What made you buy a Les Paul? What did you have before?

[Jim]

HI all,

 

I was prompted to ask this after reading the thread on the Chinese copies. I waited nearly 28 years before I was in position to buy a Les Paul and it was worth the wait. I would cry if I thought mine was a fake! (It isn't I bought from a highly reputable dealer - that was a story in itself)

 

I had to have a black custom, ever since I saw Marc Bolan play with one. (He is known more for that re-finished one that had at least three different necks) But I already had that image of the black custom. Then I started listening to different bands and started to recognise the classic Les Paul/Marshall sound, think classic british heavy rock in the '70s

 

My first guitar was an Eros Les Paul Custom copy that I bought in 1974, loved it, Cost me £60.00 secondhand, but a new Gibson was about £500.00 at the time, and more importantly it looked the part. Bolt on neck!

 

Next was a K Flying V with a thru neck, thru body stringing, active electronics, brass inlays and nut. K made the Woolworths guitars and this was an attempt to go upmarket a bit. Kept it for years. I had seen Bolan playing a flying V.....

 

Aria Strat copy I fitted with Di marzio humbuckers, blonde, nice looking guitar, but I just can't get on with Strats, I don't know why, but I just cannot get a sound out of them, and I never feel comfortable playing one.

 

Colombus (Another Japanese manufacturer, long since departed) 335 dot copy - Dreadful

 

Arbiter Gibson TV copy. Brilliant little guitar.

 

Aria RSX 70. Oh dear. Double cut original guitar with active...but it had 13 different knobs and switches, complete overkill and the active was almost unuseable as it was just a wall of feedback. Never found the same settings twice.

 

Another Arbiter TV with a genuine P90 fitted. Wish I still had that one

 

Epi 335 Dot kept it for years

 

Epi Flying V (Black) with a mirror scratchplate that cost me more than the guitar did. Again kept it for years

 

ESP Telecaster shaped Eclipse. Very early Jap model with two seymour duncan humbuckers and floyd rose. Painted fingerboard which is a little odd. Still got that one.

 

And then I was finally in a position to buy my Les Paul, some 5 years ago now. But the excitement, I felt like a kid trying to pull off Marc Bolan poses, I listened to all my old vinyl that I remembered the guitarist using a Les Paul on. I sat for hours just staring at it, I could never get that involved with a guitar if I knew it was a fake, it would be like lying to myself. My old Jap copies were just that, cheap copies and didn't pretend to be a Gibson.

 

Afer I got my Les Paul, I sold the Epi 335 and V, just didn't need them any more, kept the ESP as a stage back up and have my acoustic.

 

Thanks for reading. So what was your first, worst and why did you want an LP?

[FennRx]

i wanted to play the guitar after seeing TSRTS. i wanted a les paul. it was 1995 and i was 13 when i started lessons and my parents bought me a samick strat knockoff. a few months later, i pulled all my money from my BD and xmas presents for the next two years, all my grass cutting money and a $200 interest free loan from my parents and bought a new 1995 Gibson Les Paul Studio in ebony. i was going to buy an Epi Std because it had the sunburst finish like JP's #1. but i bought the gibson because the ads said "only a gibson is good enough." and i believed it then and i believe it now. the difference now though, is that i do know the difference....

 

all because of jimmy page.

[pippy]

I remember The Eros Custom Black Beauty! My best mate down the road bought one!!!

 

My first electric (referred to on my last post on the fake Chinese guitars as it happens) was bought about the same time you got yours. I used to go into the local music shop and lust after (sad but true) a Columbus Les Paul plaintop in what we now know as Iced Tea finish!

 

With my Christmas money I went through to Glasgow and tried out what I could afford. It came down to a 'Grant' Gold-top and a V. I liked the V but found it impossible to play sitting down (of course) so got the Grant. Sixty-two pounds fifty pence. I've still got it - for sentimental reasons I could never sell it on.

 

My brother and I bought a 'Zenta' 3 watt (I think they were exaggerating) practice amp. So horrible, of course, but we didn't care! We used to go to the rubbish dump to salvage any speaker drivers we could find in old TV sets, radiograms and the like, which we then nailed onto an inverted apple crate, wired them up in Parallel to the amp and we were away! It was actually quite loud because of the drop in resistance etc., and we ended up putting the whole "stack" under the bedclothes so we could turn it up enough to get the essential distortion! Happy Days.....

 

It was then my mate got the Eros to jam with me but he gave up after a couple of weeks and left me the guitar when he moved away.

 

My first real Guitar was also a Gold-top but then, late '79, I got my first Strat., an '02 Jan 1964' from McCormack's in Argyll(?) St., again in Glasgow. It had been stripped back to bare wood by someone before me to get the 'Steve Hillage' look. Shame, really, as it had the original paint in the cavity etc and had been Lake Placid Blue. I had it re-finished in LPB and it became my shadow for the next 24 years. Many other Fenders came and went; I remember desperately trying to get on with maple-necked Strats. At one time I had two but they were both the plastic-laquered variety and were truly horrible to play. I also had a weird Fender called the Swinger, which is a rarity but, as it was 3/4 scale and had a terrible pup, was sold on. I wish I still had it - just out of curiosity.

 

In the mid '80s I thought about adding a s/h CSB LP Custom to the Gold-top but when I went in to the shop clutching my cash (350.00 sterling) it was awful and I ended up walking out with a Musicman Sabre II. That was even worse - active electronics etc.

 

From then on I decided to buy only Fenders; I had never found a Gibson I really, really liked but, recently, tried to find a nice 'burst as I'd always loved 'The Sound'.

 

Found one. Got rid of (almost) everything else. Can't really see me wanting anything else.

 

But those first years with all that rubbish! Nothing can recapture that excitement!

[myspace.com/jessenoah]

lucky or me, i only played one recording session before i bought my firsy les paul, haviing the versitility of tones is really important for me

 

but i wanted a les paul because of the regulars

page

ace

slash

zakk

bfg

 

 

no real surprises

[InBlack.]

Previously I used only floyd-rose, and similar floating bridge guitars. Anyway I joined a band that plays mostly Hard Rock, and naturally I needed a fixed bridge guitar. So I tried a few and found one thats playable and has a great tone.

[Elias]

i always wanted a les paul.. since the first time i saw Slash, almost 15 years ago (i`m 27).. and for 15 years that i`ve been playing guitar, now i finally got my Gibson, i had an Epiphone Les paul Goldtop before this one. And here in Chile, the Gibson guitars, the few that we`ve got here in some musicians stores, are to expensive. so i bouht mine right from new york

[stymye]

My first real guitar was a 68 SG, I later found a LP copy that worked well enough till I could afford the real thing.

I always liked humbuckers and fat necks because thats what I became used to.

LP Influences were the typical players,mainly Page , the guys from thin Lizzy, Joe Perry.Ace

[djroge1]

My first guitar was probably a Kay or something like that. My mom bought it for me at a garage sale because I wanted to play like my older brother played.

 

Later my folks bought me a Global Les Paul - Global were sold thru the Sears catalog. I was rockin' for years with that guitar and later they helped me get a Peavey Classic amp. Somewhere along the way, my parents helped me buy a no-name flying V guitar. It really had no name on it at all, but it was cool as a 13 year old.

 

My brother lent me the money for my Gibby... there was some dude who needed to sell it for some quick cash at a good price. Now that is the oldest and longest owned guitar in my stable. I bought it in 1979 - it's a '78 Les Paul.

[L5Larry]

I got my first electric guitar in 1970. It was guitar that I picked out of a S&H Green Stamp catolog I THOUGHT looked like what I later learned was a Strat I saw pictured in the Beatles "Let It Be" album. I talked my mom into cashing in all her Green Stamps for it, the name on the headstock said "Ranger". Well it certainaly wasn't ANYTHING like a Strat.

 

A couple of years later I saw a "Lyle" SG copy hanging in a music store at the mall, and had to have the "upgrade" since I had seen the Alice Cooper band on television playing matching white SG's (and an EB). I had found some other neighbor kids to jam with, and we thought we were on our way to being rockstars. We had also started learning a little about guitars and equipment, and my lawn mowing (summer) and skate sharpening (winter) businesses were taking off. I was getting $5 a lawn for mowing (I had five lawns in the neighborhood), and 50 cents a pair for skate sharpening, man was I getting rich. Of course the lawns were mowed using my dad's mower and gas, and he had also bought me the skate sharpening machine.

 

The other guitar player I was jamming with was an "older" kid that had a drivers license, so we started hitting the local music stores. One day during the summer of '74 we ran upon a couple of old used Fenders, one was a sunburst Strat ($195), and the other was a butterscotch Tele ($150). These were REAL guitars, and we both went home to start digging around for the cash. After a few days I had dug up $100 cash and borrowed $100 from my sister. I called my buddy up and said my sister was driving me down to the store to get one of those Fenders, did he want to go along. To my horror he said he had already gone and bought one of them. I really wanted the Strat and was sure he had "sniped" me on the deal, and I was relieved to hear he had bought the Tele. So I was able to get the old used sunburst Strat, I even got $30 trade-in on my SG copy. All I knew at the time was that I was getting a REAL guitar, a Fender Stratocaster. I learned a short time later that is was made in 1960. At the time that still didn't mean much, for the "vintage" guitar market was really just getting started.

 

The next summer I got my first Gibson, a used '64 Firebird III ($470). I was probably listening to Johnny Winter, Dave Mason and Stephen Stills at the time, all playing Firebirds. Then the "Southern Rock" craze hit the midwest, and although I had been listening to the Allman Brothers for a few years, here came Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, all powered by the Les Paul/Marshall sound. It seemed like every band I went to see were playing LP's. When it comes right down to it, it was really Duane Allman that made me realize I HAD to have a tobacco sunburst Les Paul Standard.

 

Gibson had recently started making sunburst Standards again, before this time only sunburst Deluxes were available. I went to my hometown Gibson dealer, which happened to be a store owned by Mel Bay, and they had two tobacco sunburst Standards in stock. I had them both layed out in their open cases on the floor in front of me, and with Mel Bay looking over my shoulder, I picked up, inspected, and played each one until I had made my decision. Closing time had come and gone and Mel couldn't wait to get me out of the store so he could lock up and go home. I handed him $500 and some change and bounced out of the store with my brand new tobacco sunburst 1975 Les Paul Standard. It was also the first "real" guitar I had ever bought new.

 

I still have the Strat and the Les Paul. The Firebird has been sold, as has a '75 ES-335 I played for years. But, I have since added a ES-345, L-5CES, L-7, and a TB-1 tenor banjo to the Gibson collection (see avatar).

[myspace.com/jessenoah]

very cool story larry, sounds like gas hit you pretty young

[Jim]

Thanks - a lot of stories there, but following on from Pippy's reply, man, I really related to that, we must be of a similar age and I played my first gig in that incredible summer we had in 1976. I got a set of letraset and put "Les Paul Custom" on the truss rod cover of that Eros....Made me feel better!

 

My amp at the time was a "Custom Sound Trucker", a 50 watt all tranny amp, no gain or anything, just volume bass middle and treble, I used a coloursound fuzz box and and cry baby that my brother in law donated to me. I played in a pub in ealing to a dozen or so bored punters while I put 5 minute solo's in every song - Ah those were the days!

 

Second gig, we got chased out of the pub (The Lambeth walk) and laughed about it for days - My Brother in Law got an Eros as well and we would spend hours kidding each other that the name didn't matter, how these guitars were just as good, it was all snobbery with "named" guitars and how you could buy any cheap guitar and with new pups (remember the "mighty mite super distortion"?) and a set up it would be as good as guitar costing £500.00 I think I ended up almost believeing that.

 

Then life, work, wives (erm...) divorces and all get in the way and although I had a couple of near misses with music, just carried on playing in pubs and small clubs and then I got a bonus at work and bought my Les Paul

 

It all came back and I really think I was just as excited then as I was when I got my Eros. I still look at it on it's stand, pick it up even just to play one chord on my way past and think how incredibly lucky I am to have it.

[MarkHolbrook]

I was playing in a HS band. I had my original Fender Telecaster from roughly 1969 or so. I always liked the look of the Les Pauls. I couldn't afford one so I bought a copy in cherry sunburst and it played like crap. I had that copy for about two years between 1976 and 1977. Then one day I walked into Jensen music (I was regular there). Up on the wall was a purple Les Paul. The owner got it down for me and I played it and fell in love. Then he told me he'd make me a deal on it. The rubber sleeves on the guitar rack had somehow interacted with the neck and left two marks. He knocked down a fair amount and I said ok. I came back the next day having pulled my savings out and he sold me it for like $700 and took my cheap clone in on trade for about $250 which I thought was good. I had purchased it for like $300.

 

That was a wonderful guitar. In 1984 my (now ex) wife saw I was not playing the paul much so she said why don't we sell it. We were broke, I was stupid and I let her sell it. I have no idea how much she got for it but I'm pretty sure it was like $200 and she turned around and snuffed that up in coke that same afternoon. I never saw a cent and I had no clue until years later how much that guitar was probably worth.

[rocketman]

Great stories here! I was lucky enough to be given a Gibson Sonex when I was 13. But I always wanted a Les Paul. Other things took priority for much of my life (OK I bought a BMW before a Les Paul...bad me!!), but I eventually got to buying one...and then another.

[turtle]

i bought my first les paul , a black standard because i loved the way it sounded and the way it played. it was a little beat up but i traded my almost new american strat for it anyhow. i had to chip in about 200 extra for the les paul so you can imagine the shape it was in to only be 200 more to trade. but it became almost habit to pick that up instead of my 68 strat i had or the 335 i traded the 68 for later and then retraded it back. later i traded it for my cherry sunburst thats in my avatar. when trading it the salesman showwed me the crack in the headstock that was repaired . i thought it was a scratch or somethng. but a hell of a job because i thought he was pulling my leg. the crack was not in the neck part. more in the bottom of the headstck part . now i traded all my guitars and only have 2 LP's and i tele thats a real gem...for a fender anyway> hahahaha

[uyasgali]

I bought a LP Studio (Ebony) just because I wanted it. I haven't owned an electric guitar since 1967. I have a Gibson Hummingbird (1963) that I love dearly and a Gibson J45.

 

I'm older than dirt but I like to make some noise once in a while.

[hi13ts]

My Fenders lacked the power and depth of a humbucker guitar, so I tested around. I saw Snowy White playing a Paul with Pink Floyd and I immediately fell in love with the tone. I went out to find a Paul and I was shocked at the price. Several years later, I saved up enough to buy a decent Les Paul and have been in love with Les Pauls ever since.

[hbpatter83]

It was also about 28 ++ years to have passed before I could finally afford a new Gibson Les Paul. A long wait but worth it.

 

I started playing (or I should say making noise) in the early to mid 70's. I rented an epi 335 look alike. I think it may have been the Casino. My parents ended up buying it for me. I then bought a Fender Twin Reverb and truly had no business owning that monster. I couldn't play worth a damn then and just made loud noise. I ended up selling it all in the early 80's and bought a Univox acoustic. I played that thing off and on for about 10 years. There were some years I never picked it up. Was mostly playing stuff from tabs... which wasn't easy to get since no internet. Then in 1990 I stumbled across an 84 Gibson 335 that someone was selling for $300.00 and bought it immediately. I had alway's wanted one of those too. About the mid 90's I started to get serious about playing and started to learn some music theory and I guess the rest is history. I'm still just a hobbyist type player but I love the techical aspect of the music theory and playing.. Through the course of all that I was married had two boy's and tried to find time to play. Now my boy's are grown.. still married and finding more time to play. I'm a little more liquid with money so I've finally gotten myself the Les Paul. Love it!

 

That's my story

 

HP

[SRV-Zeppelin]

I played acoustic for quite a while before deciding to make the switch to electric. I was looking at getting something low-end to start and was rather naive about electric guitar brands... although I had heard of Fender. My friend kept babbling on about Gibson and how great their guitars were, so I did a bit of research. The first time I laid eyes on a Les Paul I knew I had to own one. And now that I actually do, I want three more guitars and a new amp... even though I don't need any of them.

[saturn]

I started learning on a no-name LP copy back in the 80s. Then over the years had an Ibanez, and a Mexican Strat. I payed that Strat exclusively from 1993-2004. When a new Guitar Center came to our city my wife told me to finally get a I really wanted. She wanted me to get a PRS because we live near the factory and she likes the bird inlays. As tempting as that was, I knew that I would regret not getting a Gibson Les Paul.

[lowb5str]

When I heard Clapton play BluesBreakers & Cream, I was lost. I studied his tone, got as far as noting the different dual-humbucker Gibsons he used at the time, (LP, SG, ES) and started saving my allowance. Learned to play on a $100 Yamaha folk. Mowed lawns, shoveled driveway snow, banked it up. Noted more blues-rock LP users with tone I liked. Started shopping all over my city for the available LPs. Found a Deluxe GoldTop with the same hanger marks that the earlier poster mentioned. Sustained forrreeevvvveeerrrr. Couldn't afford the difference between that and the Custom (Black Beauty). 1971 was a happy year.

[cajunman831]

I always wanted a Gibson.But,I didn,t like how heavy they we,re.For years, I was and still am a Strat guy.

I finally bought me two Gibsons recently.Custom and a std.with 50s neck.Haven,t played them yet.Will

let ya,ll know when I get home from work in a couple of weeks.

[Flight959]

I always wanted a Gibson LP. I think its that classic shape and sound that makes them so popular.

 

Flight959

[tulsaslim]

Wow. A lot of you guys certainly add creedence to the theory that 'they'll buy what their idols play'.

 

For me it had nothing to do with that. Plain & simple, there is no other guitar that sounds as full and thick as an LP. If you want that sound (I do) you gotta have an LP to get it.

[saturn]

Wow. A lot of you guys certainly add creedence to the theory that 'they'll buy what their idols play'.

 

For me it had nothing to do with that. Plain & simple' date=' there is no other guitar that sounds as full and thick as an LP. If you want that sound (I do) you gotta have an LP to get it.[/quote']

 

That cuts both ways. People generally pick their idols based on what kind of tone/sound they prefer. So it follows that when it come to buying their own guitar they will want to get a similar sound that they prefer from their idols. Does that make any sense?

[1MESAMAN]

My first guitar was a Memphis,bought with the change my father put in a HI-C can.(P.O.S)I later sold my first car to by a brand new Peavey Nitro,which I still have as a clockL.O.L. I eventually fell in love with Jacksons after my teen guitar idol Rhandy Rhoads got his.I played them exclusively for 18 years,and still love them,but I wanted something WITHOUT a F loyd R ose on it,with more versatility. To make sure I could make the switch,I bought an ESP paul copy with EMG's.What an amazing guitar for 800 bucks.It felt pretty awkward at first playing an arch top,but I began to use it to my advantage,and found I really dug it.So that was that.I could do it after all.I was going to get MAJOR heat from my frinds who played Gibsons all these years,with the I told you so's,but what the hell right?So I did some research,and found the G.T.,with coil tapping,dual truss rods,and some not so neccesary frills,and ordered it.I almost laid an egg when I tracked its postal progress and saw the weight @23lbs !!! I love the guitar,but have to trade off to the E.S.P,after a few songs just to save myself a trip to my physical therapy.I would really like to get another one,maybe a supreme,but I will definitely check the weight first !,Scott Peace