johnny winter's guitr collection auction results

Playability is superb, and even inspiring, and the tone is exactly what these unusual creations excel at In fact, I’d say this yielded the most satisfying Firebird-playing experience I’ve had since testing out a particularly nice vintage example from among a noted Firebird collector’s favorites some 12 years ago or more. Which is to say, yeah, very much working for me. Many past Firebird reissues have carried hotter ceramic-magnet pickups, but Gibson has gone the whole nine yards here to re-create the vintage-style units with Alnico magnets and lower-output windings, resulting in pickups of 6.77k ohms in the neck position and 6.83k ohms in the bridge.Ĭontrols are the traditional four-knob setup, with a three-way switch on the point of the lower horn.Īmped up through a Friedman Dirty Shirley Mini with a 1x12 cab and a 1966 Fender Super Reverb 4x10 combo, and teamed up with a variety of overdrive pedals, the model’s full promise paid off in spades.įirebirds are quirky beasts, for sure, and even when you love them, in theory you can still pick up a particular example and go, “Nah, not working for me!” This Johnny Winter homage, then, would be the polar opposite of that experience. Often mistaken for a fully covered rendition of the mini-humbucker that would end up on the Gibson Les Paul Deluxe at the dawn of the ’70s, it is in fact its own design, made with two hum-rejecting coils, each wound around its own Alnico bar magnet, which also takes the place of any pole pieces. The neck is capped with a nicely dark Indian rosewood fingerboard edged in aged binding, with aged celluloid trapezoid inlays.Įqually significant to the original Firebird’s revolutionary design was the bespoke set of pickups Gibson created for itĮqually significant to the original Firebird’s revolutionary design was the bespoke set of pickups Gibson created for it. So when you hold this Johnny Winter model, you’re holding the exact feel of the original, which is cool.”Īs Koehler indicated, the Firebird’s uniqueness goes far deeper than its looks and includes a complex “through neck” constructed from a nine-ply mahogany and walnut core that forms both the neck and the center of the body, with solid mahogany wings attached to its sides to complete the shape, all perfectly rendered here. “And then over the period of a couple weeks we cleaned that up and created programs out of it, for CNC and otherwise, so we were able to capture that and get the exact dimensions. “We’ve now got a 3-D scanner, and were lucky enough to get access to the original Johnny Winter guitar, so in a couple of hours we had a 3-D map of the entire guitar. We’ve now got a 3-D scanner, and were lucky enough to get access to the original Johnny Winter guitar Mat Koehler

“For 2019, we totally revamped the entire range, including pickups and so forth, and that’s when we took a deep dive into the Firebird, so we corrected a lot of the little issues,” he reveals. (Image credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images)Īs vaunted as the Custom Shop’s reissue guitars have been for several years, Koehler tells us the step up to modern technology finally enabled Gibson to take the authenticity over the top, and it really shows here.

At the Custom Shop, we are making them exactly how they were made in Kalamazoo in ’63, ’64, so this Johnny Winter has exactly the same woods, exactly the same construction, and it’s very, very true to his original.” “That’s actually why Gibson moved to the non-reverse Firebird in 1965. Ray Dietrich was a brilliant mind, but he did not make it easy on production,” he says with a laugh. “The nine-ply construction, the wings… It was clear that someone who was not a luthier designed that instrument.

The original reverse-style Firebird is one of the most difficult to replicate Mat Koehler “I will say that in the great catalog of Gibsons made over the past 128 years, the original reverse-style Firebird is one of the most difficult to replicate,” Koehler tells GP. Given the quirks of the original Firebird design, you can bet it’s no easy guitar to re-create accurately, and Gibson’s head of product development, Mat Koehler, concurs. The sleek lines continue in the six-to-a-side phoenix-head profile of the headstock, which used banjo tuners to avoid spoiling the esthetics.

Johnny winter's guitr collection auction results