I bought my Gibson Blueshawk - a red one - in autumn 1998. I had been visiting it in a music shop in Birmingham (UK) for a some months when visiting in the city. I loved the look and playability, and when after a couple of months it was put in the 'Sale' - it was a bargain for a real Gibson and I bought it. Another attraction of the BH was its weight - this was to become a really important factor some years later when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. It immediately became my main guitar and I rehearsed and gigged it a lot in preference to my Strat Plus.
I've always spent a lot of time carefully setting-up and fettling guitars, and I was particularly fascinated by the control circuitry and spent time analysing the BH's circuit - confused at first until I gently pried up the dummy coil and found the choke associated with the Varitone in a cavity beneath.
Early in the 2000s I was off work for a couple of months and wrote a website about the Blueshawk. I produced 100 pages of content, including some info kindly provided by the BH's designer JT Riboloff. The site had several hundred 'registered users' and I had lots of correspondence with other 'Hawk owners. Sadly the website was lost when the friend who was hosting the site became ill, and so did I - so no more blueshawk.info - and in the subsequent years I managed to lose the source code and most of the associated media. And then encroaching arthritis stopped me playing for a several years.
The BH was one of only two guitars I didn't sell at that time. When I started playing again the long-term tuning problems and the slightly 'meh' tone of the BH meant I usually grabbed Thinline Teles - in particular one I had built myself.
Then…. recently I started researching small-bodied, lightweight guitars to buy, until I remembered I had one on the wall, if only I sorted out the tuning problems and livened up the sound (which I'd always found a bit disappointing).
The solution (for me at least) was to give up on the idea of maintaining a pristine, unaltered BH and to fit better tuners and some really good pickups. I also suspected that the hum-bucking dummy coil was 'sucking tone' - coincidentally something Varitone circuits are often accused of.
In the end I fitted some decent locking tuners and a pair of Lollar P90s - the new pickups meant I had to lose the dummy coil - I carefully avoided hum-loops and copper-lined the control cavity resulting in a hum-free instrument. I kept the Varitone circuit which works brilliantly with the new pickups. I also installed a 5-way pickup selector. I've now had my Blueshawk for nearly 25 years and once again (fitted with 8-38s) it has become a go-to guitar that helps me cope with arthritic hands and body…
