Beatrice and my L-5

hello all my friends on social media this is jamie slater coming at you uh today i'm gonna play

a beautiful tune called beatrice uh by sam rivers

um sam rivers was a saxophonist and this song came out on an album

i think the album was called bimsha swing or something anyway it's from 1961

and uh do sam rivers as a state a favor and don't just type it into spotify and

listen away they're screwing artists so buy the thing will you buy the song if

you only like the song buy it but i think you'd like the whole record get it on itunes i think you can get it on

amazon it's probably available the disc lp not sure but if it is i think i'm

going to buy the lp uh but anyway um

just remember spotify is not the way to make sure people are just get paid okay so

modal interchange is something that happens in music and it makes things a little more complicated i'm not going to

go into it it's advanced concept and i'm not sure i 100 understand it myself i'm

still learning just like everyone else but um this tune is called beatrice

um i made a loop for the whole thing uh this time i didn't just kind of make

a loop for the middle or whatever this song i'm gonna play it the head twice which

is what normally happens i'm gonna play uh solo over the middle

uh play the head out and then the loop is gonna end the song uh so i did it in its entirety because i like to play with

a little more you know a little more forcefully a little more animation in the middle and the rhythm needs to kind

of um not be one-dimensional it needs to have some dynamic so

dynamics is very important in music it's something you should really work with if i were playing with a bass player and a

drummer right now or a pianist or something like that we would have dynamics i'd be bringing it in nice and sweet

this tune is one of the prettier tunes uh out there it's beautiful song

and i'm gonna play it for you and then i'm gonna have a conversation about this

guitar that people have been asking me questions about it's a bitching guitar so we'll kind of

talk about uh my history the history of this guitar and

construction and all that stuff okay so but for anybody just want to hear music here you go this is beatrice by sam

rivers all right [Music]

do

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do [Music]

so [Music]

do [Music]

so

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do [Music]

do [Music]

do

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do [Music]

do

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okay so that is beatrice by sam rivers really pretty tune um

it's a loop so i don't know it's not the same as playing with other players who actually

give you something that you're not expecting to have happen okay so

uh once again that tune was from 1961 and buy it

you really should own it um and it's a lot better than what i'm doing here all right

now uh it uses a concept called modal interchange where you borrow chords

from usually a relative minor key so you you you say have a key

b flat and then you go to b flat minor or whatever usually it's a parallel

major minor situation anyway that's a pretty advanced lesson and we're not going to talk about that today

instead we're going to talk about eye candy we're going to talk about this

oh look at that wood oh my goodness uh look at the neck it's like an old

violin okay so this is a gibson

l5 west montgomery model all right now the west montgomery model

um is kind of a specialized uh you know l5

a lot of l5s um the l5 started in 1921 okay it was the first year that gibson

made an l5 and it was created by lloyd lore who was an acoustic

engineer who created first the f5 mandolin which is that funny goofy

little scrolly looking mandolin you see a lot of those

country guys playing you know um and he came out with a lot of instruments for gibson and the first one

that he created for gibson as far as the guitar is concerned was the l5 okay

now the l5 was there i want to say it's the first instrument

to ever have these f holes in it okay and that's kind of comes from

the uh the cello and the upright bass and the violin and other instruments

that are handcrafted and carved so

the first l5s when they came out were 16-inch instruments

and they the appointments were not quite as fancy you know like the

they had a headstock with i think the flower pot was on the original one this kind of flower pot

inlay up here but the the gibson logo was in a scroll and there wasn't all this binding it was pretty plain by

comparison to this one but uh it made quite an impression

my mother maybelle carter played one in the carter family and it also got picked

up by quite a few jazz guitar players in say new york uh the old school guys

eddie lang played one and all these guys uh a little later so

the cool thing about this instrument is that um

it's a high-grade instrument so uh low-grade instruments

generally have a laminate construction meaning the wood

is not it looks like one solid piece of wood but it's not it's a bunch of pieces of wood like plywood that are glued

together now when i say plywood i'm not talking about uh construction

grade pine or something i'm talking about um

woods that are pretty nice in their own right but they're super thin and they

for for the for uh say the gibson es175 which is a really nice guitar but uses

laminate construction uh what they do is they take maple and they take poplar and they turn the grain

crossways and then they do another one of maple and so the middle ply on a

three-ply guitar like that um in that particular case is poplar and they have

a really nice pretty maple on the front and really nice pretty maple on the back which can sometimes give you this kind

of look and they take that and they

cut it to shape they wet it after they glue up those different you know layers you know you

have one piece they wet it and they put it in an industrial press that also applies heat

as well as pressure and they press that wet wood into an arch

shape and after it's been there a certain amount of time i imagine it dries up a bit

from the heat and so forth but it basically just stresses the wood to an arch construction and they take that and

they uh they put structural uh braces inside and they

and they glue it up and there you have a guitar those guitars are really handy uh

it's kind of the working man's guitar it's still a pro grade instrument but

it's uh it's not uh hand carved or anything so the the it feels a little different

in the hand it's still a nice instrument okay it uh one good thing about laminate

construction guitars like that is they're not as susceptible to heat and humidity and cold and all the

environmental things that can really stress

guitars of solid construction now the l5 was always carved and that was

gibson's thing they always wanted to be the company that

craftsmanship you know so gibson's um their thing was uh on on an l5 is you

take a wedged shaped piece of wood like this and you cut it right down the middle you

lay the two thick sections together you glue them together like this and so it's like a big trunk a big you know double

triangle you have like a like a pyramid kind of a shape and they turn that over

and they start carving it and so they carve solid wood into the

shape of an arch and they can tap tune it and things like that and hear what the wood sounds like and decide how

thick or how thin the instrument needs to be so

this is one of those uh it's one of the top quality um construction types and it's an it's a

very expensive guitar and it's very fancy um almost a little too fancy for me uh but

it's uh it's pretty fancy so when i first started guitar um i had been

playing saxophone in school band for several years so i started out playing saxophone in

school band in the sixth grade and i did that for three years and instead you know eighth grade and

instead of going and marching and continuing with saxophone which always kind of frustrated me a little

bit because um to play a chord you need two other instruments you know they can only play

one note at a time um and so i switched over to guitar and i

played the biggest piece of poot on the planet ever you know it this was a department store

guitar now at christmas time you can go into a department store or a walmart or

whatever and you can purchase like a first act or something like that which is a decent instrument these days

you know uh back then if you got a guitar from um

you know a walmart that actually didn't exist but if you got it from a kmart or some other

department store and you were to purchase it it really wasn't very good and really high action the electronics

didn't sound good it was just it was bad but i played it for yeah i guess i don't know i started in in late

83 or something and i started playing this instrument and i played until my fingers hurt until they bled because the

action was really high but it didn't stop me at the time i was trying to play rock stuff and so it was a lot of you know

[Music] a lot of power cord type things

and uh and i played that for a while then for my 16th birthday my mom got me a gibson les paul she's traded in my

saxophone which was rather expensive at the time you know like 600 bucks or something traded it in and got me

a lower line les paul like xr2 model i think was the model in the 80s and it

was a flat top les paul but it it had pretty wood and it had the shape and it had dot markers on the neck so it wasn't

fancy and it didn't have a lot of binding it had a sticker logo um and it had a set of mini humbuckers

like uh like a les paul deluxe had where they had a little ring that went all the way

around them that was a little bigger on the edges for a mini humbucker it also had a little switch in the top that

allowed you uh to split the coils on the pickups and stuff so i played i love that guitar and

i played that guitar for years and years played rock and punk and all sorts of different styles on it

and um i played that until i guess about 1990

199 you know 1988 89 i started listening to jazz

and i heard wes montgomery and i saw the the cover of uh boss guitar west

montgomery with an l5 like this um and i've always kind of wanted one every

time i saw a picture of him he was playing a guitar like this big fat jazz guitar

and i loved his sound he had a very uh beautiful sounding instrument

and i always kind of wanted one but even at that time the guitars were

incredibly expensive and i was maybe you know in 88 i was 20. so

um that was a pipe dream uh i started working for music stores

and eventually i worked at a store that had uh epiphone

joe pass guitar which was uh it was kind of weird it wasn't like a

175 or something and had a venetian cutaway like this one you know rounded cutaway

and uh it had a a pickup in it and it was made in korea

back when the koreans weren't really kicking ass doing this stuff it was kind of new a new place to do

uh inexpensive construction of instruments and i kind of bought that and played

that for a little while but i always kind of went back to my les paul because i the gibson neck shapes um

epiphone kind of had it but it just the sound wasn't there and it didn't feel it felt like a cheap guitar

so a little later on after that um i got an opportunity to buy a gibson

howard roberts fusion i think in like 1990 1991 and that guitar was a 88 or 88 i think

uh howard roberts fusion which was a semi-hollow body which means it had the f-holes but it had a solid block of wood

in the middle and um it wasn't quite there but it was my first

foray into a really decent uh jazz guitar sound and uh

i changed the pickups to some seymour duncan's and and it sounded great and

and i played that for a little while uh it was a it was expensive for the

time i think i paid 8.50 for it or something i i and i i played it for years

um i think my next guitar that i got after that was a

carbon allen holdsworth model which looks sort of like a solid body like a weird telecaster but it was hollow and

it gave me a little bit of a hollow sound but it was really versatile you could use it for rock you could do you know when i was still trying to pay the

bills playing some rock music um you could use it for jazz it had a pretty tone um when i first started out

on guitar playing rock i really uh was concentrating on you know learning how

to play and a lot of the music i liked was the randy rhodes stuff and you know ozzy and black sabbath and hendrix and a

lot of the uh grungier sounding things and the metal and i played the metal band and

um toured with those guys for for a little while um opened it up for helix and molly hatchet

and late a little later on i started getting to rem and i started getting the xtc and the smiths and cleaner guitar

sounds kind of started to be what i concentrated on and then and i think in 89 or 88 i got a

wes montgomery record and a coltrane record and i really started thinking about jazz and really started to

um kind of think about doing that so uh

that was kind of a digression sorry uh but uh so so i ended up

playing uh the howard arts fusion for a long time and switching it out with the carving and then i sold the carving and

went to the howard roberts all the time and then eventually um i got i got a pat

matheny model like uh ivanez pm 20 i think it you know like 2008 or

something and i played that guitar um for a little while and right after

that a pretty well-heeled friend of mine wanted you know he used to pay me like

tuition for lessons in in six month increments or whatever and he he had

just gotten one of these an l5 west montgomery because i had expressed to him how badly that was my dream guitar

and that's the one again he he bought one and he had been playing a es175

and he i told him that once you get that l5 you're not going to care about that 175

and he didn't believe me at first but then eventually you're like yeah i don't really don't care about the 175 and he said i'll tell you what i'll trade you

the es175 for a year's worth of guitar lessons and i think at the time that was about 2 400 or something

and i was like yeah i'll do that and i got an es175 a double pickup model

same pretty much color as this like a tobacco sunburst it was a 2008

um it was a pretty guitar uh you know it was just like a year old when i got it in 20 2010 i think i guess

is when i got that and i played the fool out of it but it always had one too many pickups it

always had a bridge pick up which you know on a jazz guitar like that or a hollow body guitar unless you're into

rockabilly and you want to sound like dwayne eddie or like scottie moore you know

elvis's guitar player you know or have that classic sound clean it's just really useless

um having a a pickup back there like that it's just it's just adding weight to the top which shuts the guitar down a

little bit uh acoustically and uh there's more electronics than you need to because you got an extra knob you know two extra

knobs and it's just a and you got a switch up here which you don't need and

um but i i played it and i loved it it was definite step up for me uh for some reason when i owned all

these other guitars like the pat matheny which was a nice guitar for the money you know for like a grand it's hard to

go wrong with that guitar but it when i got the 175 is a little bit heavier it felt it just the next

shape gibson neck shapes i think having that that that lets paul first and then um go into

the upper phone and then go into the howard roberts um and then now the 175 it just see or

at that time the 175 it just seems like gibson neck shapes always felt like home

for one thing and another thing um they just always had that classic look

you know you get a 175 jim hall played in the s175 and a lot of guys

uh barney kessel and not barney herb ellis played at 175 um and they eventually came up with a

es165 which was his model but a ton of guys um played

175s and it's still considered the working man's jazz guitar in other words

it's got that laminate construction and and but it's it's

it keeps you from uh it's it's a basic instrument kind of it's just enough to

do the job and it's a very all of my gibson guitars have been like

this they're very honest instruments meaning um

and also my way of thinking about tone it's an honest instrument meaning if you screw up everybody's gonna know it

you know there's no hiding behind anything you have to play well if you don't play well

everybody's going to hear your mistakes and everybody's going to hear your technical issues so it kind of inspires you to keep going uh

and increasing your your technique and your ability to to play well on the instrument

um i played the 175 a while then out of the blue i got an opportunity uh to buy an

epiphone 1949 epiphone blackstone which is a carved

top guitar non cutaway which i love non-cutaways just something about having that same exact

uh look on the bottom just makes me happy i don't know why i also don't play a lot up in this part of the neck so it

wasn't a big deal for me but it was a 1949 epiphone blackstone which wasn't a top of the line model for

them it was kind of an intermediate model but it had a carved

uh spruce top like this instrument does and but a laminated maple

sides and back and uh it sounded just a lot more

acoustic and live now this is i don't know

what comes first you know i don't know if it's chicken or egg here but older guitars

have a certain sound to them and i don't know if they came from the

factory with that sound or if just after years and years and years of the wood drying out

and and the the little tubules in the wood becoming crystallized if they sound better and they get lighter and

everything is just better with old guitars because of that um i don't know if it's age or if it

came from the factory that way but i can tell you that older guitars have a certain

something that is very difficult to recreate brand new from a factory guitar

now okay and those now at the time 1949

epiphones were made in new york city they weren't like a cheap off-brand they were gibson's biggest competitor

and that particular instrument was 16 inches and i think 3 8 16 and 3 8 wide so every

time gibson would come out with a guitar that was 16 inches epiphone would come out with one that

was 3 8 bigger so at the time there was no amplifi there you know

amplification was kind of a new thing and not everybody had them so they made guitars that were allowed and the bigger

the guitar the louder the guitar the l5 started out as a 16 inch guitar

then they went to an advanced body l5 which was a 17 inch guitar it just it

got bigger the dimensions got bigger which means acoustically

it was louder okay and at the time you were playing with the jazz orchestra if

you played one of these guitars generally or you know they used them in country two but a lot of times you were playing with a jazz orchestra which

means there was a drummer a pianist an upright bass player and a bunch of horns so guys like freddie green those classic

uh jazz guitarists for orchestras did a lot of very choppy sounding stuff

because the guitar was a percussion instrument in a way it was

that was that was what you heard of a guitar if you were in the audience with a big band you you know and they kept

really high action and really heavy strings and they really set it up to be loud as they could manage it

um the l5 or should i say

amplification from gibson started in in the

i think in the late 30s early 40s with with a charlie christian pickup

which is a really kind of stylized hexagonal pickup and it mounted like

here inside of the guitar and it had three triangle laid out bolts that went

through the top so you could uh adjust it somewhat and uh it was a

very weak set of cobalt magnets which you can't find anymore and it had a certain sound to it but one

of the big problems with this sound and this is a single coil pickup and the so was the charlie christian so

the charlie christian had a single cool pickup and what would happen is it would act like an antenna

and that antenna you hear that

hear how it goes away but the close i get closer i get to my main light here shining on my face the

more of a hum that you hear and that in some rooms can be a real

problem um in a room with like a lot of stuff or a

refrigerator on the same circuit as your amp or things like that it can be a real

problem well they they ended up you know getting a different type of pickup that was a little better about it and that

was a p90 p90s sounded really nice it was also a single coil design but by

uh i want to say the early to mid 50s they started using what's called a humbucker

design which is a double coil pickup and everything is reversed the magnetism is reversed and the winds on one of the

coils is reversed and it it's sort of like your bose noise canceling headphones

it takes in the sound and then it flips at 180 and feeds it back to you and it cancels out the noise well that

electronically is what a humbucker pickup does so

the l5 kept getting bigger it eventually got to its final

size of of 17 inches and then they started creating this cutaway here

and they called that the l5p or l5 premier and it had a cutaway and so this

guitar has kind of looked like this since i think like the late 30s they started

kind of making them look like this and it went on

now this is a west montgomery model west montgomery had a bunch of l5s it kind of

seemed to be his his go-to instrument and um

he had him create uh an l5 like this uh for him with a single pickup like

this one has and um he played those on a lot of uh

appearances on television and things like that back when he was getting big in the in the 60s

and uh but he owned a ton of l5s and some of them had two pickups and you

know you never know you listen to a record and they sound great some of them had what's called an almoco staple

pickup which was kind of a gateway between the the uh p9 i think between the p90 and

the paf and um they have a certain sound to them that

is really sensitive and very um they just sound real sensitive like when

he plays light you can really hear it there's a clarity there that was really

in my mind is very important to have okay so

this is a carved guitar and i've always wanted an l5 i finally got

an opportunity to get my dream guitar a little ways back and i was playing my

epiphone my 49 epiphone at the time and i loved it and i wish i still had it

because that guitar was a cannon all right um meaning there was a lot of low end

there's a lot of mid range there was a lot of high end i had a floating pickup on it but it was a very

thinly uh thin top on it so it was really loud acoustically

and um it was also kind of a feedback machine so you had to be really careful

how you sat near the amp um if i had

my amp up as much as this and i was sitting this close to the amp as i am right now i would have to really control

would be trying to feed back i'd have to turn on the volume and really be careful of feedback

at some and so that guitar was very loud acoustically but what happens when

guitars are loud acoustically is they don't have much sustain because they

were created to be percussion instruments okay so you would get this

[Music] this really loud and then it would go away right away you

couldn't you know with this guitar and we're going to talk about why that is here in a minute but

notice it's still holding out and if i turn on an amp [Music]

it'll sit there for a good long time [Music]

it'll just sit there and sustain you know i could set this on a stand start it going

go to the restroom come back and it'll still be going to a certain degree not much but still there so

at some point in uh gibson's development

they went from taking a guitar that would normally be an acoustic guitar traditionally

and their first concept was let's take that guitar that works really well and let's put a

pickup on it make it louder they didn't really redesign anything they just kind of put a pickup on it to make it louder

and that's how these guitars started they started out as an acoustic guitar

with electronics on it so it could be louder later on i think

gibson changed the way that they construct their instruments and when you take a thinner top and you

brace it for strings and then you put heavy strings on it like these are 13's

and i've played as high as 14 gauge strings but these are 13 gauge round wound strings that's a lot of tension

and it's transferred to the bridge right here and that pushes down on the top these tops have an arch so over time

what would happen on old gibsons is all that string tension over the years would take an instrument that's arch like this

and eventually cave it in from the string tension gibsons have a lifetime warranty on them

so i think what they had to do was do a lot of lifetime warranty work on collapse tops on arch tops and so

i think they got tired of doing the warranty work and as the electronics became more advanced they went okay well let's you

know let's concentrate on the electronics and brace the guitar a little stiffer and uh keep ourselves

from having to do all these extra repairs and things like that so that's what they did so this guitar

while it looks like an old style gibson and i mean it still has

has an acoustic [Music] still has an acoustic tone to it that's

not bad it's not as loud and not as you know doesn't pop out at you the way

that they used to um it's a good compromise uh they gibson

went from making acoustic guitars that happened to have a pickup on him to making electric guitars that happen to

be hollow you know and for a modern well me as a modern

player i'm good with this because this allows me

to have sustain [Music] like a piano player with a sustain pedal

[Music]

and that first chord you know that that note is still ringing

and i can do a lot of different things and play over it and having too much sustain is good

because i can always use my technique instead of holding out i'll just i'll just release a little of the tension

and take it out when i want to but if you don't have enough sustain uh it leads me personally as a player to play

more you know i end up playing a lot more notes because as soon as i play a note it goes away i can't

just play a note

and it doesn't sustain that way with some of the older style instruments okay

so this is a gibson l5 west montgomery

all right and the next thing i have to talk about is the electronics

so the electronics everything i buy i end up changing the pickups and the reason why i end up

changing the pickups on an arch top guitar like this is because i'm looking for a more organic

sound now this guitar when i went inside of it and got the pickup out i took the whole

wiring harness out at one time so if i ever i don't think this will ever happen but if i ever sell this instrument i can

just put it right back to original and sell it okay

um i looked at the back of the pickup and

it's got like the name of the person that wound the pickup everything is a little more extra with this model so

this is if we look at the fingerboard you see all those see the edge of the body all those lines

that's like five ply binding then they do it again here on the side you can see

how thick the top is um maybe you can see it do you see how it gets thicker here in the middle than at

the edge that's the carve on the top so when they cut into that top to make that

cutaway you can see that it's thicker in the middle there was like one individual that carved this

thing out of a solid block of wood and it really makes a difference from

this to a to a laminated guitar a laminated guitar really feels differently than this guitar okay

but the pickup winding was next step they got the initials of the person that wound it and everything and

a lot of people would their heads would explode if i said i re rewired this guitar but i just i took

the whole harness out so if i ever wanted to put it back original i just drop it back in

i solder a ground wire to it and i'm done okay so i can always put it back but

these guitars unlike the old style guitars where everything is real

bright this has a lot of low end to it

and almost all gibson's have a bit of low end to them um but it's one of the things that happened when they went from

an acoustic guitar with a pickup to an electric guitar that happens to be hollow is it ended up thickening up the

sound a bit um when they got rid of some of that acousticness so

with the standard issue [Music] hand wound

57 classic the gibson puts in them this sounds very much like an electric guitar

it had like a thickness to it and it was a little bit artificial

uh the way that i like my pickups to work is if i were to play

a chord and i bring up the volume slowly

i wanted to sound like the guitar

just getting louder um i don't and i can turn off all the effects and you can kind of really hear

it um but [Music]

it just sounds like the guitar there's not a lot of

it's not a lot of extra added to it you know i wanted that acoustic sound so i ended

up putting a charlie christian pickup in this guitar because i really like single coils

they're very sensitive [Music] they give me a little

[Music] a little more of an acoustic quality to

the instrument [Music] and that's what i'm looking for

um now along with that wiring i put a push-pull volume pod in here

and i have a dummy coil of this pickup that means

i've got a reverse wound coil that is the same

dimensions and everything of this and it's velcroed inside of the body of the guitar so this is a single coil

if i want to kick in that dummy coil it'll give me a little bit of hum canceling

i pull that out notice it got a little thicker

[Music] yeah you hear it

here's the double coil again [Music]

it's it's a little bit of a tone difference and it also helps you to cut down on the hum in some rooms depends on

the room okay um but that's how this guitar is wired and i

also have the tone pot i wanted with the um

the tone capacitor is a little different than what comes standard from the factory this tone control if you listen

to it it is much more usable than the factory

tone control so a factory tone control

as i turn it down so now my i'm starting on 10 i'm gonna put it on about

seven [Music]

still usable take it down to about five

still usable a lot of guitars by the time you get to five it's starting to get real muddy

and there's four [Music]

with that double coil on and with that on about four [Music]

that's what a standard gibson with a humbucker l5 sounds like this is pretty much what it sounded like from the

factory [Music]

it's a lot thicker of an instrument i take my tone control down a

little bit more to about two and a half [Music]

it's still usable [Music]

but it's starting for me it you know it's getting way unusable and that's all the way off

[Music] and i'm gonna bring it up just a little

that's at three so the tone control with this other pod in it is a lot more usable than a standard

tone pod um and it's just has to do with the capacitor the amount of high end that

gets bled off when you um [Music]

better uh that that gets bled off when you turn it down so

um when i look at effects um

i am looking at effects that don't change the tone too much that do what they do

without changing the tone of the instrument because i spent a lot of time getting the guitar itself to sound exactly the way i want to i don't want

to click on an effect and there all of a sudden the mid-range is gone or there's a whole lot of high end and things like

that i really want it to kind of sound like it sounds just add whatever effect

i wanted to have okay so it took a bit of a transition

with to to start playing this guitar uh when i got it now when you first get

a guitar a ten thousand dollar guitar um

you're kind of afraid to touch it you know you you you played a little but you're just like you know you set it on

the stand you kind of want to look at it a little bit and uh and uh which which i did you know and i

played a couple of gigs with the stock pickup in it just to see what it would do and what what would happen with it i

just felt like it could sound better and so i started to um to go about that business of it

but one of the things that threw me a lot in the beginning was two things um i was coming from either the i was coming

from the upper phone it was uh it was a lot more acoustically live a

lot more feedback and stuff but it was a cannon man if i played a low string whoa i mean you did it just popped through

the mix and you if i played hard i could just really shine through on my

solos um although the sustain wasn't there okay um and but it was a 16 inch guitar and

that when i say 16 inch the lower bout was 16 on my upper phone and it was also 16 on my es175

so going from a 16 inch guitar to a 17-inch guitar in some ways

was a little hard but in other ways was really cool the first way that it was cool is that a 17-inch guitar just has

a power to it that a 16-inch guitar doesn't have there's just a power to it it allows you

to pop through the mix like the older acoustic you know instrument did and plus it's

carved so it feels really good against your body there's a big difference as to how it vibrates when i

play this instrument i'm hearing though i feel the whole body

vibrate against uh my chest and and it really

improves the quality of your experience when you're playing an instrument

um it's also long scale it's 25 and a half inch scale

so was my 16 inch upper phone which i had gotten used to and my es175 is a

short scale guitar so it had a les paul scale which is 24 and three quarter rather than 25 and a half now we're only

talking about what three quarter of an inch you know you wouldn't think it would make that big of a difference but it

does the the spacing is a little wider on the instrument but the big thing

it does sonically is that when you play a chord

on a short scale like a 175 it sounds like the everly brothers it's very

organic there's like a everly brothers kind of harmonization when they sing together it just it's

it's real organic and natural and sounds good but when you play a chord on this a long

scale guitar it's like each note in the chord is a professional singer

okay and each note has a separation like it's its own entity and they're singing

together like take six or any of those really good vocal groups so if i play

every note [Music] has a clarity of its own

and that's one of the qualities of a long scale instrument that you that you enjoy when you when you play it if you

like that sort of thing now it is a little harder

to reach things and i spend a lot of time on the bandstand with my eyes shut

um because i'm really listening and uh you know when i first migrated

from a from a short scale guitar to a long scale guitar i had to look a lot more because where you know

inevitably where i thought i was was a half step away from where i was and that's also a function with where the

guitar uh body meets the neck sometimes that can throw you off too

but i've gotten so used to playing this guitar now that it i'm pretty used to that another thing that throws you a little

bit moving from a 16-inch guitar to a 17-inch guitar is this is a carved

instrument and it has a deep carve on it so if you look at this you'll see

there's an arch to this back and there's an arch to this front and it's 17 inches at the lower

bout which means it felt at first like i was holding a bubble

you know it was just it was just round and big in a subtle way but if you play you know

what i'm talking about it was a big guitar and where my arm fell across this instrument was different from where my

arm fell across the 175 or the upper phone so it took a minute to

kind of get to a place where i could play this instrument as reliably as others but

they gibson doesn't make this guitar as a factory guitar anymore i think

there was a time when gibson made it as a factory guitar not a factory but you know what i mean they've always charged

you top price and there was always a couple of craftsmen this one has a guy's name on the label the guy that oversaw

the team of two or three dudes that built this instrument it takes a long time to do it and they do it there's a

lot of hand work involved and there's a lot of listening and specialization to make

sure this guitar sounds good it's not like a factory instrument with this they use the best woods they

have they put a lot of fancy appointments uh on it

with the binding and the gold hardware and everything and they they do a lot with that now

um gibson having undergone its recent bankruptcy they don't put this in the

catalog anymore um and i don't i want to say that they got

rid of most of the guys in the crimson custom shop which is what these guitars are uh where they were from they had a

special shop that just dealt with arch tops and other uh really really high-end gibson guitars

uh as far as this type of construction uh flat tops they have a group of guys that just do flat tops out in montana

and this is uh this is made i think in memphis um tennessee so

um and most of their factory guitars are made in nashville so

if you want one of these now you have to give them 10 or 11 000 and then wait a year and a half or two

years until they're done with it and then they'll call you and and send you the guitar

uh so the best way to look for one of these is say on the used market and usually you can get them seven eight

grand i got a really good deal on this one because i knew the guy was selling it and um you know he was in a hurry to

get some money out of it he wanted something he wanted to buy something else and needed you know some money

but anyway gibson l5 west montgomery [Music]

all the changes i've made to it i also put a sadowski bridge on this it came with a gold

you know nashville tuna matic which is a really nice bridge as well that gets your intonation perfect i put a sadowski

bridge ebony bridge on this original bridge saddle with the with the inlays here um sorry the bridge base

with the inlays here is original the the saddle on top is aftermarket it's a sadowski i change

everything that i do and um i turn a guitar into exactly what i want to hear and what i want to sound

like and um it's a big deal for me if i don't sound right i can't play right

uh so this is a gibson l5 wes montgomery and um

it's awesome and uh and uh so if you get a chance to play

one try it out if you can afford one congratulations

uh they're gonna probably would be worth more money in the future because they're

i don't know the same guys in the shop or the same guys that made this guitar and the previous generations you know

and i don't know that uh the quality and the materials are gonna be there i know somebody that has one of

these but instead of an ebony fingerboard it has a rich light fingerboard which is kind of a synthetic

material made out of paper pulp and stuff yeah because they're trying to you know ebony

is an expensive wood and it's getting harder to get dark high quality ebony certain woods are getting tougher to

find and more difficult to use in construction um so they're trying to be more sustainable

about it so i'm not saying the guitar sound any different i'm just saying if you're going to play 10 pay 10 grand for

a guitar you don't want a fingerboard that looks like ebony you want abiding you know um

if you have any questions about the music or about the guitars or about my amp or anything i teach lessons

if you want to know about music the tune today was beatrice from sam rivers um hope i didn't bore you guys of tears

with all this gear talk and uh but uh check out beatrice by sam rivers it uses a concept called modal

interchange which allows the music to be a lot more interesting so jamie slater

signing off and thank you so much for listening