Handcrafted icons: inside Gibson’s custom guitar experience

Lee Bartram concedes that his guitar-playing isn’t what it might be. “I kind of play,” says the impressively titled Head of Commercial, Marketing and Cultural Influence for Gibson – one of the world’s most historic electric guitar manufacturers. “It’s frustrating because around here there’s always someone better than you,” he laughs. “And you can’t do this product justice just strumming a few chords.”

At the Gibson Garage London – part European flagship store, part guitar Mecca – the clientele are less often guitar legends (though Jimmy Page, Brian May and Tony Iommi did cut the ribbon) and more often passionate aficionados.

Some simply come to pay homage: this year marks the 90th anniversary of Gibson’s first electric guitar, the EH-150 – and in 1951, the brand partnered with Les Paul on the mahogany single-cut solidbody that became a blueprint for generations.

Others, however, are here for something far more hands-on – to commission the guitar of their stadium dreams from Gibson’s Custom Shop.

This might mean mixing and matching the neck of one guitar with the body of another to better suit their hand size or playing style. Or perhaps they want a familiar model but with a specific tone, achieved through a different pickup – the component that translates string vibrations into an electric signal for the amplifier and speaker.

“Most of our customers are huge guitar fans – they already have a ton of Gibsons, a ton of Fenders, some of which they might sell to get this one very special guitar. They’ve been playing for a while and now know what they really want from their guitar,” explains Dustin Wainscott, Director of Gibson’s custom made-to-measure division in Nashville, its home city – the only other place where the hands-on made-to-measure service is offered. “But other customers of course just want the Gibson look. It’s an aesthetic decision.”

And when it comes to aesthetics, clients can really go to town. They start by choosing from around 60 blanks the very piece of maple or mahogany that will become their one-of-a-kind guitar – complete with just the right ‘flaming’ to the grain.

From there, it’s all about personal flourishes: it could be initials inlaid with mother-of-pearl along the fretboard; customised sunburst effects; or hand-picked combinations of tuning pegs, pickguard, nut, jack input and – such a wonderful phrase – whammy bar.

Finally, the customer can have the entire guitar finished in colours to match their car, motorcycle, or even yacht.

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“If someone wants the controls in titanium, and diamonds set into the fretboard, the custom shop will have a go, as long as it’s within the engineering parameters of a guitar,” Bartram explains. “But generally people still want their Gibson to look like a Gibson, to have that vibe.”

Some order a custom guitar as a graduation gift, others in the hope of creating a new family heirloom. Delivery comes anywhere between six months and a year later, depending on the complexity of the order. It will leave you somewhere between £8,000 and £16,000 lighter.

But, you know, ready to rock…

“There was a time when there was demand for a kind of nostalgia, driven by the Les Paul guitars being played by the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page,” explains Bartram. They had likely picked up theirs during the 1960s ‘blues explosion’ when the initial, dissuasive price of Les Pauls had calmed down.

“And because of those players, prices later soared again for older-style guitars. Gibson started making modern interpretations of the guitars of that time. But it was clear that there was a huge market for a particular look or feel or specification of guitar – the kind of guitar that would fetch £1m now and be almost impossible to find. And, of course, just to have what your heroes have.”

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That’s why Gibson’s custom service makes its orders exactly as they were made half a century or more ago: the same methods, the same animal hide glues, the same nitrocellulose lacquers; less efficient than their modern counterparts perhaps, but more romantic, more characterful.

That won’t necessarily mean you get to play like your heroes, of course. “They may have managed to get a specific sound from those guitars, but the sound is more in the player. A customer who orders a guitar to the exact specifications of [Fleetwood Mac’s] Peter Green’s guitar isn’t going to sound like Peter Green,” Bartram chuckles. But it’s as close as you’re likely to get to the look.

And it really can get very close. An additional layer to the custom process is to have the guitar aged.

People may have mixed feelings about the questionable taste of pre-aged products – distressed jeans, rustic furniture and the like – but Bartram says the majority of customers select to have their pristine guitar given what he describes as, “the look of having been played at every major venue in the world for 50 years”.

He explains further: “Ageing is, for me, the cream on top because of the extra craft and time that’s required to achieve the look”.

That job falls to Wainscott and his colleague Tom Murphy at what’s been dubbed the Murphy Lab. They’ll use various techniques, many of which were originally developed to help a new repair blend seamlessly into an old guitar. They’ll also employ a range of Heath Robinson tools of Murphy’s invention – contraptions such as belt buckles mounted on a kind of flail, or bunches of keys repurposed from a railway tie. These are used to wear away the lacquer in carefully chosen spots, giving the instrument an aura of authenticity. A faux-thenticity, if you will.

They’ll introduce the charming ‘cracking’ and ‘checking’ that usually only appears in the brittle lacquer after the wood has moved and breathed for decades. The odd dink or scratch? All part of the life the guitar has only ever had in its owner’s Rose Bowl fantasies.

“The fact is that some Gibson models are incredibly rare and few people will get to see them, let alone play them,” says Wainscott. “But we can use the same materials and processes from the 1950s, and then age the guitar to look like it’s been around since then too. It’s as close as someone might get to the experience of owning an original. I’ve played baseball all my life, and getting a new glove has always been horrible – the old one was broken in, shaped by years of games. That’s why it matters that the guitar feels old in the hand too.”

Even if, you know, you can’t actually play it all that well. Lee Bartram surveys the walls of the Gibson Garage – the curvaceous shapes, the pointed horns, the flying Vs, their gloss and depth of colour – and you realise these guitars are as much cultural icons as musical instruments. Any one of them would look irresistible simply propped up in a corner at home. “Oh yes,” he nods. “We get customers who buy a Gibson for that too.”