Russell Bateman last update:
“ Eternally After Death God Blesses Everybody ” 7/5
“ retsaE tA knurD steG ynnuB retsaE ” ("Easter bunny gets drunk at Easter")
This is my guitar. Epiphone is owned by Gibson, but it's a far better value, especially for the price, than a Gibson Les Paul. This Epiphone is one of the most beautiful guitars I have ever seen. It's well built and I only wish my playing did it justice. Someday. Here's some advertising fluff as well as cold, hard specifications below.
Serial number: 19041527322 Production date: April 2019 (serial 27322) Quingdao (electrics), China
In the serial number, besides the obvious year and month, the fifth and sixth digits are the factory code, Quingdao (electric), China, and the last five digits are the sequence number of that factory (i.e.: the 27,332nd guitar built in April of 2019).
Quingdao, China, pronounced /KEEN dah-o/, is on the Pacific coast far south east of Beijing, and means "Green Island". Electric guitars are built there.
The ProBuckers™ on the Les Paul Standard Plustop Pro feature Alnico II magnets—same as sought-after vintage Humbuckers—for rich, warm tone with crystalline highs and a tight bottom. With a ProBucker-2 in the neck position and a (slightly overwound) ProBucker-3 in the bridge position for a legendary Les Paul fat, snarling tone, served up with days of sustain.
Coil-splitting, controlled by push/pull volume pots, for a variety of sounds from single-coil spank to full Humbucker shred. Press down for Humbucking, pull up for single-coil. Push-pull potentiometers to switch between pick-up styles is after-market for Gibson. It's factory on this Epiphone guitar. (Notice that the sticker incorrectly proclaimed "coil-tapping." See Coil-splitting versus coil-tapping below.)
The Plustop Pro comes with Epiphone's Limited Lifetime Warranty and is backed by Gibson's 24/7/365 Customer Service.
In order of importance...
Anastasios Stathopoulos born in 1863, a Greek luthier who started a mandolin and violin company in 1873 in Pellana, Greece. (Yup, that's right—when he was 10 years old.) In 1903 he emigrated with his wife to New York. As a luthier he started a year later a company that mainly produced mandolins. The company did well and he hired Italian luthier, Henry Cappielo.
After the death of Anastasios (1915), his son Epaminondas (nicknamed Epi) took control of the company. Under his management the company grew to one of the biggest of its kind. Later, Epaminondas opened a factory for banjos.
In 1924 Epaminondas registered the brand name Epiphone, a combination of his nickname (Epi) with the Greek word for sound (phone). Shortly thereafter, he bought the banjo company, Favoran, and introduced the Epiphone recording line of banjos. Because of their quality and elegant design, they would be a great success.
Because of this success, a recording line for guitars was also established in 1928 and a full line of f-hole archtop guitars was introduced in 1931. There were 12 models, including: Broadway, Triumph and DeLuxe. Epiphone had been competing with Gibson for some time and with the introduction of the Epiphone Emperor in 1935, dealt Gibson a serious blow. In 1937, Epiphone introduced the Electar series, an electric guitar with an adjustable pickup.
Epaminondas passed away in 1943 and the business was continued by his two sons, Orpheus (Orphie) and Frixo. The two brothers struggled to get along and the company went through hard times after World War II.
By the mid-1950s, Epiphone's output remained small. In 1957, Epiphone was sold to the Chicago Instrument Company, which also owned Gibson, for a mere $20,000.00. A full line of newly designed acoustic and electric guitars was launched in 1958. Then, in 1960, Epiphone's production moved to the Gibson plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
At the beginning of 1970 the production under license from Gibson moved from the US to Japan, then opened production in Korea in 1983 and again in 1995 also in Indonesia. In 2004, Gibson opened a factory in Qingdao, China for the production of Epiphone guitars.
Although the vast production of Epiphone guitars takes place in these countries, some more exclusive models are still being made in the USA.
Especially for Humbuckers, this is terminological distinction that's important to grok.
First, humbuckers were a way to use two coils together, each with the inverse field polarity of its partner, to counteract the humming that a single coil (Gibson's P-90) produced.
In recent times, however, it's become fashionable to modify humbuckers such that one of the coils can be dropped out to turn the pickup into a single-coil, presumably in imitation of the pickups Fender and other manufacturers mount on their guitars. This is what my Les Paul has; single-coil is obtained by tugging out (or upward) on the leftmost potentiometers.
This is called coil-splitting.
Coil-tapping is where an electric lead comes out from somewhere in the middle of the coil to short it if you choose to use that lead and the bottom lead instead of the final and bottom leads. This is a frequent technique in the manufacture of transformers more than guitar pickups.
Some 50+ years ago, my Kasuga Les Paul suffered from going quickly out of tune even after I replaced its tuning machines with Grovers. This is a known phenomenon on Gibson 3 over 3 headstocks and affects unwound (smooth) strings, but, more often than not, the G string.
My Epiphone Les Paul has a string butler I bought and installed figuring that I'd have to contend with this problem. I don't play enough and stress my Epiphone enough that I have become so aware of the out-of-tune the way I did back when I was 18, but...
...I found out recently from some random guy on YouTube that there is a trick. It consists of "winding upward" the smooth strings, especially the G (but tuning can be affected also on the B and E strings because they're not wound strings either) when you replace strings. (Click the image to the right here to enlarge it.)
Thank you, random guy.
The first step to nailing any song quickly is to:
Pluck the low E string on your guitar while the song is playing. Slide your finger along the frets until you hear the same starting note of the opening riff or fundamental in the chord of the song.
A good example is Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl.
The first note is G. This tells you that the song is in G major.
Hundreds of thousands of songs use only 3 or 4 chords. You only need to figure out which 3 or 4 chords are used in a song.
Brown Eyed Girl is played in G major. The chord progression in the G major key is [ G A B C D ].
The chord sequence (or pattern) of most popular songs is [ 1 4 5 6 ].
Answer the question, "What are the 1, 4, 5 and 6 chords in G major?"
Train yourself to answer the question, "What are the 1-4-5-6 chords?" when you've foud the starting key of a song.
Shows you've figured out 80% of the song. The rest is whatever the composer or lyricist did to make it unordinary (if anything).