rustystrings

That took impressive restraint. One of the two guitars I used to own that I still have twinges of regret about parting with was an early '30s roundhole L4 that came to me with massive holes from being fitted with magnetic pickups and controls, no frets, and much missing finish. I had it rebuilt by David Hosler (now at 7C in St Petersburg FL), just structural repair, no attempts at cosmetics or restoration. When I walked in to pick it up, Dave's first words were, "Normally these guitars don't sound so great, but this one does." And it DID, somehow sounding like a cross between the best of a Gibson archtop with a lovely old -45. Unbelievable "WHOMP!!" to the tone, just enough sustain - and tremendous clarity. If you played a clam, you (and everyone around you) heard it. It was an awesome guitar that changed how I hear guitars.

Gotta disagree - too many Gibson Jumbo slopes used for British folk baroque and rediscovered blues men. Davy Graham and John Renbourn played J-50s, Mississippi John Hurt’s first recordings after rediscovery were on Tom Hoskins’ refinished J-45, and if we throw on their long-scale cousin the Epiphone Texan we get use by Wizz Jones - and Paul McCartney, even. Part of the issue is, does the Gibson SOUND the way you want while fingerpicked? Coming from a more blues/jazz/folk background I LOVE the midrange-heavy, blended chordal tone - though I see those who like greater note separation might prefer a different tone. The J-45 and its siblings are AWESOME vocal accompaniment tools, especially when played barehanded. Final heresy - for the first time in more than 40 years I own ONE guitar, a 2005 J-45 I bought new in 2007 and have bonded with. I’ve owned vintage treasures among the hundreds of guitars that have been mine, and this one makes me happiest of all. Why would I play anything else?

When I bought my 2005 J-45 Historic Collection new in 2007, the action was too high as well. I wound up having to cut the nut slots significantly to get the action right - out of the box, when I fretted it, it went out of tune. I also had to tweak the truss rod somewhat to get the relief nailed down just right, and did the same again about a decade ago when I switched to nickel wound strings. On the other hand, it was ABSOLUTELY worth it. For the first time in more than four decades I only own one guitar - because why would I play anything else?

Bear in mind that the J-45 is actually an incredible fingerstyle guitar with a loooong history in blues music. The first recordings of Mississippi John Hurt when he was rediscovered were made using a J-45, for instance. My acoustic blues mentor plays the same J-50 he bought new in 1962. If you decide you want the balance to fall more towards projection than presence, the LG-2 is well worth considering. It'll handle those blues sounds and more besides.

I no longer own a vintage Gibson, but based on my memories of my '60 LG-2, I think I would used the same John Pearse Pure Nickel .012-.54 on it and be quite content. Lower tension than phosphor bronze and a sound my ears and brain perceive as less colored by the strings, more transparent. But I play without picks, and that might make a difference. Or not.

The only maple guitars I have had and played extensively were all old archtops - though one of them, an early '30s roundhole L-4, was an amazing instrument! It had the low end "whomp" of a mahogany jumbo, the chop of an archtop, and a little something else - it seemed to sustain longer than the f-hole acoustics did. I LOVE good rosewood - on a good classical guitar. The Kremona Fiesta FS I had (Carpathian mountain spruce, East Indian rosewood back and sides) was both shockingly light and astoundingly loud, yet capable of all sorts of sounds. It was a wonderful instrument that I could sing with, even, but in the end I found myself rarely reaching for it, because I have a J-45 I simply love better. The rosewood Taylor 815C I had for a dozen years was frustrating. It was the 17-in Super Jumbo body shape with a long scale, so I had to really work it to drive the top. It sounded ... nice. Not astounding, but nice enough. But I never bonded with it, because for some reason or another I had a hard time finding where to place my voice while playing it. There were lots of nice overtones, which if the styles of music I play called for them would have been lovely. But I was still dissatisfied. In the end, I am a mahogany kinda guy. I played a variety of mahogany bodied Guilds through the years, and just preferred their quicker decay and more fundamental tonal center. Combined with a Gibson's slightly arched top, though, and there's the midrange boost I am looking for. Oddly enough, I sing better with my voice folded INTO a mahogany bodied Gibson, rather than my voice falling into the pocket of any other guitar with the scooped mids.

I've owned a couple of hundred guitars in the last 45 years, from brand new to ancient relic, including a number of trainwrecks I spend good money having luthiers put back together. I spent a lot of time and money in the vintage guitar catch-and-release program until the money got crazy. I have had times when I had a specific guitar model in mind because I wanted a specific sound - but it was usually because I was emulating a specific sound or style I had heard. I've written before, here and in other places, about how certain old guitars just seem to sort of nudge you into a musical direction. The c.1931 round-hole L-4 archtop with the patches in the top and sides and half the finish gone seemed to sing especially well on interwar pop songs that are now standards, for instance, and did great old-time country and blues. Other times, you felt something that might have been a combination of craftsmanship and years of making music with a really gifted player - the '49 D'Angelico I played once comes to mind, perhaps THE most resonant guitar I have ever played. That one was a near-religious experience. I don't regret all those vintage and other guitars, either. They were an education, and all the different instruments and tones and pursuing sounds I liked after hearing them on records taught me so much. I was purposely looking for guitars that had a certain sound or vibe, again usually because I wanted to sound like someone I admired. My current guitar of the last nearly 17 years is still a mystery to me. On the surface, it's a bog-standard J-45 built in 2005, gussied up ever so slightly with a "Historic Collection" decal on the back of the headstock, one of a run of 670 made in 2005-2006 for Gibson 5-star dealers. I put my hand on it to lift it off the pegs on a Guitar Center wall and just knew. Intellectually I can tell myself that the neck carve matches my memory of the 1960 LG-2 I played my first solo acoustic gigs with, and that the tone captures the things I loved about old Gibson jumbos I have played in my lifetime. But that is not the complete picture. The very first night I had this guitar, I felt pulled to blur the lines between what I had flatpicked for decades and what I played with my bare fingers. Over the next couple of years the flatpicks went away, and I found myself taking everything I had ever learned about different people's styles and refining it into my own style. Sure, you can hear all the influences, but everything is blended now into what I feel and what I want to say when I play now. I love that it has the classic Gibson J-45 sound, but there are other things there as well. There's a breathy vocal quality to it as the notes decay that when coupled with the midrange boost the archtop DNA provides has changed how I play. I used to sing on top of a guitar like the vocal and the playing were separate things. Now I sing more with the guitar, frequently playing fewer notes but letting them bloom like another voice. Financially it didn't hurt to let the other guitars go - I sold the Baby Taylor, the Seagull S6 and the exquisite Kremona Fiesta FS classical, gave the shockingly good Farida OT-22 to my son - but in the end, really, it was more about, "I absolutely love this J-45, why would I play anything else?"

I don't think it's the humidity that causes a guitar to go sharp while sitting it its case. It's temperature. The guitar's STRINGS conduct heat/cold more so than anything else about the instrument. When not being played the strings go to room temperature. If you had it tuned while playing it earlier, AFTER playing for a while and AFTER your body heat as transmitted through your hands had warmed up the strings, then let the guitar sit until it reaches room temperature, the strings will cool down and contract, thus making them sharp.

Sometimes it's every six months or so, but in general I change my strings every year whether they need it or not - though I realized at one point I never bothered to change them in 2019, and I think I went 18 months that time. I have been using John Pearse pure nickel .012-.054 on my J-45 for nine years or so now, playing with bare fingers almost always. My taste in how I want my guitar to sound has changed dramatically from 30 years ago, when I changed strings every couple of weeks and always wanted the hyper-jangly sound of new phosphor bronze being slammed 'round with a Dunlop tortex pick.

I know, it's three years later, but I forgot to respond to this - my J-45 has similar runout, visible to varying degrees depending on lighting. It is absolutely bar-none THE best guitar - FOR ME - that I have ever played. Maybe not for anyone else, mind you, but for me it is ideal. Though I will note that pretty much every time I have played it somewhere, I will be told by at least one person (some guitarists, some not) that it is a beautiful guitar. And it is, but I am biased - and it is beautiful, I think, in part because of the shape-shifting nature of the run-out in the light. Then again, I think too much about these things. And then again from that, this IS the Gibson Acoustic Forum, and I'm writing for a bunch of other folks who probably think too much about these things as well.

I can confirm that a good classical guitar case will fit this guitar nicely. Over the last 40-odd years I've given classical cases and bought them for myself to house assorted LG-1 and LG-2 guitars, and it is exactly the right fit - even though the LG guitars are usually deeper than a true classical. It still fits, and fits well. The "G" in LG has been explained as a carryover from when Gibson decided to use the same body shape (and I assume molds) used for their GS series classical guitars in the late '30s.

Alas, I am one of those who installed Grover Rotomatics. At the end of '85, maybe very early '86, I bought what turned out to be a 1960 Gibson LG-2 for $125 from a friend of a friend. The LG-2 had spent 20 years or so in an attic, and it's a miracle it wasn't in worse shape. As it was, in addition to repairing a crack in the top, I also had zero useable tuner buttons. Remember - maybe 1986? Greenwood, South Carolina. And at the time, NOBODY took LG-2s seriously - they were still regarded as a student guitar and not as the grand concert-sized version of the J-45. For that matter, all the vintage acoustic love went to Martins, and old Gibsons weren't taken all that seriously then, either. Nobody in town had anything that would have been a drop-in replacement for my unbuttoned keys, and replacement Kluson-style buttons didn't even exist then, did they? So I got a set of Rotomatics and borrowed the tapered reamer from the Radio Shack I worked for and a little while later I had a playable guitar. And it served me very well, despite being a touch neck-heavy, and those tuners were still on it when I last saw it ...

What a gift he had. What a gift he was! I grew up with his music always in the background. A few years back, when I started getting serious about really studying songwriting, I took a deep dive into his catalog and was smitten. I can only imagine how much work it must have taken to trim and tailor every word and every note to where everything was just exactly right and enough like that. It sounds so effortless, and it is anything but! We listened to "Sundown," "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," and "If You Could Read My Mind" on the drive in today to take my kids to school. My 14-year-old daughter was smitten by the long ballad and was shocked and amused that it had been on the charts on the radio - a song like that is totally alien now. She also declared herself a Lightfoot fan after that, so I pointed her towards his catalog, as well as this video - - I still can't decide what I like best about this breakdown - the choice of a perfect song, perfectly written, played, arranged and recorded; the explanation of HOW it works in language even the musically illiterate such as I can follow; or Beato's sheer joy and enthusiasm for a stunning piece of music.

I've been using position 4 on my acoustics since 1989, if not earlier - I disremember, as it were. It worked great on my old Guild, I think there was already a strap button fixed there on my '60 LG-2, and I did the one on my '05 J-45. DO use caution if you do it yourself - mine is maybe a degree or two off perfect parallel with the neck, but I ignore it rather than stare at it and focus on the imperfection. It hasn't gotten in the way of my playing, nor did it when I was taking advantage of the old Guild's cutaway.

I am sorry for your loss, and wish you and your family peace in the wake of it. I suggest the J-45 TV, for the same sorts of reasons vintage J-45s are so popular for Texas fiddle accompaniment. Mahogany for the drier, more fundamental quality of the sound. The LG-2 has more projection, but you're accompanying an instrument with a penetrating tone, and the warmth and presence and low mid-range tones will better complement the violin without competing for the same audio space.

Your memory is right on! It was Eldon Whitford's guitar, and if memory serves they replicated it right down to the saw marks on the braces! My memory is that 2008 was the year Gibson split what had been the J-45 into the Modern Classic and the True Vintage models. I could be wrong, but it seems to me there were rolling changes to the TV as they went along - like maybe some early examples were built with Sitka before they went to Adirondack, and greater amounts of hide glue were used instead of titebond, etc. The label colors from around 2008 on do appear to signify whether the instrument is a standard or modern version vs. a vintage-esque guitar.

I vote for the J-45, all day long. And don't get me wrong, I LOVE LG-2s. But the J-45 just does more. When I first started playing solo acoustic gigs in '89 I had a 1960 LG-2, which I adored - but I knew its limitations. It projected well, and it had a bluesy snappiness to it that I liked, though. When I got my first J-45 (a pieced-back-together 1948-49 specimen that now lives with my brother), the FIRST time I recorded with it, the low end floored me. It wasn't overpowering or loud, it just had this nice presence to it. I really liked how it launched with authority, and then got out of the way, so to speak. I've been playing the same J-45 for 16 years now. Earlier this year I sold off some stuff, and for the first time in more than 40 years I own ONE guitar. This is it. Do NOT worry about fingerpicking. The first recordings of Mississippi John Hurt when he was rediscovered were done using a J-45. British folk-baroque guitarists John Renbourn and Davy Graham played its natural-finished sibling J-50s for most of their most important recordings. I first realized I wanted a Gibson J-body at a party where the guy who would become my blues mentor showed up with his '62 J-50. I think the LG-2 has more projection and penetration, or at least it feels like it does. There seems to be a little more note separation. I had a bad week or so where I was considering acquiring an LG-2 because I missed that clarity. Then I remembered where I used to put my right hand when I played my flashier fingerstyle stuff, moved back about 1-in closer to the bridge - and there was that sound, but with more low mid-range, MORE throb, more warmth. After that, I kinda lost interest in acquiring the smaller guitar, at least for solo stuff. This first video involved a microphone a couple of feet away from the guitar - While this video used a small condenser closer to the soundboard -

This is an alternate song from the session that produced the song above. I wrote "Still Believe" in 1991 for the love of my life, and it's still true -

One of the most important, iconic guitars in my little world remains a c.1950-54 LG-1 I first encountered in Macon, GA in 1977. It belonged to my new friend on the school newspaper staff, and when he took some of my lyrics and set them to music, he started me on the road I've been traveling ever since. That lovely old guitar is all over my earliest recordings (most of which will NEVER see the light of day!), and to this day whenever I hear an LG-1 I lock onto it. My friend still owns his 70-ish year old guitar and treats it with respect and love. My take on the LG-1, more so than even the LG-0, is that it is the flattop Gibson that most reveals the baked-in archtop DNA. I'm surprised they aren't used more for people wanting to play old jazz standards solo in an intimate setting.

Sunday morning I stumbled onto a reference to npr's tiny desk contest. I read the rules, which require the presence of a DESK in the video. Then I showered and dressed, grabbed my J-45 and my dumpster find ring-light/smartphone holder and a little TASCAM XY mic for iOS stuff and went into my workplace and set things up. It's my song, but it's the spiritual descendant of "When I Was A Young Man," which my old blues mentor Steve Belew claimed is derived from the old Irish broadside ballad "The Misfortunate Rake."

Count the frets. This guitar has 19, not 20, so figure it to be an original J-50 built prior to 1955, when J-45/50 went to 20 frets and the batwing pickguard. Also, the endpin is exactly that - an endpin, and and NOT a jack for an acoustic electric.

I experienced a moment - just ONE moment - of second-guessing when I bought my J-45 16 years ago. But then it passed, and now we're pretty much inseparable. I played a 000-15M a couple of months back, and it didn't move me, but it's hard for me to judge a guitar fairly in a Guitar Center. Oddly enough, I DID really like its cheaper, made-in-Mexico stablemate the 000-10e that I played yesterday. That may be because it's a 24.9-in scale instead of the 25.5 on the 15s. Both mahogany and sapele tops REALLY need to be worked, though. And I'll pile on to the "different strings" bandwagon. I know I sound like a broken record, but I really like the Pearse Pure Nickel acoustic strings, the .012-.054 set, because they don't have the over bright jangle of phosphor bronze. I get a really good mid-range out of them, and long life.

FWIW, the warmest tone I have gotten consistently from a steel-string guitar is my '05 J-45 Historic Collection when fitted with John Pearse Pure Nickels, the .012-.054 set. Then again, I play bareknuckle without picks, and go for a tone grounded in folk-baroque and 60s folk revival fused with delusions of Wes Montgomery. Seriously, the nickels don't have the overly bright jangle of phosphor bronze and to my ears give me a sound that I perceive as more of the guitar and less of the strings, if that makes sense. I'm looking forward to photos and videos!

LG-2 all the way - but don't overlook the '50s Original and the Nathaniel Rateliff LG-2 Western. As I understand it, the LG-2 was only built with red spruce for two years before Gibson switched over to Sitka, and Sitka was the norm until the assorted special issue versions came out in the last decade or so. The red spruce gives more headroom, allegedly, but often sounds a little harsh to my ears. Then again, I've been playing Sitka for decades, and my sense of a how a guitar should sound is based on the predominance of Sitka guitars I've heard. Re: Martin vs. Gibson - that archtop DNA with the solid mid-range is more in line with the cited Tom Waits influence. I've seen pix of him playing an old 0-15 Martin, but also archtops. More of a mid-range punch, I think, and that is what Gibsons excel at. And lots of people through the years have commented on how easy it is to sing with a Gibson - that has certainly been my experience. To my ears the L-00 is a blues box; the LG-2 has a smokier, jazzier quality. It really DOES have a lot of the J-45's "hold my beer" attitude when it comes to rolling through numerous genres, with some interesting differences. The LG-2 has a surprisingly loud voice and combines the slightly arched top and back with a deeper body to get a really projecting, penetrating tone, vs. the enveloping and enfolding presence of a J-45. Those two Gibsons overlap tonally, with the smaller guitar having a tighter, tauter bass and the tonal emphasis a little higher in the midrange, vs. the "whoomph!" of a J-45's low end. Not to say that the LG-2 doesn't still provide the "Gibson Thump," though - it's just a little tighter, maybe a little more archtop-like. The LG-2 still has the Gibson chordal, blending effect, just a little clearer than a J-45. Seriously consider running nickel or monel strings, too. My perception is that they yield a more transparent, less hyped sound than phosphor bronze, and it's closer to a pre-war/mid-century sound. I've run them on my '05 J-45 and my Farida LG-2 clone with great results. Thanks for including the clip featuring JoiL at W Sound - I always go to his demonstration videos because his playing style is so much closer to mine than most of the videos I see. Besides, his playing is always enjoyable!

I would recommend either John Pearse Pure Nickel or Phosphor Bronze strings. I preferred the JP phosphor for at least a decade on a variety of guitars. Nine years ago I switched to the Pure Nickel, .012-.54 strings and haven't looked back. I usually have to slacken the truss rod about 1/4 turn when I switch a guitar over to these, as they are less dense and have less tension than the bronze. The nickel wound strings don't have that "zing" of the PBs, and they (to my ears) have a warmer, rounder sound that I really like. They also don't sound as dead a couple of months in. My perception is they bring out the archtop DNA lurking in Gibson flattops. They're great for my finger-picking, flailing, zero-plectrum playing style, though they're pretty good on those occasions when I break out a flatpick to teach my son something. The basic D'Addario EJ-16 light gauge phosphor bronze is a good string, and when I played them in the late '80s and early '90s (my second choice back then, behind Guild phosphor bronze strings) they always worked pretty well for me on a variety of instruments, including Guild, Gibson and Taylor flat tops. I have never had any desire to play coated strings. I can understand why some folks like them, but they're kinda like funny colors on guitar strings - not for me.