1964 Gibson LG-0 Flattop Guitar




A local customer brought this guitar by for a setup. It was his Dad's and it was in fairly good health save the neck angle was bad and the replaced bridge (these had plastic, bolt-on ones to begin-with) was coming-up. I was trying to adjust one of the pinholes and the dried-out bridge went pop and split in half. Oh well!

So, suffice to say, I told him I'd replace the bridge and set it up afterwards. He got a bit extra, too, as I threw in a neck reset on the house. It takes me less time to reset the neck than fuss with making a too-low bridge and trying to fit a too-low saddle to it and then iron-out all the too-little back-angle problems with the strings.

After the work, it plays like a champ and sounds more like a late-'50s LG-0 than a mid-'60s one. For what it's worth -- that means it sounds a lot better than it should. These have a woody, direct, bluesy voice that lends itself to fingerpicking. I'm not a huge fan of them with flatpicks, but someone looking for an old-timey chunk-a-clunk sound will like that as the strings age-in to mellowness.

This one has a 24 5/8" scale length and a 1 11/16" nut width. The neck shape is the old-style, medium-C profile from the late '50s and it has something like a 10-12" radius to the board. The top, back, and sides are solid mahogany and the neck is, too. My new bridge is Indian rosewood but the fretboard is Brazilian. The nut's synthetic and the saddle is new bone.



I'm not sure how it got that odd truss-cover.




I style my repro bridges more on the old '50s look. This one is oversize, though, to fit the footprint of the old replacement bridge that was on it.






Comments

CM said…
"Hawthorne" is the name of Orson Welles' other sled in the director's cut of Citizen Kane.....it was later cut up to make a set of braces for a 1947 Kalamazoo....