Gibson Custom Handpicked Nashville 1961 ES-335 Dot Reissue Lightly Aged, Faded Cherry

Gibson Custom Handpicked Nashville 1961 ES-335 Dot Reissue Lightly Aged, Faded Cherry Overview

Gibson Custom Handpicked Nashville 1961 ES-335 Dot Reissue Lightly Aged

A rare beast- whilst the vast majority of 335s come from Gibson's Memphis factory, this one was crafted in the Nashville Custom Shop. And it has undergone their 'light ageing' process, a painstaking procedure that imparts the looks of many years of use and lacquer checking making it almost indistinguishable from a 50 year old original- but with none of the issues that old age can sometimes bring! The original “dot neck” ES-335 had already set the guitar world alight three years prior to 1961 but for many the '61 Dot remains the ultimate ES-335. The slimmer neck profile and new shorter pickguard combined with the stopbar and PAFs were the last incarnations before the block necks appeared the following year and then trapeze tailpieces later on in the decade.

The ES-335’s design and construction, revolutionary for its day, gave it a “best of both worlds” appeal that suited it to any imaginable genre of music, from jazz to rock, blues to country. The 1961 ES-335 Dot Reissue accurately retains the original construction, with the solid maple centre block for superb sustain and resistance to feedback, and arched laminated maple top, back, and sides for added hollowbody-like warmth. The glued-in quarter-sawn mahogany neck with long tenon has a one-piece rosewood fingerboard with a 12” radius and a width of 1 11/16” at the nut, along with classic 24 ¾” Gibson scale length. Other Nashville Custom Shop features include double ring Kluson™ Deluxe machine heads, hot-hide glue neck fit, a period-correct Historic Truss Rod assembly with no tubing, a more accurate body and fingerboard binding colour and period-correct Aniline dye for the neck. The result is a dot-neck ES-335 that is more true to the original of 1961 in look, feel, and tone than ever before. 

A period-correct hardware set that includes an ABR-1 Tune-o-matic bridge and lightweight aluminum stopbar tailpiece completes the ’61 specs, and adds to the 1961 ES-335 Block Reissue’s considerable sonic bite through a pair of superb E-bucker humbucking pickups. E-Buckers are essentially underwound Custom Buckers and are created in the image of the original PAFs. The 'E-Bucker' pickups closely resemble the tone of what some of the best sounding 1958-1960 "PAF" guitars sound like now. By under winding Gibson's new Custom Bucker pickup to a specified spec and comparing it to other guitars with original "PAF" pickups Gibson has brought back the clarity and sweet high end that everyone has been searching for. These pickups are not available separately.