here is something on Ren's retirement

[rar]

Ren has stated himself he doesn't make many guitars these days and the vast majority of their output is crafted by other skilled workers. This will continue and they will probably use and revise the specs and designs that Ren has left as his Gibson legacy like they do every other year anyway.

The underlined bit is exactly what many of us are worried about. There are people still there who are great at building guitars. It is not so clear that there is anyone there who is great at continuing the evolution of specs and designs to get closer to desired tone. Ren spent 20 years figuring out how to make Gibsons sound like Gibsons, and, for my money, got continually better at it -- although his advances weren't always immediately reflected in production models, for various reasons. I don't see any basis for confidence that this trend is going to continue.

 

Moreover, some very cool guitars have resulted from developing signature models that satisfy people who are very fussy about the tone of what their signature goes on. It's not so clear that anyone still at Gibson could have made, say, Jackson Browne -- maybe the most extreme example, but not really in a class by himself -- happy enough to sign on the bottom line. Other tonally opinionated folks have contributed in much the same way, but don't wind up with their signature on the result because they're not famous enough. (Gary Burnette's influence on the AJ specs is a fairly widely known example.) All this has resulted in some pretty amazing guitars that are available to the likes of me. Maybe someone still there (or a new hire) could have done all this as well as Ren did, but just never had the chance to show it. As they say, anything is possible. But some pessimism doesn't seem unwarranted.

 

-- Bob R