Why I will never give Gibson another penny!

At one time I did own a actual "79 Dean ML" which I wish I still owned! It's neck seemed too be custom designed for my Jimmy Dean like fingers!

 

Gibson and Fender are riding the nostalgia wave by buying up legendary old tech, boutique'ing the products and capitalizing on it big time.
Gretsch, Sunn, ............ (memory lapse)............, many others, are all owned by Gibson and Fender, capitalism and opportunism at it's finest.

When I was a young bass player I had a big "F" stamped on my forehead showing my brand loyalty to Fender.
"From my cold dead hands!"

As time progressed I broke the faith and started putting my hands on other basses and I became weak.
Warwick, Spector, MM, G&L, Aria, Modulus, Dingwall, F Bass, Sadowsky, Mike Lull, the list goes on and on.
"Take my Fender, Please!"

Today I don't even look at a Fender or Gibson guitar and would never consider buying one, they all look the same, no allure whatsoever.

Maybe if I was a collector, or wore a big G or F on my forehead.
If it had mojo, definitely, as I would buy any instrument that had mojo.

 

Maybe back in the day Fender and Gibson set the standards for quality. Today with CNC routers and stuff everything seems to be pretty on par IMO.

I bought a kit guitar from Solo last year. One of those kits you paint the body and assemble it. Strat style, basswood body, maple neck, maple fretboard, triple single coils. Cost $150 Cdn. Thing plays as well as my $850 Mexican built Fender Strat HSS. Sounds pretty good too. I was going to swap the triple single coils over to a single DiMarzio Tone Zone humbucker but I really like the way it sounds through my 100 watt single channel Peavey.

 

I will say my Mexican Strat is probably the heaviest guitar I own. I got it in about 2005 or 2006. So it could have been made a year or 2 earlier than that because the guy at the guitar store said it had been there a while. Solid alder body, maple neck, walnut skunk stripe, rosewood fretboard, Floyd-Rose locking trem.

I'd love to pick up an Explorer style guitar next. But its got to have the Floyd and the Jackson or Kramer style headstock.

 

Heritage guitars have been made in the old Gibson factory in Kalamazoo for a lot of years, they’re probably better then new Gibson’s by a long shot.