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What is it?
Search by body shape and you will find 271 Les Pauls currently in stock on the Gibson website. There are Murphy Lab replicas of unicorn vintage models and artist signature guitars. There are stripped down entry-level models such as the Les Paul Modern Lite and the ever-reliable and recently refreshed Studio.
Then you have the familiar favourites, the Les Paul Custom – the archetypical tuxedo-wearing electric guitar – and the Junior, wearing dungarees, and the Les Paul Standard, the house special. The choice is perplexing.
But among the Les Paul Standards you will find a new model that might just tick all of the boxes. It has a certain vintage allure to it, offers a choice of in ‘50s and ‘60s neck profiles and specs, has some collectible bona fides, and yet it arrives at a mainstream Gibson USA price point, i.e. definitely expensive, aspirational, but not altogether silly money.
It’s called the Double Trouble Les Paul Standard, so named for the “double white” pickup bobbins that hark back to the golden era of the ‘Burst, 1959 to 1960.
Gibson is offering it in Vintage Tobacco Burst and Vintage Cherry Sunburst. We have the latter here, applied to a Double Trouble ‘50s Les Paul Standard, and this faded nitro finish takes some of the brightness off what might otherwise have been a tomato soup burst in all but name.
The ‘50s designation means we get a rounded full-fat mahogany neck, Burstbucker 1 and 2 humbuckers at the neck and bridge respectively, Vintage Deluxe tuners with Keystone buttons, and Gold ‘top hat’ controls, with volume and tone for each pickup and a three-way selector switch with an amber tip.
You’ll find a SlimTaper neck on its ‘60s sibling, plus ‘kidney bean’ tuners, a pair of Burstbucker 61R and Burstbucker 61T pickups, and silver inserts on those controls.
The ’50s Double Trouble I’m testing has a AA figured maple cap with an asymmetrical look, the two halves doing their own thing, one noticeably more figured than the other – agreeably so in our book. With the covers off the pickups it might strike you as a “vintage casual” Les Paul. In an age when everyone and everything seems to be trying too hard, this has a lot of appeal.
Gibson is only making 500 of the ‘50s Double Trouble, 500 of the ‘60s. In the years to come, your outlay, serious enough at £2,499/$2,799, might well look like a sound investment when scarcity ultimately bites.
For anyone whose nose has been pressed against the glass of the vintage guitar market, or for whom each Murphy Lab release uncovers the hollow pain of FOMO for budgetary reasons, the Les Paul Standard Double Trouble could be an entry point into this world. Even so, it still has to be a hell of a guitar. But then, it is a Les Paul Standard; it should be a hell of a guitar, right?
Specs
- Launch price: $2,799/£2,499/€2,899
- Made: USA
- Type: Six-string electric guitar
- Body: Mahogany with AA figured maple cap
- Neck: Mahogany / Vintage ’50s profile
- Fingerboard: Rosewood, 12″ radius with acrylic trapezoid inlays
- Scale length: 24.75 Inches/628.65 mm
- Nut/width: Graph Tech / 43.053 mm
- Frets: 22, medium jumbo, nickel-silver
- Hardware: Vintage Deluxe tuners with “Keystone” buttons, bridge, ABR-1 Tune-O-Matic bridge with aluminium stop-bar tailpiece
- String spacing at bridge: 50 mm
- Electrics: Burstbucker 1 (neck), Burstbucker 2 (bridge) both with Double Classic White Bobbins
- Weight: 8.48lb/3.85kg
- Options: ’60s Les Paul Standard Double Trouble with SlimTaper neck and Burstbucker 61R and Burstbucker 61T pickups (same price)
- Left-handed options: No.
- Finishes: Vintage Cherry Sunburst (as reviewed), Vintage Tobacco Sunburst nitrocellulose gloss finish
- Cases: Hard-shell guitar case
- Contact: Gibson
Build quality
Build quality rating: ★★★★½
There will be some players who, when handing over this amount of money, are going to be wanting to see more curl on the maple than what we have here. Or that the top is book-matched, consistency across the board.
This is a seriously handsome instrument. You’ll want to leave the case open just to check in on it
But there’s something magical and unique about the tops on a Les Paul, where you can get such variance, with some looking positively three-dimensional, others plain.
As figured maple goes, our review model’s top is on the plainer side. We have seen more decorative Double Trouble tops in the wild but we have no complaints here. This is a seriously handsome instrument. You’ll want to leave the case open just to check in on it.
The rosewood fingerboard – 12” as per house style – is rich and dark. Note: the nitro is aged but comes fresh out of the tin. There’s no cracking or checking on the finish. You’ll have to wear this in yourself.
What is a non-negotiable and something we can all agree on is that the Les Paul Standard should be impeccably put together. There should not be a hair out of place.
You won’t have to apply any after-sales TLC. At least we didn’t. The factory setup was bang on, the fit and finish impeccable. As it should be. It was tuned up once and we didn’t have to touch the tuners again. Those tuners have a smooth action.
Both electric guitar pickups are hooked up to audio-taper pots and Orange Drop capacitors. The hand-wiring is tidy. All of this augurs well.
Playability
Playability rating: ★★★★½
As with the aesthetic merits of the hyper-figured maple top vs the plain top, preferences over the rounded profile of the ‘50s Les Paul Standard neck vs the SlimTaper of its ‘60s successor will come down to a matter of taste.
Personally, I find the SlimTaper profile a lot of fun – especially on an SG – but the Les Paul Standard kind of feels like a love letter to tone wood, and the fatter ‘50s shape feels somehow more appropriate, or at least more satisfying. Go big or go home.
The neck will fill the palm but not crowd it out. It’s super comfortable for chords, and it is a fallacy to say that fully proportioned necks are somehow a barrier to performance.
The experience of playing this Double Trouble feels very much like the classic Les Paul experience. You compromise some of the access to frets 19 through 22, where that glued-in heel makes its presence felt, but you can get right up there if you want to, and elsewhere it’s an easy, refined feel.
Just think of the players who have picked up the Les Paul Standard over the years, players of all different styles. Like all the great guitar designs, it invites you to impress your own style upon it.
Like all great guitars, the difficulty is in putting it down. If it has been a minute since you last acquainted yourself with a dialled in Les Paul, this will remind you what it’s all about. If it’s your first time, it’s like Rick said to Louie, it might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Sounds
Sounds rating: ★★★★★
Curse you, Rob Reiner. It has become impossible to discuss the tonal characteristics of the Gibson Les Paul without sounding like Christopher Guest. So let’s get it out of the way. You’ll find the sustain you are looking for.
Open chords ring out. Never mind amplified, those preliminary chords before you plug it in are reassuringly loud. There’s almost a brassy assertiveness to it.
It has become impossible to discuss the tonal characteristics of the Gibson Les Paul without sounding like Christopher Guest. So let’s get it out of the way. You’ll find the sustain you are looking for
The Burstbucker 1 at the neck, Burstbucker 2 at the bridge, are both designed around an Alnico II magnet, and inspired by the “Patent Applied For” humbuckers that came hot out of Kalamazoo in the ‘50s. The idea is that not that much has changed. In a sense, it hasn’t. Disney originally released the first Sleeping Beauty in 1959 and is at it again, and Gibson is still – sensibly – finding ways to resurrect PAF tone for today’s player. That will never go out of style.
The Double Trouble’s Burstbucker pairing both have unbalanced coil windings and have vintage braided two-conductor wiring. As per the Double Trouble’s USP, these are left uncovered. Given that most of us will never take the covers off an original set of PAFs only to discover those holy grail double white (or cream to be exact) bobbins, this is as close as we’ll get.
Tonally, what this all adds up to is a quintessential Les Paul tone. But what does that even mean? There are many quintessential Les Paul tones. There’s the bridge humbucker, deceptively bright. There’s a puckish treble to it, almost a quack when the guitar pick hits the string close to the bridge, but plenty of body, too. This will assert itself in a mix.
When you play the archetypical guitars, the archetypical tones from pop-culture inevitably reveal themselves – Eric Clapton’s “woman tone”, Slash’s Appetite-era Sleaze, Jimmy Page’s proto-metal Immigrant Song bark…
The Gibson site rates the bridge position’s Burstbucker 2 as medium output with a DCR reading of 8.4K, and you can buy them for 150 bucks a pop, unpotted (Gibson USA production models have wax-potted pickups), direct from Gibson with nickel covers. The magic really happens when you start adding some gain.
Through a Blackstar tube amp combo , with a little compression and a Fulltone OCD Germanium adding some gain, that bridge humbucker really opens up, all spiky, hot grit. Volume makes everything happen. There’s a pot of feedback gold at the end of the rainbow when you turn everything up and dime the overdrive pedal.
When you play the archetypical guitars, the archetypical tones from pop-culture inevitably reveal themselves – Eric Clapton’s “woman tone”, Slash’s Appetite-era Sleaze, Jimmy Page’s proto-metal Immigrant Song bark… Page took the metal covering off his bridge pickup, supposedly to accommodate his violin bow. Regrettably, we didn’t have a bow to hand but it’s work keeping in mind that the violin bow is an option with the Double Trouble.
The neck pickup is nirvana for blues guitar. With all the guitar’s dials set at 10 it’s super-precise, offering high-cholesterol creaminess when your guitar amp is overdriven. The challenge is to resist playing the classics. The invitation is to experiment.
The players with a set-and-forget approach to their guitar’s controls will be missing a trick if they don’t spend some time twisting knobs, searching for sweet spots
Alternating between bridge and neck pickup you can play good cop, bad cop, modulating between sweet honeyed tones and bee sting treble.
The players with a set-and-forget approach to their guitar’s controls will be missing a trick if they don’t spend some time twisting knobs, searching for sweet spots. As Joe Bonamassa once described it, the Les Paul’s control set is akin to having a full onboard EQing stage before you even touch your amp.
That middle position is underrated, too, both for rhythm work – it’s great clean, and just a bit of chorus and reverb away from a fat funk sound – and for leads.
Will players notice a huge difference in sound between this and the mainline Les Paul Standard? It’s debatable. Maybe. What they will notice is a Les Paul Standard doing exactly what you want it to do, sounding exactly as it should.
Verdict
The Double Trouble is aptly named. It is trouble on two counts. One, because I want to buy it. Two, because I can’t afford it.
And it is exactly the type of guitar to encourage financial brinkmanship. Especially when, as mentioned earlier, Gibson is only making 500 of each version, and so you could feasibly rationalise this in your G.A.S.-addled brain as being a sound investment. “Y’know, man, in years to come, this is the kind of thing that collectors tend to value.” Or words to that effect.
That’s if you could part with it, and that is a big if. The “Double White” mojo either works for you or it doesn’t. Personally, it’s not so much the vintage kudos, it’s that it makes the instrument look a little less ostentatious, cooler – though it would be nice to have had a set of spare nickel coverings in the guitar case.
That faded nitro looks sweet, like a subtle analogue filter on a digital photo – or on a piece of audio – it removes some of the harsh frequencies from the Cherry Burst, making it kinder on the eye.
MusicRadar verdict: Ultimately, set aside the Double Trouble’s aesthetic. The biggest takeaway is how this limited edition model sounds and plays, how serious it feels. An investment? This is a beautiful, well-executed Les Paul Standard, and that’s the sort of guitar that tends to stick around for life. That’s as sound an investment as there is.
|
Test |
Results |
Score |
|---|---|---|
|
Build quality |
Not a hair out of place, as it should be. Faded nitro looks good on Vintage Cherry Sunburst. |
★★★★½ |
|
Playability |
That ’50s profile neck is supremely comfortable and while some guitar’s will give you better access to the top frets it remains impossible to put down and an instrument that flatters your playing. |
★★★★½ |
|
Sounds |
On-point. It’s a tone machine. |
★★★★★ |
|
Overall |
This Double Trouble ’50s Standard is pretty everything we would want from a Les Paul: top-tier sounds and build, and those “Double Whites” look cool. |
★★★★½ |
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