Chicago Music Exchange | 3 years ago
Nathaniel fills up the Bird Pun-O-Meter while winging it with this recently sold 1966 Gibson Firebird, finished in a rare Cardinal Red.
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The Gibson Guitar Corporation released several new styles during the 1950s to compete with Fender's solid-body instruments, such as the Telecaster and Stratocaster. After success with the Les Paul in the 1950s, Gibson's popularity began to wane in the 1960s. Fender's colors, shapes and multiple pickups were endorsed by notable guitarists. Gibson's guitars, most of which were hollow or semi-hollow designs, seemed old-fashioned. Coupled with higher prices, this contributed to a decline in sales.
Gibson had made forays into radical body shapes – the Flying V and Explorer in the 1950s – which met limited initial success. The president of Gibson, Ted McCarty, hired car designer Ray Dietrich to design a guitar that would have popular appeal. Under Dietrich, the Firebird took on the lines of mid-50s car tailfins. Dietrich took the Explorer design and rounded the edges. The most unusual aspect is that the guitar is "backward" in that the right-hand (treble) horn of the body is longer than the other. Thus, the original Firebirds were unofficially referred to as "reverse".
The Firebird is the first Gibson solid-body to use neck-through construction, wherein the neck extended to the tail end of the body. The neck itself is made up of five plies of mahogany interspersed with four narrow strips of walnut for added strength. Other features were reverse headstock (with the tuners on the treble side) and "banjo"-style planetary geared tuning keys. The special original Gibson Firebird humbucking pickup(s) – single, dual or triple – were smaller footprint versions of standard Gibson humbucking pickups, but were unique in that inside each of their smaller bobbins contained an AlNiCo bar magnet (standard humbucking pickups AND mini-humbucking pickups have one bar magnet that activates the 6 iron slug poles of one bobbin, and 6 iron screw poles of the other bobbin). Original Firebird pickups were also built without any specific bobbin fasteners – their bobbins (and possible "reflector" plate under the bobbins) were held onto the frame during both the wax potting process (to reduce/eliminate feedback and unwanted noise) and the solid metal cover that was soldered to the frame base. There are no screw poles on Firebird pickups. Some Firebirds from 1965 featured Gibson's single-coil P-90 pickup.
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Check out more vintage demos here:
1959 Sunburst Gibson Les Paul Standard: https://youtu.be/UwBK4yhjwz0
1968 Mahogany Fender Telecaster Thinline: https://youtu.be/xcjIMo6TVrY
1964 Gretsch Country Gentleman: https://youtu.be/NhVBZGcaxhE
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