges have just a standard slight slant but this one can be straight up straight in the middle straight down or you can have any combination in between middle middle lower lower upper middle this way that way any way you want it to go most people generally just set them up like this but that's great because if you run out of intonation room instead of having to rip the studs out re-drill it put it where it needs to go you can just tilt your Bridge you're good to go this was a very shortly lived part in Gibson history and then we've got the tp6 tail piece here in case you don't know how these things work you've got these little Flappers and the ball end of the stream connects to them right there and then your fine tuner here pokes the flappers up and down you can see the end of the screw right there so by slightly moving that it changes the pitch of the string these were a rental wall creation and BB King liked to use them because they were so easy to string up you don't have to pull it through a tailpiece you just lock that in then you tie your string on and you're ready to go but these were initially designed for Azure playing like a chord if you're holding one for jazz and you need to take your picking hand and fine tune one of the strings because you're like Ah that's not quite right that's why I was here personally I've never really been a big fan of these they changed the way the guitar feels in a negative aspect in my opinion but there's some guys that like them I just like them because they're fancy then it looks like this one actually has a sustained sister around it what those are are giant brass blocks that replace the normal tiny studs you can always tell if you have them because they're a little bit wider and have more of a profile but if you actually take those out they're like just a big brass block I mean brass was big in the late 70s early 80s and check out how beautifully aged our speed knobs are these are my favorite knobs of all time as far as standard ones Go 70s and 80s speed knobs that have aged second only to the 1983 prehistoric style knobs because those are pretty cool too but we've just got a regular three-way toggle switch here we'll just take a second to capture the very nice wood grain on this two-piece Maple top as we were talking about earlier you can see our pickguard has left a little bit of a ding here in our top it's right there but that's all right I'm going to leave our pickguard on but we took it off to clean it up here but this right here breaks my heart you see this weird residue that's on it that means somebody left the plastic on this pick guard for an extended period of time you know that brand new one and then somebody decided to remove it after it's already done its damage like if you are lucky enough to have a guitar that has the plastic on it please leave it on there because nine times out of ten you're not gonna be happy with the end result anyways that does it for the body let's go ahead and move over to the neck so we've got a straight up ebony fretboard with inlays that were borrowed from a banjo which I just happened to have one of the banjo decks right here man I love collecting for this Museum because whenever I try to reference things normally I like to show photos but it's even better just to have have it side by side so it looks like they borrowed this one and just slightly modified it over there our 12th fret inlay was taken from over here except for they took away the Little Dot underneath it to make it a little easier and they also took a few artistic Liberties or maybe they came from a different model but the headstock is definitely almost one for one besides maybe moving the hearts and diamonds a little bit closer together but they did a pretty fancy job here as well as matching the Gibson logo in a round of that way but I honestly never really looked at these inlays super closely before the hearts aren't very well crafted in my opinion they look more like peaches or butts or something I don't know they just don't have that rounded curve of coming together I looked at my other artisan and it's pretty much the same way but very cool nonetheless you've got the ebony fretboard and these Frets polished up very nicely but we have a nut with the 1.71 inches that increases to 2.06 by the 12. we've got a first fret neck depth of 0.82 and at the 12.99 they're very slender 460 style necks here's that neck profile at the first fret and the 12th fret just a rounded C it's actually a little bit flatter in the first ifrat area but rounds up pretty nicely not huge by any means but they do have a nice roundedness to them and our headstock here again don't forget flip out winding tuners awesome just in case you don't understand that that's so you can do string changes very quickly if you don't have a string minder on you if you have one of these power Peg Pros you you never need it but they sure do look cool I mean you could just leave them hanging out if you want I always thought they look like ninja stars throwing them around and we can see our perfect truss rod here with our Maple neck and the signature of the guy who did the Frets I've always loved the artist and Trust Rod cover maybe it's the font the way it's engraved I'm kind of surprised that they didn't go the route of putting a brass truss rod cover on these as well as a brass nut as was popular but oh they left them like this Now we move on to the back side so the condition of this guitar reminds me of a owner that keeps it at home lightly plays it always takes good care of it and then he lends it to his buddy for one night and then he dings it all up and returns it like nothing's wrong and then they never speak again for another 30 years because you just have this line of divots right here it's not like your usual Circle coil cables I mean there was something on his jeans one day that just dinged it up there's like a small impression line right there Then you have a couple of Marks here but overall this was very well preserved it was strange there was something green on the finish and it was really hard to get off but after about an hour of scrubbing I finally got it all off it was all built up here along the edges there's like sticker residue here probably from a shop store sticker but since it was already removed I don't need the residue on it but at the end of the day it's beautiful again speaking of beautiful look at our untouched Electronics so I'm gonna go ahead and say it this does not have weight relief this is probably one of the older bodies that they just had like laying around because it's before they switch to the CNC routing you can tell by the circle Channel route right there and we can see our pots right here which I'll date the way I would expect looks like 81s for here 82's there and it does still have the shielding tray here with a factory ground wire as far as the edges go Artisans do indeed have the thick binding in the Cutaway pretty much the only special thing here are the diamond posi lock strap locks such a cool little feature they're just designed to help keep your strap on kind of like a strap block that's what these teeth are for foreign Artisans do not typically have flamed necks they're just three pieces of plain Maple usually now that doesn't mean you don't find some that have some light figuring but such even figuring throughout three pieces you know this one was definitely the pride and joy of a Kalamazoo worker when they were making it and specking it out because our serial number here tells us it is the second guitar produced on the 158th day of 1982. Kalamazoo made because this is 4.99 or less and we have the vertical stamp and you can see the back side of our Gibson tuners and again Nova Loot on this one not even a small one and in terms of Gibson things having a maple neck with Nova loot is the rarest option because it really only happened for like maybe six to eight months if that so that's just kind of cool that all these nice specs are on this particular Les Paul Artisan because I just love collecting the has all the cool model Les Paul customs and now I've got an artisan which I I didn't even know it exactly existed however you might ask the question if I'm so kind confident that this is a custom special order why does it not have a custom shop original decal on it or a custom shop Edition well first off 1982 is when they first started it and I think this one's a little bit too early for that but just because something was custom ordered does not necessarily mean it got that it's just a good indication of if you do have that it does mean that because sometimes you just find random things where you can find the original owner that says hey yeah I custom ordered this but was it really a custom order or was it hey this shop doesn't normally carry this we're going to custom order it from Gibson and ship it here like for example my first Gibson Les Paul was a 2012 Gibson silver burst I had to custom order it from Guitar Center but it wasn't truly a custom order it's just because they didn't carry one in stock they needed to order it I wasn't customizing all the specs or anything so sometimes there can be some confusion in the terms of what a true custom order was with such beautifully aged lacquer this is exactly what I was expecting a nice very even glow throughout everything including the knobs you can see there's maybe a little bit of sweat absorption right here but not too much I'm sure the dark finish kind of helps hide that discoloration in normal lighting situations but everything's looking good on our neck and the face of the headstock I don't even see any hanger rash on the front flip it over to the back you're looking good you can see some of those dings I was talking about I mean you could technically refinish the back and probably get rid of all these dings because they're not super deep by any means but then somebody blacklight so they're going to be very confused while the back does not glow I remember I ran across I think a white custom that had that done one point in time and I was like what's going on here I think that was before I did like big video documentation processes though so don't go looking for that video anywhere but our sides are looking great and here's a good example of you can take the sticker off the guitar but you can't take the sticker's history off of the finish under blacklight it still will show up you have that little box area now normally store ID stickers I'll keep on if it looks like it was the original store but I think that was just like a used inventory sticker because normally the big store stickers will be like right here sometimes they cover the made in USA or they have it right there those ones you definitely should keep on but I would say this one passes with flying colors it is a fantastic example okay maybe we do have a little bit of rubbing right here from a stand and a little bit more so right here but not too bad for being from 1982. all said and done the moment of truth is at 12 pounds pretty darn close to it 11 pounds five ounces is way too heavy for what it is but it is beautiful so let's go ahead plug it in and hear how these sound [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you good morning gotta say really digging the clean tones out of this one tonight that neck pickup is so juicy [Music] glassy even Bridge has the bite but the true magic with these it definitely has to be the middle position [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] sounds [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you that'll be no all about this rare 1982 Gibson Les Paul Artisan what are my final thoughts on this thing the three pickups are really in your way when you play but the tones are quite interesting I really love the cleans out of this one now as far as Distortion goes I've never really been a big fan of the tarback pickups whether that's the series sevens or any other of the tarback variations I've always just preferred the standard t-tops and Tim Shaw's and it's probably just because that's what the famous people ended up using to record all those famous songs that you've heard these pickups in but I am just enamored with this example I've actually had a few people try to buy this off of me before I even like featured it just off of the guitar hunting episode but now that I have this thing in my hands yeah I'm not gonna let this one go it's just too darn clean and it's got so many cool features that you don't normally see on an artisan this will definitely be in display on my future Museum in fact I would like to have one of every color Artisan one from every year I think that would just be fun but to find out that'll all line up like this is a three pickup wall in that one so I'll have to find all the other colors and hope it just matches up for the days but if anybody has a white Les Paul Artisan the famous 1982 Run please let me know I would definitely like to own one of those it is a Golden Goose I guess you could say I've been hunting for that for a couple of years now all right chocolate ice I hope you enjoyed our annual Les Paul Artisan review don't forget to like comment and subscribe and we'll catch you tomorrow on the next one take care if you enjoyed tonight's episode consider subscribing I post videos like this every day and you might even enjoy this next one

Channel: The Trogly's Guitar Show

Views: 73,219

Keywords: the trogly's guitar show, trogly, trogley, gibson, gibson les paul, fender, 1982 gibson les paul artisan, gibson les paul artisan 1977, gibson les paul artisan for sale, Gibson Les Paul Artisan 3 pickup walnut, gibson les paul artisan 1976, 70s gibson les paul artisan, 80s gibson les paul artisan, rare gibson guitar, banjo guitar gibson, hearts and flowers gibson les paul artisan, hearts and flowers inlay gibson, The Kinks father christmas guitar, the kinks father christmas

Id: SE6lG2IPtP0

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022