'58, '59, '60 Bursts and R9 Comparison

[Rock City]

Fair enough, but on the other hand, who the f#ck uses this model guitar to play clean tones? LOL. Yes, I'm sure you could post a dozen examples to my 2,000, but 90% of the time or more, these axes are not used for clean tone playing. When I think Les Paul, I think classic ROCK tones...Billy Gibbons, Gary Moore, Jimmy Page, and on and on.

My guess is nobody posts "clean neck tone" , or any other pickup combo clean tone because it's fairly irrelevant to the instrument.

Absolutely. Many considering "clean tone" actually think of slightly overdriven/crunch which, IMHO, shows the best character of neck pickup.
Straight clean is jazz only

 

[Platte City Paul]

Pretty cool. My ears heard the 2008 as slightly brighter and more trebly. Of the originals, I liked the 1958 the best, but that was a matter of degrees.

As for the clean tone debate, we talk a lot about that in the band. Over time, as my playing has improved and as Jason and I have gotten used to playing together, we both lay off the distortion pedal a lot more. There is enough of a break between the guitar and amp to get a nice crunch, and we save the pedals for specific songs. I hope that makes sense.

For reference, I'm playing a 94 standard with Zhangbuckers through a Fender 2 x 12 Deville on the clean channel.

 

[PierM]

Absolutely. Many considering "clean tone" actually think of slightly overdriven/crunch which, IMHO, shows the best character of neck pickup.
Straight clean is jazz only

At amplifier/settings parity, a clean signal it’s describing the real voice of a guitar. You preserve the original waveform, foundamentals and harmonics. As soon as you overdrive that signal, you are clamping, cutting, compressing, normalizing every guitar into a similar frequency spectrum. Also real dynamics coming from the pickups, are being clipped and compressed as well.

Having a crunch test it’s great, not having a clean tone tested it’s a mistake, believe it or not. Not that I care really, I’d never buy any burst, ever, but would be nice to have imho.

 

[lpfan1980]

"In this video Simon Karlsson and I compare a 2008 Gibson Les Paul 1959 Reissue R9 to three original Bursts from 1958, 1959 and 1960 which all are pretty different but all mind blowing instruments. The 1960 (early 1960 so 59 specs) being the greatest instrument I have ever played."

Wathching this again your 2008 holds up pretty good little peppier than its older bros but very nice.

 

[1all's Pub]

What would have been really interesting would to have been if it was all a blinded test. 3 of these are Bursts, 1 is a reissue, don’t tell which is which and let people try to figure it out based solely on their ears. Doug & Pat did something similar to this a while ago, but with a Tokai Love Rock mixed in... was very interesting.

Anyway, cool vid regardless.

 

[Mike J.]

I think that this video clearly shows what a great job Gibson does on the reissues. They all sound very close, with the 59 a little outstanding, but that difference is rather marginal. Cool playing by the way, you’ve dialed in exactly the sounds I personally consider with a Les Paul!

 

[korus]

While OP clip by itself is truly good and interesting, let's make one step beyond usual routine.

The question is : do tonal differences these 2 clips (also created by Johan) corelate with the tonal difference in OP clip?

 

[1969 weatherman]

liked the 2008 the least.... thinner and colder than the oldies. thanks for sharing

 

[brentrocks]

From what I heard, the custom shop is a great guitar for the money!!