Before 1952 Gibson - ignoring the great Les Paul - put out only hollow body guitars which, sounded great but were terrible for feedback when the amplifiers were turned up. Les Paul’s signature guitar came out this year Gibson took the fight to Fender’s “slab guitar,” the Telecaster. The problem with the solid body was not a big one, but a quirk that all the solid-bodies had. It didn’t have the warmth of the hollow boy guitars that the jazz and country players loved.

The Gibson ES-335 was a middle ground guitar with a warmer tone than a solid body with little or no feed back. In 1958, in one swoop Gibson grabbed the market for rock, blues, and country. With a double-cutaway it gave greater access to the upper frets. In essence what the engineers did is take a block of wood thinner than the hollow-bodies and sandwich it between the front and back of a hollow body guitar. Thus they called the “Thinline” or “semi-hollow.”

There have been many models of the ES-300 series featuring:

  1. Coil Tap pickup switch: to switch from single to double coil.
  2. Bigsby tailpiece (in place of the standard Gibson Vibrola trapeze tail vibrato)
  3. Stereo
  4. Various style of F-holes

Gibson ES-335 12 String Guitar, guitarI really liked the 12 string version of the ES-335 because it had a deeper, warmer sound than the other 12 string electrics (which came out fast and furious after The Beatles movie, “A Hard Days’ Night” made the 12 string Rickenbacker electric popular)

Since Roger McGuinn was a diehard Rickenbacker player David Crosby used the Gibson 12 string for live performances and brought it out again for the Byrds reunion album in 1973.

This is definitely one I would like to own!

For more information on this and other Gibson guitars visit out pal Dom at Vintage Gibson Guitars