2021 Gibson Les Paul Special TV Yellow

Gibson Les Paul Special, 2021, SN: 121090187 

This is a recent, made in 2021, example of the iconic Les Paul Special, the mahogany body and neck guitar with a set neck and a TV Yellow nitrocellulose lacquer finish. The finish was created in the days of black and white television. If you were playing your Les Paul Special with the standard burgundy finish in the 1950’s the television cameras would translate the color into black, this was before black was cool, so another color was developed by Gibson that would look better on screen. This mustard color was bright but not too bright, so the guitar could be clearly identified by viewers and Gibson executives alike. 

The headstock has the Gibson logo inlaid in mother of pearl, a silk screened Les Paul Special signature logo, six Gibson Vintage Deluxe tuners with cream plastic buttons and the iconic bell flower shaped truss rod cover. The neck is bound, the only binding on the guitar, in a single layer of cream. It has a “50’s Vintage” profile, a “C” shape with a slightly chunkier feel than most modern guitar necks. The fingerboard is rosewood with acrylic dot markers at the third, fifth, seventh, ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, seventeenth, nineteenth and twenty first frets, for a total of  twenty two frets. The scale length is 24 ¾” and the nut width is 1 11/16.” The string spacing at the bridge is 2.” It is a nickel plated wraparound type, held in place by two adjustable bolts drilled into the body, first specified for this model back in 1955. 

The electronics consist of a P-90 in the neck position and a P-90 in the bridge position, a volume and tone knob for each, and a three way toggle to choose between neck, both or bridge. The pickguard is five ply with black as the top layer, because black is still cool in certain situations. The guitar sounds cool too, it plays well and there are only light signs of previous play on the pickguard and the pickup covers. There is a small area on the headstock where the finish has absorbed some color from the interior of the case. Overall, this guitar looks and plays beautifully with plenty of punch from the P-90’s.