Ultimate Gear Talk with Tool & Pantera, Ed Sheeran's Looping Magic, PRS & Peavey Spotlight | Gig Rundown Ep. 2
The PG Video crew of John Bohlinger, Perry Bean and Chris Kies comment on recent monster Rig Rundowns with Justin Chancellor, Rex Brown, and Zakk Wylde. Then the trio focus on new gear pieces from Ed Sheeran, HeadRush, and PRS, before dishing out some new music they're excited about from Pelican, Knocked Loose, and St. Vincent. They conclude their chat with a horrific bandmate story from Llorona and chime in with their own terrible tales from the tour bus.
A 1979 Gibson Les Paul Custom gets caught in the collectability zeitgeist.
In the vast galaxy of used and vintage Gibson Les Paul models, no star is rising quite like that of the Les Paul Custom. The eternally slick variant—which debuted in its original Black Beauty form in 1954—has been in a certain vogue over the past several years, and prices on used and vintage examples have gone up. For context, average Reverb sale prices on used or vintage Gibson Les Paul Customs increased about 10 percent in 2020 compared to 2019 and have risen nearly 30 percent since 2017. This pattern plays out with Epiphones as well, where Les Paul Custom models have gone up by about 24 percent over the past four years. Comparatively, prices on all used and vintage Gibson Les Paul Standards remained more or less flat over this same time span.
Within this general rising tide of Les Paul Custom popularity and value, today's focal model, the silverburst Les Paul Custom, has seen an even more pronounced jump. These guitars were produced by Gibson starting in 1978 in very limited numbers and underwent a few spec changes before being discontinued in the mid-'80s. Sale prices on this specific group of guitars surged 28 percent in 2020 over 2019, with a 52 percent increase in prices since 2017. Just a few years ago, original silverburst Customs were selling comfortably in the $3,000 to $5,000 range. Today, we're seeing the best examples go for more than double that.
The basic configuration of the single-cutaway Les Paul has remained no nonsense for more than 60 years, with two pickups, four dials, a 3-way toggle, and a Tune-o-matic bridge at its core.
While there are always a variety of drivers behind such a jump in the pricing of a vintage collectible guitar, an artist or stylistic association is certainly part of the equation. Customs claim a certain reputation as metal guitars—think Metallica, Mastodon, and Zakk Wylde—and while plenty of classic-rock titans have employed them over the years, it could be that there are more metal and hard-rock fans getting into the vintage market than in previous periods, driving up prices. For this group, a dapper Les Paul Custom makes a lot more sense as a guitar splurge than something like a sunburst or goldtop Standard.
With no belt rash or other notable dings or scrapes on the back of its mahogany body, this guitar was handled with care. Note the well-defined back binding and lack of chipping along the edges, too.
This column's featured guitar is an original 1979 in very good vintage condition, listed on Reverb by Nationwide Guitars of Cumberland, Maryland, at $8,999 as we go to press. It sports the specs typical of its year and model: a 3-piece maple top with a mahogany body, a medium C-shape maple neck, an ebony fretboard with white binding, a bone nut, mother-of-peal block inlays, a Tune-o-matic bridge, a pair of humbuckers, a 3-way pickup selector, and a black version of the usual Les Paul dual volume and tone controls. Note that the finish shows some greening, which is typical of vintage silverbursts.
True to its roots, this Custom sports a larger headstock, which identifies it as a product of the era when Gibson was owned by the Norlin Corporation.
In the case of this month's silverburst, we can confidently point to the 2020 launch of a Custom Shop reissue of Adam Jones of Tool's trusty '79 as the culprit. This sort of high-profile reissue often has the effect of spurring collector interest in its vintage counterpart, and this can be even more of a factor when the new reissues are sold at prices that are similar to or higher than the originals, which is the case with this model. The Adam Jones 1979 Les Paul Custom VOS was also teased for a long while before going into production, creating more sustained silverburst hype, and this publicity was only amplified by news of a batch of these guitars being stolen this past November. While our guitar has some of the aforementioned finish greening in its center silver section, it's retained its original silverburst glow better than many of its brethren, which is appealing to collectors and players alike.
Mat Mitchell and Greg Edwards on how Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A Perfect Circle) pushed them to creative liberation on the supergroup’s new Existential Reckoning.
In 2018, Greg Edwards stepped out of his comfort zone. For the most part, his career up till then had been focused on his own projects—like his bands Failure and Autolux—not on being a journeyman. But A Perfect Circle was touring in support of Eat the Elephant, and guitarist James Iha was unable to come along due to prior commitments with Smashing Pumpkins. Edwards—who's known A Perfect Circle (and Tool) frontman Maynard James Keenan since 1994, when Failure opened for Tool and the Flaming Lips—agreed to help out.
During a break in the ensuing APC tour, Edwards got a mysterious call from Keenan. “He just said, 'Start practicing fretless,'" Edwards recalls. The suggestion wasn't completely insane. Edwards, who plays both bass and guitar, had already played fretless bass in the first incarnation of Failure (having been heavily influenced by early new wave band Japan's Mick Karn, and Brian Eno bassist Percy Jones). But it certainly hadn't been his focus in recent years.
“I love the feeling of playing fretless," he says. “I love what it does, sonically, and what it can achieve in a song. But it was a challenge to get back. It's a whole new set of concerns when you're playing fretless, especially with someone like Maynard singing. The intonation has to be spot on. But that appealed to me."
But “challenge" seems to be an operative word when it comes to Keenan's creative process, including with his supergroup Puscifer's new Existential Reckoning, where idiosyncratic instrumentation and outmoded/vintage technologies were key facilitators. Happy with Edwards' performance in APC, Keenan brought him along for the Existential ride, as well. He also brought back longtime production, songwriting, and guitar-playing/mad scientist collaborator Mat Mitchell.
For the Reckoning sessions, Mitchell (who, along with Keenan and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Carina Round, forms the nucleus of the band) wanted something to disrupt his usual workflow and stimulate his imagination. His solution? State-of-the-art-circa-1980 computer-driven synthesizers like a Synclavier and a Fairlight CMI (famously used by Peter Gabriel on his eponymous 1980 release).
“Part of [the appeal]," says Mitchell of the quirky gear, “is the flow—the way that you work when you're using these tools. It forces you to do things differently. They are very limited, and being creative within very set boundaries is really good."
TIDBIT: Cumbersome vintage synth hardware was a key foil to the guitar and bass parts on Existential Reckoning.
But the instruments did more than just force Mitchell into a new headspace. “They sound very unique," he explains. “Of course, you can sample one and put it in a laptop, but it's different. The way that both of those instruments are is that all the voices are separate hardware. When you hit a note, it is bouncing around between [processor] cards, so you can hit a note five times and it may sound different all five times. There are all these little things that affect the way it sounds when you're performing on it, which is a very different sound from what you get when you sample."
Mitchell applied that same disorienting criteria when choosing his main guitar for Existential Reckoning. In the end, he settled on a headless Steinberger GL2T.
“I've always wanted one," he says. “When you get your hands on one, you realize it doesn't feel like a luthier-made instrument. It feels like an engineer or a clockmaker made it. It feels more like a watch than it does a guitar, and it seemed fitting for what we were doing. The whole record is this mix of organic and early electronics, and a wood guitar just didn't feel right."
When he's not learning almost-forgotten synth technology or wrangling sounds from his Steinberger, Mitchell focuses primarily on the creative process itself. He has a reference folder filled with everything from full arrangements of possible songs to keyboard sounds that strike his fancy. He shares that folder with Keenan, who goes through it when he has the time or when he's ready to start working on a new Puscifer album. When they find something that clicks, they play with it, develop it, and take the first tentative steps toward crafting a song.
Mitchell customized his Steinberger by replacing its humbuckers with single-coils. “When you play soft and you play hard on a single-coil, there is a bigger range than you get from a humbucker." Photo by Mitra Mehvar.jpg
“Typically, I'll build out the arrangements, and that's when Greg comes in," says Mitchell. “Most of the arrangements were already there, and then he interpreted on top of that. There were a few moments where he went in an unexpected direction, and I suggested we change the chord structure to match what he was doing. We're not precious about anything until it's done. We're all happy to let it be in flux and to let each person's decisions push it one way or another."
That openness played to Edwards' strengths. Left alone in a studio room with synths and roughly 20 different stringed instruments—including fretted and fretless basses, guitars, an electric sitar, and an electric violin—he was like a kid in a candy store.
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