[PH] TIM CAMUT-SHUCK: Hey. How are you doing? We're back, and again I'm [PH] Tim Camut-Shuck from Gibson Musical Instruments, and right now I'm going to take you on a little tour of the Gibson USA Division Plant in Nashville, Tennessee.

A lot of people don't realize about Gibson is we don't start like most companies start with just block of wood kind of like this. We actually start with big logs, real trees. We hire people to go out into the forests and to get our woods for us. They grade the trees, they pick the trees that our suppliers cut down and send to us, and then we cut them up ourselves in what's called the rough mill that is behind the plant in Nashville. This is the first step where our guitars are really born, and the marriage of mahogany and maple is begun. This is also where our wood is graded, especially the maple, and maple is graded on a level of A, AA, AAA, or AAAA for flame or quilt, which is called figure. Some people argue that that is an anomaly in the nature of wood and say it's a diseased part of the wood, but whatever it is we know it sure looks pretty and we like to use it.

Where the wood goes after we've cut it out from logs is it goes into the vacuum kiln if it needs it. It's very important to keep the optimum moisture content of both the mahogany and the maple at a certain level throughout the production process because once we marry those two woods together, you want them to stay together, and they are different woods that they will react to moisture and temperature in different ways so keeping their optimum moisture content continuous throughout the process of building the instrument helps the longevity of the instrument.

For book-matched maple tops, they way you book-match a maple top is you take that billet or that chunk of maple, and you can't book-match any wood. Really, it just keep the grain symmetrical. You take that piece of wood, you cut it down the middle, you open it up like a book, and therefore you're going to have a mirror image of the grain on either side of the instrument. That's what adds to that kind of tiger-striping effect on a lot of Les Pauls.

Now, you will notice during -- as you go through this -- during this presentation that there are a lot of old-looking machinery, and the good reason for that is that a lot of these machines are very old. A lot of these machines are the same machines that Gibson has used since the late '40s or early '50s to build these instruments. We pride ourselves on using a lot of the kind of old-world techniques as opposed to a lot of the new kind of mass-merchandise techniques. There are over 490 somewhat steps to making a Les Paul throughout production and approximately 450 or so of them are done by hand, so that's very unusual in today's musical instrument market. So, we do utilize a lot of the same machines that we've used all along to make the classic instruments. They were moved from Kalamazoo, Michigan where Orville Gibson began the company down to its current home in Nashville, Tennessee. We also have a machine shop on the floor of our factory because the majority of the manufacturers who made these machines no longer exist. So, we had to take things apart, figure out how they work, and be able to replace parts on them or machine parts for them should they break down. So, what you're looking at here is called the glue wheel, and this glue wheel is used to marry the two sides of that book-matched maple top. Now, even if you're getting an opaque finish guitar (white Les Paul, black Les Paul, something like that) that you can't see through, the top is still book matched. It just is not a higher grade, either a AA, AAA, or AAAA. You're probably looking at a single-lay top underneath that because the grain is just not there.

Here's a wood press. This is another old machine, and this is where the marriage of the maple top and the mahogany back begins. We found that this is the classic sound. This is where the Les Paul sound begins, part of the recipe for building a Les Paul, and the mahogany adds a nice solid warmth, great bass and mid range. The maple, being a more dense wood, just that maple cap gives iy enough shine on the top end and on that top mid to really give it that classic Les Paul tone.

This body line carver is also a very old machine. You'll notice the third machine back is the template, and that template uses a wheel to roll over the template which guides the saws, which carve the actual maple tops. The full inch and three quarters or so of a maple cap gets sawed down to its curvature on each Les Paul.

And here's a band saw, just an old-fashioned band saw that we used to shape the necks. One of the innovations on Gibson guitars is the headstock angle, and we use the headstock angle to eliminate the need for a string tree, which we feel interferes with the tone. Any time you're putting a piece of metal against the string that's supposed to be vibrating, you're kind of inhibiting its vibration and therefore inhibiting the tone of the instrument. So, our headstock angle enables us to not need a string tree, and just have the right amount of pressure applied by the strings to the nut as it goes down to the bridge for the entire instrument to resonate, All those necks and that neck angle is all done by hand on a band saw like this.

And after it's been cut on that band saw, this is what the neck blank looks like. There's that neck angle I'm talking about. That's what allows us to not need a truss rod. It's that neck is angled is such that it will pull the strings right over the nut with the correct amount of pressure to keep this neck as a part of the tone creating for that guitar, which you'll also notice on this piece. You see these two holes here? That's one of the ways that the fingerboard is attached to small little wooden dowels to make sure that it doesn't move. A strip of maple covers our truss rod here, and that is a rough Gibson neck blank.

Gibson is also responsible for a lot of innovations in the guitar industry, and it's fairly safe to say that the guitar industry as we know it today would not exist had Gibson not innovated a lot of the things that they had over time. One of the things was the truss rod. We didn't patent that one but the truss rod is a metal rod that sits inside the neck underneath the fingerboard that allows you to straighten out any kind of curvatures that would occur due to pressure or temperature and outside influences. But the truss rod was definitely one of the first things that Gibson had innovated in the industry.

So, when the truss rod is inserted into that neck blank, now we move on to looking at some fingerboard issues. Fingerboard wood, for the most part we use rosewood with the occasional foray into ebony for Les Paul Customs and things like that, but it's mostly Indian Rosewood. That Indian Rosewood is made into fingerboard blanks, which are then -- of course, this is where we do utilize some computers. We use a computer to carve where the frets will go, the fret seatings, as well as where the inlays will go, depending on what those inlays are, but each of those inlays is put in by hand. There are people who will sit there all day, put glue on the back of little dot inlays for Les Paul Studios, and put them in by hand. Once the inlays are installed, the fretboard blank goes over to what we call the fretboard line and goes under the surface grinder. The surface grinder basically makes sure that the top of the fretboard and the inlays are smooth so that there's no jagged edges, you don't get caught on anything, and the strings can lay over it smoothly.

Again, not only are the inlays put in by hand, but on each Gibson each fret is put in by hand. This is something that is definitely an anomaly in guitar production these days except for very small manufacturers or boutique manufacturers. Most manufacturers, especially overseas, use a big machine which will put frets into a guitar neck and usually several necks at a time. Each of these is individually fretted. Each fret is individually seated by a person. All of the inlay or all of the binding is also put on by hand. It's then glued and the ends of the binding are then sanded by hand.

As you can see on this fingerboard blank, there's a channel on the side of this fingerboard as well. That's how the binding, one of the binding is actually set in and glued on. This binding is glued on by hand to the ends and the sides, and as you can see it does overlap the frets right here. It's just as high if not higher than the frets. That's when someone has to come in and get rid of all that binding while still leaving the fret end covered.

Other thing people don't realize, and it sounds silly but this is really one of the main reasons that a Gibson guitar plays the way that it does is that binding is about as high as the frets are on the entire -- throughout the entire neck during this process until we get here where a person literally will take a file and file down the binding between the frets but still leaving the fret end covered. That allows the neck to really be smooth and to feel good in your hand because you don't have any fret-end issues at all, and the silly part really is that those little black dots are also all put in by hand.

QC is a very important thing in the Nashville USA factory, and the unusual part about it is that the QC people that you will see throughout this presentation do not work for their specific departments. The Quality Control or QC department is its own department, and we rotate the QC people. Next week, this woman may be checking pickups, she may be checking finishes, she may be checking buffing, but we rotate them all so that their eyes don't get too used to what they're seeing and that they're always sharp in looking for something new.

The headstock veneer is a wood fiber material that we use that either has a silkscreen logo on it or an inlaid mother of pearl logo on it depending on the model. Here's another old machine, the veneer press. We see the back of the neck sticking out beyond that machine. The sole purpose of this machine is to apply pressure to apply that headstock veneer to the headstock on the guitar.

Now here's another one of those really magic parts of the formula here for a Les Paul and again where we really differentiate ourselves from our competition. Because each neck on every Gibson is hand rolled, that means taken against the belt sander by person and shaped, so there's no CNC or computer generated shaping of the neck. The initial shaping of the neck, I should say, is done by a computer but the actual final shaping and the way that that neck feels and the responsibility of the way that neck feels relies on a person. If this guy has had a bad day, we may get a lot of skinny necks. If he's having a good day, it may be '50s neck day, but they all do fall within parameters because we have to make this lady happy, and her job is to make sure that those necks do fall within our parameters. If they don't, we jump them. Again, her issue is not how many necks get made that day. Her issue is to make sure that every neck that gets made that day is done correctly.

This is what that carved body looks like when it comes off of that cutter that we saw before, that body cutter, and people have asked me before, "Oh, is that how you make flame on a guitar?" and no. That's not. You can't make flame on a guitar. Flame or figure exists in the wood itself. This is just what the raw saw cut Les Paul top looks like before it's sanded down.

Now, a body line rabbet cut: this is unusual as well for the most part because in overseas manufacturing I know this is all done by machine. Some manufacturers don't use it at all as they use just kind of wood edge binding, but this rabbet cut is the channel or the groove along the side of the body that holds the binding. It's where the binding sits and is glued to. A Les Paul Custom obviously, you would have to turn that over when it's done and make a rabbet cut on the back to hold the binding as well.

Here is another really old world technique that we use that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of patience, but we feel it's important. Binding in and of itself is mostly an aesthetic, an accruement to a guitar. It does protect the edges. It does do a few things, but for the most part it's really aesthetic and we take a lot of time on that aesthetic for these guitars. The beginning of that process starts out with a piece of plastic binding which is run through a glue wheel and then applied by hand to the guitar body, and then held on by one of these big cotton shoelaces, and then held on by one of these big cotton shoelaces. Then a lot of pressure has to be applied to these guitars to hold that binding on and that is just the angle of the picture. That Les Paul is really not 9 inches thick.

Okay, once the binding is being applied, of course there's a few angles where the binding needs to match up, and these are all done by hand as well. Here, you'll see one of the binders, making the 45-degree angle on a Les Paul. It's very important because if that binding doesn't match up there, it's not going to look great and it's not going to feel right. It's going to be off. So again, all by hand.

And then we wait. One of the first places during the production process in the USA plant where the guitars just really sit, there's not much we can do so that glue has to dry overnight. Now, for a Les Paul Custom or some guitar like that that has binding in the front and the back, this process has to be done again the next day after the top binding has dried and redone for the back and then the guitar has to wait another day.

Now, remember that rough-cut body? See that in the corner. I want to explain to you that that's not how we make flame. How does that get as smooth as it is when you see it in the store or in the stand in your house? Well, that gets done by hand as well. This is called slack belt sanding, and again this is another one of those really unique parts on a Les Paul that we feel contributes to the magic or mojo of what each Les Paul is making them kind of each unique, that hand rolling of the necks, and this process here makes each top just a little bit different. Again, if this guy is having a bad day, the top might not be as thick when he gets done. When he's having a good day or he just doesn't have a lot of strength, we might have a real thick top on that guitar.

Rim sanding is just the process of sanding off the excess glue after the binding has been done to make sure that we have a smooth surface, and we make this guy happy to make sure that each of those bodies looks and feels the way that it's supposed to.

Now here is another really crucial section of the guitar process in the building of these guitars. Bolt-ion necks are fairly simple to do. You you’re your neck pocket, the neck fits in it. You put three or four screws in it and it's done. Most necks setting overseas in production is done by machine. Every single Gibson guitar neck is set by hand, and these things come out a little rough and people like this gentleman here will chip away at them with a chisel by hand to make sure that that neck pocket fits as tight as it possibly can. This is a real tonal transfer center for us and the reason why we use this wood-to-wood joint is that we really think that it's important to the resonance of the instrument from the top of the neck to the bottom of the body. Where those two join has to be a strong, correct joint to make sure that the tone transfers.

He also needs to make sure that the neck pitch is correct using his little dial gauge there because if the neck pitch is off, he won't be able to string or intonate the instrument, and it will be basically unplayable.

Once he's got the neck pitch correct, he's got that pocket fit, then he puts the glue on it which we use a hide glue, a horse hide glue again because it's more natural. It helps to transfer tone. It doesn't inhibit tone as a wood glue possibly would. And another issue in using hide glue, you know, we hope this never has to happen but years down the road, if something happens to the neck joint due to weather or any other outside influences, a qualified luthier can heat that joint up and off to pop the neck off and reset it so the instrument does not die if the neck joint has a problem.

Next, we clamp that neck joint in there and we let it dry. This time, it's for about 30 minutes though, not overnight.

Routing, we do use computers. We decided at one point during production that having someone use a pin router or hand router to route out things that were continuously the same on all guitars where the pickups go, where the bridge is positioned, the tailpiece is positioned, where the volume and tone knobs go. That kind of stuff is always the same on the guitars, so it's much easier to step up production to put those on what's called a CNC machine, which is computer numerically controlled, and this happen to be a CNC router which is routing out some pickup spaces for these double necks you see.

And we take that guitar over and we have those frets filed down so that all the frets are even, then we take it to color prep which basically means that the guitar is ready to take on its finish and we sand it with 280-grit sandpaper, and then we buzz sand it. And as you can tell, we have Santa Claus work for us the rest of the year, and he is patiently buzz sanding this SG.

Next, we apply pore filler. Mahogany, due to its nature, is a very porous wood, porous meaning that there are lots of very small holes in the grain of the wood itself. If we apply finish directly to that, then you would see the finish begin to pit. So, to avoid that, what we do is we use we call pore filler, which does exactly what it says. It fills the pores and the holes in the mahogany, and you see her there applying this pore filler. It's real kind of messy stuff then it gets wiped down. If that kind of -- that back finish looks familiar to you, our worn finish guitar, that would be Worn Brown or Worn Cherry, those finishes are basically applied, that color is the color of the pore filler. There are three colors of pore fillers that we use. One is the cherry, one is the mahogany, and one is the yellow that goes with the TV Yellow-type guitars. Those guitars are colored with the pore filler and then sprayed with a few less coats of our lacquer, our nitrocellulose lacquer finish to give you that worn finish so that wood really sings.

Once that guitar has gone through that color prep process, we go back to another quality control stop, and then (depending on where it's going) it goes to one or two places. If it's going to be an opaque-finish guitar, that would be something you can't see through like a Wine Red or a black or white, it would go into this electrostat booth, and the electrostat booth is a [SOUNDS LIKE] fevery from the automobile industry that we've taken. It involves charging the paint with one charge and charging the guitar with the opposite charge. In that way, they will attract to each other and the paint will adhere better than just kind of a regular spray. How do you charge a piece of wood you ask? We charge the truss rod.

Or if it is not getting an opaque finish, we send the guitar to the shade booth where it's taped off and sent to one of these people. We like to call them burst artists, and this is another one of those things that makes the Gibson guitars unique. It's that each of our burst finishes is done by hand. If she wants to see more red that day, it's gonna be a thicker one. If she wants to see less, you're going to see more yellow in the middle. A good majority of other guitar manufacturers when they do a burst, it is done by computer. It is done by machine so you can actually measure them. They're the same from the end of the guitar to where the burst begins to break up on every single guitar. We kind of pride ourselves just like the necks or the slack sanded tops, carved tops on these Les Pauls. Each one of these burst finishes is unique.

She also has to spray the back depending on the model. You'll either get a reddish tint or a brownish tint. Now you'll notice there was binding on that guitar at one point in this process, and she's just spraying color and there's no tape on that guitar and nothing else is taped off. The picture you saw prior to this had the front taped off from the back so she could do the burst but this would appear that there's something that might get on the binding

This is how it gets off: hand scraping. Now, this go on and on every Gibson guitar that has binding. We spray right over the top of the white binding or cream, depending on what color it is, and we need to get that overspray off of the binding by hand by people with very very sharp instruments. We've invested a lot of time and money into these guitars up to this point and it's very -- this is a very difficult job as it would be very easy to cut that binding too deep or mess up in one way or another, and if that happens this guitar gets junked because Gibson refuses to put out second-level guitars. We won't put out B-stock, so if a guitar like this gets to this point and somehow gets messed up, it gets cut up for educational purposes.

More scraping of the binding again, all that binding on the neck, the body, and the headstock. If it's there, it needs to be done. Think about the hollow bodies. How would you like to scrape those f-holes up?

Now, each scraper makes their own tools, believe it or not, and you've seen several different tools and several different hand protection devices throughout these slides. That's why we allow them to make their own tools. The Montana Division scrapes with glass. The Memphis Division and the USA Division in the Custom Shop usually use metal.

And we're back to another QC to make sure that that guitar is looking the way it's supposed to.

Then we go on to scuff sanding. So, we need to create a surface on this guitar that the nitrocellulose lacquer will adhere to, and we have to make sure that there's nothing, no foreign objects on this like a piece of dust or hair or anything like that. The nitrocellulose lacquer is exactly what it sounds like. It's nitro, which is nitrogen, and cellulose which means the finish is actually mixed with a wood pulp, so the finish is actually like putting another layer of wood on the guitar itself and that finish ages and becomes a part of the instrument over time, and the nitrocellulose lacquer is kind of like your skin. You get a splinter in your skin, your skin will try and push it to the surface. If we allow a particle of dust or hair or something like that to adhere to the body and we finish over it with nitrocellulose lacquer, over time the lacquer will attempt to push that foreign object out, and that would create what we know as orange peel, which we see on some vintage instruments. To try and avoid that, we scuff sand.

And then we have old Wilbur here spray it for you. Wilbur's been with the company for a very long time and he usually does wear a mask but when we're taking his picture, he always takes it off so.

Now we go to our lacquer line QC again, just making sure that that finish is looking the way it's supposed to look. Well, this guitar has got to dry, and this is one of those things where we kind of stop at ourselves. This guitar has got to dry for a week or so, and polyurethane, which most manufacturers use on guitars, has its advantages, and one of those advantages is it dries almost immediately. You can get a guitar finished and out the door the same day. We have to wait for each of these guitars to dry for probably about a week, and really nitrocellulose lacquer never completely dries. That's why you can always fix finish flaws in a nitrocellulose finish.

Then we'll send this guitar off to fretboard prep. They will scrape off any lacquer that got onto the fretboard and check those frets over again to make sure that everything is going to play well down the line.

We'll send that guitar, once it's been sprayed, off to the buffing wheels. Now, you'll notice that there are two different-colored buffing wheels in this slide, the white one at the forefront and a red one towards the back. The red wheel, apparently if Wilbur had a Martini or two at lunch one day and sprayed a thick spot of lacquer on one of our guitars, they can use that red wheel in the back to actually heat up the lacquer to a point where they can spread it and even that finish out, kind of like peanut butter on a piece of bread. Not that Wilbur has Martinis at lunch; let's not go there. But the front wheel is more of the shine wheel for buffing, and that guy really gives the guitarist their shine and sheen.

Next, we'll send it off to fret polishing, and she will apply the oil to that neck to make sure it looks pretty and it's healthy and it's moist and polish those frets and we're almost there. You got to make sure the buffer did his job.

Final Assembly: Control panel assembly is what CPA stands for. Now, those of you who are not aware, Gibson also makes their own pickups. We use the same wire, enamel wire supplier. We use the same machines to wind our coils. We magnetize our own magnets. Obviously, the pickups are now wound by computer, by machine as opposed to by hand, and those are built in that Nashville plant as well. And to speed up our final assembly, what we do is we have people do the motherboards, which basically just means applying the volume and tone pots and knobs to a piece that slips into the control panels of these guitars. Then they're all wired up together, wired to the pickups, wired to the switches and to the jack.

Now this guitar has been through a lot and we use the peghead a lot, the headstock, to hold the guitar during the process. So, we remount that peghead to make sure that the excess lacquer and paint is removed so that the tuning machines can now flush and stay even.

Then it's starting to look like the guitar. It's actually got strings on it now, so we adjust the setup here and we set up the electronics and make sure that the nut is placed correctly, the bridge, the tailpiece, depending on the model.

Then we apply our plastics, which would be your truss rod cover, your pickguard, the rear covers for the control panels, and you'll notice that they'll be signing this piece of paper here. During every step of final assembly, there is a card that travels with this guitar, with each guitar, and those cards are signed by every person, anyone who does anything. The guy who put the control panel assembly in, the guy who did the wiring, the guy who did the setup, the guy or girl who did the plastics, everyone has to sign that. That way, if we ever have a problem, we know how to go back and isolate it./p>

Our final inspection, we have Benny here who is going to make sure that this guitar really plays and the pickups work and the switch does what it's supposed to do, and all those hands that have been on this guitar had done their job. The aesthetic is perfect, then we package it up, and we send it out to you.

The factory tour I just took you through results in this guy. Here's the final product. This is why we do what you just saw. Here's your book-matched maple top, your binding, your mahogany back, your neck angle, your tuners, your hand-shaped neck, your fret edge covered binding. That's a Les Paul Standard. Thanks.