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MattK wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2024 6:19 am That cream Gibbo is pure hotness, presume it's one of those 70s called either the Les Paul Motivator or Gnathus. Would love to hear about it!

Let me tell you the tale of the Sonex, the cheapest Gibson until recent years. With sales going downhill at the end of the seventies and Gibson falling out of fashion and being beaten by Japanese copies, the company decided to try a budget line. They had the necks made overseas, got hardware from japan and assembled them in the USA to keep the “made in the USA” tag.

The bodies were made of “resonwood” a mixture of glue and sawdust moulded around a tonewood core of mahogany that the neck would bolt(!) onto. Advertising materials would boast of the lengthy sustain this material sandwich could attain, to head off concerns around the bolt-on neck.

There were a few oddball models, but the Sonex line had three models.
The Deluxe was the cheapest and most common. Featuring Bill Lawrence designed “velvet brick” pickups, a three-piece maple and rosewood neck. The Standard model upgraded the pickups to dirty fingers (with coil taps) and the Custom model got the dirty fingers plus an ebony fretboard. There was also a model with the onboard moog electronics that were in the RDs at the time.

Mine is a Custom, someone has replaced the original black pickguard with a cream one and I swapped out the much corroded bridge piece. It’s about due for a new input jack too.

Gloriously beat up, heavy as hell and the DF’s sound pretty nasty. I love the neck on this. The frets are fucked but I think they’ve been shaved down to match the neck angle? Really flat by the nut and pretty much full at the body. Plays okay.

You've tried to put me off but now I ONLY WANT IT MORE. Thanks for that!

JESUSGOLLY THAT SONEX IS SEX

My old lead singer had one that had been smashed by Paul Stanley of KISS.

Did that Sonex have a harmonica bridge originally? Wondering what you replaced it with if so.

It was just your standard abr tunematic, with a guard wire, but to metric dimensions.

It's in that gallery of pics if you click through a bit. The new one is a shiny NOS gotoh from either the 80s or 90s.

Link goes to a blank page for me Anyway I asked because I have a "The Paul" from the same period, a close relative. It came with a harmonica bridge which was also corroded, although not that badly. Took a lot of searching to find something to retrofit.

More to the point, seeing your Sonex kinda makes me want to switch to zebra buckers, cream pickguard and speed knobs. Sadly I only have one of the original dirty fingers though, if that's what it even came with. Some of the later Norlin-era guitars were parts bin specials, this one included. I'd love to see what the base plates of the pickups on yours look like.

I hadn’t seen a “The Paul” with a burst like finish before. I thought they were all walnut oiled finish

There were certainly some oddballs.

I haven't had the pickguard off in a while, but this is making me want to open it up and fix the dodgy output jack. I recall they looked the same as this?


With the weird little cross bar mod for the two adjustment screws.

plopswagon wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 12:25 pm I hadn’t seen a “The Paul” with a burst like finish before. I thought they were all walnut oiled finish

I always think of them as being brown too. I have a Vantage VP-750 "The Ghost," which is the Matsomuku copy.

Don't think I've ever seen one with a pickguard, either. Cool.

There were two official runs I've seen in catalogs / price lists. The earliest had a Standard and Deluxe model, with the only difference being body material as far as I know. (Oddly, the Standard was walnut while the Deluxe was mahogany. Would expect the opposite nowadays). Both were exclusively brown, with the Deluxe coming in a light or dark color.

Then they switched to the Firebrand series, named as such because the Gibson logo was branded into the headstock, instead of having the gold embossed logo. Basically the same guitar except it came in a couple other colors.

But this one is neither. My best guess is that after 1981, the last year they were in a catalog (that I know of), they used leftover stock to do whatever employees wanted. The serial number on mine dates it to 1984. Unlike most, it never had Grover-style tuners, nor a TOM bridge. The color code written in the pickup cavity indicates the finish is original, and I believe the pickguard is, too.

That said, I have seen a handful of others like it. Here's a silverburst one and here's a wine red one, both with 1983 serial numbers, and with the latter having a Firebrand truss rod cover, even though it isn't one.

Anyway, seeing those listings made me realize the pickup I have is a Tim Shaw, not a Dirty Fingers.

I suppose that's '80s USA vs Japan guitar manufacturing in a nutshell. That the nameless factories that were producing copies in Japan were doing deliberate, designed guitars that can now be dated and traced and the American companies they were copying were just sort of doing whatever in an ad hoc way and are now tricky to date and place.

That's not a judgement one way or the other nor a reflection of the quality of the instruments made, I just think it's funny how the copycat companies were run by far more serious people than the original manufactures.

Haven’t done a group pic in a while. Missing a few but these are the main players these days.

Nick wrote: ↑Thu Mar 28, 2024 9:14 pm Haven’t done a group pic in a while. Missing a few but these are the main players these days.

Perfect collection!

Seeing as I'm back I thought I'd post a pic of one of my guitars. This is my Westfield SG copy; that project guitar that came out great. It was given to me pretty neglected, by a friend, who bought it to learn and never learnt to play.

New tuners, new pickups and a complete setup; it's now an absolute beauty. Telecaster bridge pickup in the bridge I picked up on Ebay, and a Seymour Duncan 1/4 pounder from an old project in the neck. It's the cheapest guitar I own and by far the nicest sounding and feeling of my collection. Everyone else who has played it loves it. Definitely the one I play the most.

Woah, weird! I modded a Vintage SG in almost the exact same way several years back.

It now belongs to my pal Marcus, as seen in this video.



Momentarily I thought he must have sold it to you, before I realised yours is a Westfield!

If I remember rightly, this one is wired with just a single volume knob, and the selector switch actually switches the pickups between series and parallel, with them both always on.

Haha, yeah, they do look remarkably similar. Mine is definitely the standard wiring though. Oh, and I changed the strap pin to being on the top horn, makes the guitar far better balanced. Never liked the strap pin placements on SGs. It's still slightly headstock heavy but doesn't lunge forward anymore. Definitely recommend it to anyone who is considering it.

Always loved how these angled singlecoil adaptor rings work aesthetically against the SG design; and obviously angled singles SOUND ace too