Homemade Les Paul: Spencer Gibb Was Building Guitars While You Were Wasting Quarters On Street Fighter II
I'll be honest: when I was fifteen, I didn't even know what a truss rod was. Spencer Gibb, however, set out to build a Les Paul -- with his cousin -- that featured a 24-fret shred-tastic neck with a truss rod, Pearly Gates pickups with coil tapping and a body they carved themselves. And guess what: the guitar is still in use as his back-up, albeit with a replacement Warmoth neck.
Umm. . . one time I built a Terminator 2-themed pinball machine in shop class. It almost worked, too.
SPENCER GIBB: The wood we cut ourselves. My cousin and I made it together when we were 15 and so we made this really long like 24-fret neck that was really thin and it was like, you know, a total '80s thing where it's like [IMITATES SHRED GUITAR PLAYING].
PATRICK OGLE: Did it have a truss rod or was it a solid one?
SPENCER GIBB: Yeah. It has a truss rod.
PATRICK OGLE: So, that's the tricky part of building any kind of guitar. It's that.
SPENCER GIBB: Yeah. Yeah.
PATRICK OGLE: So, you did that when you were 15?
SPENCER GIBB: We did it when I was 15, and we just sort of really like [EXPLETIVE] our way through doing that, and it sounded great. We came up with this idea that if we put the strings through the body like a Tele but then set them at an angle, you can get more sustain which really worked. Weird but it did. But now it has -- I put a Warmoth neck on it. It has a Warmoth like fat contour boat neck that is kind of like a '50s Les Paul Jr. kind of neck.
PATRICK OGLE: Did you change the neck because something went wrong with the neck or just that it was not holding up the time?
SPENCER GIBB: No. It just felt like [EXPLETIVE]. [LAUGHING] It did like I took it out. I wanted to stop playing it and we just had these great pickups and we put these Seymour Duncans. We have the JBs and the Billy Gibbons Pearly Gates, and then we put a split-coil switch in so that you could activate a single coil alone, which I actually use a lot. I just loved the way it sounded like I'd use it on sessions, but I never played it live because it just felt so crappy. But in sessions it sounded so good like I could make it through say a solo or, you know, or a specific chorus that needed that tone. And then we just -- I was like, "You know what man? I want this thing to feel good again." So, I put a new neck on it and I fell in love with it all over and so it's been my second guitar now for, you know, about a year.
Right now, I'm using the second guitar for a song that's in an alternate tuning. And then, if something goes wrong with the Tele, I'll break that out and I will actually use it as my, you know, I'd just retune it and --
[SPENCER GIBB IMITATING SHRED GUITAR PLAYING
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