Doug and Pat take time out of their busy lives to compare four Gibson ES 335’s ranging from 1959 to 2006. Per usual, a chock full of tone, wit and charm video journey into Gibson’s highly successful ground breaking semi-hollow guitar. We crank the Vox AC 10 to 3 and take no prisoners.
Great shows! Really interesting and informative, and fun. Great to hear the early 335s together with the new ones. Best on the net.
Thanks for doing them.
Sid
lOVE THE dOUG AND pAT SHOW, SINCE 2013. I just want to point out that the 1965 has those ‘devil ears’ horns on that body. It also sucked bad, despite the PAF’s. I wonder what you guys think of the Burstbuckers 1, 2, 3, since most players won’t be able to get the highly sought after PAFs. The ’95 and the 2006 sounded glorious. as good as the ’59.
I know Doug doesn’t like the Classic ’57’s, likely because they have balanced coils. However, I would like to know which BB sounds like the original PAF pickups. Both have unbalanced coils, but BB’s come in three categories. I have a ES-347, a Gibson semihollowbody, with a lot of BBKING hardware, blingy binding, and was discontinued in 1991. I did switch out the Dirty Fingers neck pickup to a Classic ’57. I need to know the BB that sounds closest to a PAF.
I guess you could say that we are “jaded” a bit because we are old and have been playing old instruments for over 40 years since they were not as valuable. But we’re also lucky to have so many great pickup makers send us their wares for us to check out. Because we know that the combination of player/guitar/pickups/amps and playing style/ability are all equally important we can’t recommend anything as “the answer” other than offering the demos we do. For our personal taste though, we prefer the later BB or Custom Buckers to the first ones. Do we think they nail the ’59 PAF tone? We don’t, but that doesn’t mean they don’t sound good. As for Classic ’57’s, Doug didn’t like them in his ’96 Custom Shop 335 but did in a stock 2000 Les Paul R7, go figure. Some of the pickups that sounded great in a Les Paul didn’t sound as good as they did in a 335 and the other way around which might be because they are so different in construction. So where are we? Back to putting pickups in guitars and trying them out.
Doug and Pat