The
Gibson Les Paul 60th Anniversary Limited Electric Guitar was expertly crafted and designed in celebration of six decades of legendary performance. This limited edition guitar provides all the period correct features of the original 1952 Les Paul, but with a correctly strung trapeze wraparound bridge that improves one of the shortcomings the Les Paul had in its first year of production.
With its high-gloss nitrocellulose Goldtop finish and natural back and neck, traditional vintage binding and appointments, and snarling P-90 pickups, the Les Paul 60th Anniversary from Gibson USA is as close as you’ll come to the tone, feel and look of the Les Paul that started it all!
Gibson Les Paul 60th Anniversary Limited Electric Guitar Features
- Solid Mahogany body with a carved Maple top
- Mahogany neck with traditional ‘thick’ profile
- Pair of powerful P-90 pickups in the neck and bridge
- High-quality ‘Orange Drop’ tone capacitors
- Chrome-plated wrapover trapeze tailpiece
- Vintage style tuners with cream tulip keys and 14:1 tuning ratio
Body
To accurately recreate the incredible look, tone and feel of the early Les Pauls, Gibson USA crafts the Les Paul 60th Anniversary Goldtop’s body from a solid, non-weight-relieved, one-piece Grade-A mahogany blank topped with a solid, carved two-piece maple top. The body’s weight and solidity achieve astounding sonic girth and sustain, while the classic maple-mahogany combination blends tonal warmth and depth with plenty of cut and clarity.
Neck and Fingerboard
The one-piece, Grade-A mahogany neck is carved to the thick, meaty early-’50s profile that plenty of modern players have come to love and appreciate, a constructional choice that not only yields plenty of grip in the left hand, but enhances tone considerably by transferring a greater proportion of neck resonance into the body, via the time-tested, mortise and tenon Gibson neck joint.
A Grade-A rosewood fingerboard is bound in vintage cream, with acrylic trapezoid inlays, and partnered by a vintage-cream pickguard that has been hot-stamped in gold with the ‘60th Anniversary’ legend. As was the practice in the first year of production, the three-way pickup switch carries no plastic ring.
Tailpiece
As luscious and rockin’ as the early Goldtops were, the guitars made in 1952 were shipped with what was arguably a ‘flaw’ in their set up: a shallow neck pitch required that the new Les Paul trapeze bridge be loaded with the strings wrapped under the bar saddle, rather than over it. These guitars played great and sounded fantastic, but the configuration made it more challenging for players to achieve string-mute effects with the edge of the picking hand.
In order to remain faithful to the original, while giving this Les Paul 60th Anniversary Limited its full potential, Gibson USA has crafted the guitar with a correct 5-degree neck pitch and loaded it with a properly strung wrapover trapeze tailpiece, with the strings loaded over the top of the bar to allow an easy, traditional playing feel.
Electronics and Hardware
Partner this solid configuration with two screaming P-90 pickups, a PLEK-cut Corian nut, vintage-style tuners with cream tulip keys, and the guitar’s increased body mass, and you have one roaring, sustaining, vintage-voiced Les Paul that will sound great and turn heads. Period-correct gold speed knobs atop independent volume and tone controls, with high-quality ‘Orange Drop’ tone capacitors for a smooth, accurate roll-off, are the icing on the cake.
The Gibson Les Paul
The guitar that artist Les Paul and Gibson president Ted McCarty teamed up to create for production in 1952 forever changed the guitar world, and music itself. The Les Paul has become the most revered electric of all time, an iconic instrument capable of making any kind of music, but perhaps best suited to smokin’ blues and rock ’n’ roll. The early Les Paul Goldtops are particularly revered for their classic look, meaty feel and raw, gnarly P-90 single-coil tone.