j 45 Sustainable

[75 Hummingbird]

Good day all .

Just back from a mask enhanced trip to Long and Mcquade   for a little Covid browse .

I played a 2019 j 45 Sustainable . Really a great sounding and playing axe .... i played every Gibson they had on the wall but kept coming back to the Sustainable .

Bee wax finish on it ,not sure how that will hold up but . also Richlight finger board ..anyone have any info or comments ?

Thanks.

[jvi]

at long and mcquade the rental and returns policy are a great way to try before you decide, if its a great axe grab it !

[JuanCarlosVejar]

3 hours ago, 75 Hummingbird said:

Good day all .

Just back from a mask enhanced trip to Long and Mcquade   for a little Covid browse .

I played a 2019 j 45 Sustainable . Really a great sounding and playing axe .... i played every Gibson they had on the wall but kept coming back to the Sustainable .

Bee wax finish on it ,not sure how that will hold up but . also Richlight finger board ..anyone have any info or comments ?

Thanks.

The bee’s wax can be reapplied as needed when wear happens .Richlite is a man made version of Ebony I believe.

Watch this video Don from Gibson talks about the launch of the series last year:

 

 

JC

[slimt]

I tried one. I put it back on the rack.  I just did not like the feel of the guitar.  

[Leonard McCoy]

If you've never heard an acoustic without a finish, you've never heard the real thing.

[RBSinTo]

3 hours ago, Leonard McCoy said:

If you've never heard an acoustic without a finish, you've never heard the real thing.

While your opinion is interesting, it does lead me to wonder why, if true, the high end guitar manufacturers haven't reached  the same conclusions, and offer unfinished guitars as an option?

And for the braver souls in the crowd, Home Depot has palm sanders for $39.95, so let us know if your Dove really does coo better after a rub down.

RBSinTo

Edited July 12, 2020 by RBSinTo

[uncle fester]

19 hours ago, 75 Hummingbird said:

Good day all .

Just back from a mask enhanced trip to Long and Mcquade   for a little Covid browse .

I played a 2019 j 45 Sustainable . Really a great sounding and playing axe .... i played every Gibson they had on the wall but kept coming back to the Sustainable .

Bee wax finish on it ,not sure how that will hold up but . also Richlight finger board ..anyone have any info or comments ?

Thanks.

Very cool, love to hear good reports on the sustainable model.  I have not gotten to try one, but in the name of sustainability, am interested with respect to my next guitar.

[kelly campbell]

2 hours ago, uncle fester said:

Very cool, love to hear good reports on the sustainable model.  I have not gotten to try one, but in the name of sustainability, am interested with respect to my next guitar.

 

 

I too have a notion to try one as I never have...Not a huge fan of richlite but they have improved..I am also intrigued by the finish.  I am not against the idea of sustainable just really like the real deal.

[62burst]

Now if they could just put some kind of burst under it, before the post-nectar rub. . . something natural-  they could use these purple berries-  I've been eating them for 6 or 7 weeks now (haven't got sick once).

 

Smart move on Gibson's part to offer something like the beeswax finish, but the way that nitrocellulose finishes harden, and decrease in thickness over the years has long been attributed to play a key part of why old instruments finished in nitro sound good. Gibson has been touting the thin-finishes of their guitars recently, and it would be interesting to know how deep the beeswax gets into the pores of the wood. Also- what would be the finish on the neck? Hopefully they're not sowing the seeds for a sticky situation up there. 

In any event, trying out one of these would be something to look forward to. And yes- and they've made a Hummingbird Sustainable model, too.

[RBSinTo]

Aren't all woods by definition sustainable materials?

I'm unclear what makes a guitar partially constructed from Walnut "sustainable", as opposed to others made partially from Rosewood or Mahogany which apparently are not.

RBSinTo

[75 Hummingbird]

The wood in the rain forests of Brazil and other used and abused countries are not harvested in a sustainable manner . Those forests of timbre, flora and fauna are long long...

RBSinto ....you can grow Walnut in your back yard  Zone 5 a ...

[Twang Gang]

Gibson doesn't seem to go into a lot of detail about why their Walnut guitars are so much more sustainable than other materials.  Probably mostly a pitch to the environmentally conscious consumers out there.  But if Walnut is more readily available (and seemingly it is based on the price) and grows faster than mahogany or rosewood, then it is easier to replace trees that have been harvested.

The original poster said the one he played had a Richlite fingerboard.  Gibson's description of the sustainable J-45 says it has a walnut fingerboard?  But I have a Gibson CS 356 that I paid about $5K for and it has a Richlite fingerboard.  At the time it was made was shortly after the ebony raids at the Gibson factory.  It feels like ebony, looks like ebony and sounds like ebony on an electric anyway so I do not have a problem with it.   It was what was available at the time and it seems to work.

[75 Hummingbird]

I must say ,the Richlite fingerboard was great , looked great , slick and good feeling ,would never have thought it was a composite of glue and recycled paper or  such . The bridge was looking like ebony but i`m sure it wasn`t .

Really impressed with the the tone ,fit and finish .

It was more toneful than the j 200 and the Bird hanging beside it .

 

 

[stevo58]

Hi. This is, I think, my first post. 
 

I went with a friend, pre-lockdown, to compare J-45s at a shop here with a large selection, among them the standard J-45, the Studio, and the Sustainable. I believe he also tried a Hummingbird Studio and a couple others. 

Of course there will always be guitar-to-guitar variation, so this only applies to those specific guitars. 

The J-45 was as you would expect a J-45 to be. It was an acceptable but not exceptional example of a J-45. 

The J-45 Studio sounded like a piece of dead, wet wood. I don’t think we spent more than two minutes with that one. Sometimes you know when a guitar is absolutely right, and sometimes you know when a guitar is absolutely wrong. This one was absolutely wrong. 
 

The J-45 Sustainable was MAGNIFICENT. If I had been looking for a new acoustic, I would have bought it on the spot. I’m a Martin OM player, but that particular guitar was the first in-shop guitar in years that nearly broke my neck doing a cartoon double-take. It was fabulous. 
 

For personal reasons, he wanted to check out the Hummingbird Sustainable too, which they didn’t have. They got one in two weeks later and that’s what he bought. Just like the J-45, it is a splendid sounding guitar. Very responsive and dynamic, you can go from delicate balanced fingerpicking to thunderous bass flat picking without a thought. I spent quite a bit of time playing it and it was the first guitar I ever played that made me consider giving up my OM. 

Having said that, he reports it is very sensitive to weather changes, which we attribute to the finish. More so than any other guitar he has owned. 
 

But the sustainables are winners in my book. Given a massive, statistically significant sample size of two, I’ve played exactly two very fine guitars. 
 

steven

Edited July 13, 2020 by stevo58