SPECIAL STUFF
If a week is a long time in politics, a year is a long time in the world of vintage guitars. We’ve said many times that the combination of a slab of Honduran mahogany, old P-90s and a zamak wrapover bridge offers as close to a sure-fire guarantee of great guitar tone as it’s possible to get, but although this pair of 1950s Les Paul Specials have that much in common, there are some significant structural differences. How much difference does a year and an additional cutaway make? Let’s investigate…
This 1958 TV Special is one of the very last of the single-cutaway models, while the cherry double-cutaway ’59 is one of the last to have the Les Paul Special designation. The model lingered on until 1961, but towards the end of 1959, the ‘Les Paul Special’ screen print was removed from the headstock and the guitar was re-branded the ‘Les Paul SG’. The double cutaway superseded the single cutaway in mid-’58 and the differences between them extend beyond the stylistic. Gibson’s radical move towards unobstructed upper fret access necessitated a complete redesign of the neck joint – but we’ll discuss that in more detail later.
The selector switch also had to be relocated, and after the initial run of double-cutaways,
