I’m not sure why I am surprised that you have a multi-neck guitar. But I am.
In my defense, I think you know me well enough to understand why I keep the thing, but also that I would never have spent cash money on it (well, no more than $50 anyway). A buddy of mine was a producer on various Disney Channel sitcoms, and after one particular Suite Life / A.N.T. Farm / Hannah Montana clone had run its course, while the crew was cleaning out the unused lighting gels, broken props, and snippets of twine from a soundstage in preparation for moving in some new eye-gougingly awful Disney tween project, he came across this guitar which had been purchased for use as a prop in some episode or other. He was mildly surprised that nobody on the show had wanted to keep it (especially not anyone who actually played guitar), so he gave it to me, thinking I might find a use for it.
I was kinda delighted until I tried to play it. It’s heavier than it looks, so playing it standing up is hideously uncomfortable. Depending on how short your strap is, you can either reach the top three necks or the bottom three… never all five without readjusting the strap. And as the picture shows, you can’t really reach or see what you’re doing if you play it sitting down. On top of all that, it’s badly made and badly wired and full of the cheapest hardware available. Truly a white elephant. Even the case is troublesome to store if you hang the guitar on the wall. And I don’t get why they duplicated the neck layout of Nielsen’s setup. The twelve-string is a useful idea, and the fretless neck is at least interesting. But three standard six-string necks? Why not a bass neck, or a baritone one?
A disappointingly wasted opportunity.
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Here are a couple demos of LP Custom’s like Frampton’s so you can hear the different tones. One from 1968 and one from 1960. The latter is all bridge pickup, but man it’s an awesome mean tone.
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Thanks! That’s a pretty good demo. It looks like you can select any particular pickup, but not combinations of them?
You can.
Generally for Les Paul’s the wiring is like this -
Two pickup - bridge, both pickups or neck pickup - three positions on the selector switch.
For 3 pickup Les Paul’s, usually it’s bridge, middle/neck then neck alone for the three positions.
There are other wiring tricks that people will do. Coil splitting the humbuckers, putting them out of phase when in the middle position on a two pickup model (ala Peter Green), etc…
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I wondered if they’d ever have a 5-position switch, like the Strats do (bridge pickup, bridge and center, center pickup, center and neck, neck pickup). I recently acquired an Epiphone ES-339 Pro, which has two humbuckers with coil-taps (you pull out each pickup’s dedicated volume knob to turn the pickup from a humbucker into a single-coil) and a 3-position switch that lets you select either or both pickups.
That’s frankly more versatility that I’m ever gonna need. But man, it sounds great.
They might, hard to know. Sometimes Gibson is super-conservative with their lines and don’t change anything (even outside the Historic line, which of course is meant to replicate the originals from the 50’s and 60’s) forever, then they will.
I have a Tele that a friend made for me with a p90 in the neck and a Duncan humbucker - tele sized - in the bridge that I can split/tap into a single coil as well.
The two Gibsons that I bought second hand are very stock/standard. 56 Historic goldtop and a regular flame top standard with PAF style pickups just wired front and back, nothing special.
The goldtop is a monster, just really really “loud” and angry. And the whole thing vibrates tip to tail like something else from just one pluck.
The flame top has a more subtle, airy tone. It’s really cool how different two pieces of wood can sound.
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