Re-Finished 1960 Les Paul "Black Beauty"
A Unique Opportunity…

1960 Gibson Les Paul Custom "Black Beauty".

This medium weight Les Paul Custom weighs 10.20 lbs. and has a solid mahogany body with a slightly arched maple top.  One-piece mahogany neck with a nice medium profile, a nut width of 1 11/16 inches and a standard Gibson scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Ebony fretboard, expertly re-fretted with 22 medium frets and inlaid pearl block position markers. The top of the guitar has seven-ply binding, the back of the guitar has five-ply binding, the headstock has five-ply binding, and the fretboard has single white binding. Headstock with inlaid pearl "Gibson" logo and five-piece pearl split-diamond inlay. Two-layer (black on white) truss-rod cover with "Les Paul Custom" engraved in white. Individual Grover Roto-Matic tuners with half-moon metal buttons. The serial number "0 9912" is inked in yellow on the back of the headstock. Three PAF (double-black) humbucking pickups with outputs of 7.64k, 8.01k, and 7.71k., each with a small rectangular label on the underside reading "Patent Applied For". Original black plastic pickup rings, each stamped on the underside "MR491 / M-69 7", "MR490 / M-69 8" and "MR490 / M-69 8" respectively. Five-layer (black  / white / black / white/  black) plastic pickguard. Four controls (two volume, two tone) on lower treble bout plus three-way selector switch on upper bass bout. The potentiometers are all stamped: "134 6140" (Centralab October 1961). Black plastic bell-shaped "Bell" knobs. ABR-1 Tune-O-Matic non-retainer bridge with metal saddles and separate stud tailpiece. All hardware gold-plated. There is some very light belt buckle scarring on the back of the guitar (nothing down to the wood) and a couple of surface chips on the edges of the guitar. A few tiny surface marks on the front of the guitar, and some tarnishing to the gold-plated hardware.

This guitar is one of a very few examples made between 1958 and 1960 that were specially ordered with a maple top as opposed to a solid mahogany body.

This guitar has had the neck profile slightly altered - now very similar to Jimmy Page's Les Paul Standard with the 'thinnest profile being at the 5th fret. The neck profile on this guitar goes down from a thick 0.89 inches at the 1st fret, a medium 0.86 inches at the 3rd, a medium-thin 0.83 inches at the 5th - and then it rises from 0.85 inches at the 7th fret, 0.91 inches at the 9th and a standard 1.00 inches at the 12th. This necessitated 'shaving' the back of the neck - and so the guitar was re-finished (to factory specification) at that time - many years ago. The neck has been re-fretted with medium gauge fretwire which makes it much easier to play than the usual 'fretless wonder'. When we purchased this guitar, the original electrics and pickups had been replaced. We sent the guitar to our luthier, Scott Lentz, who has supplied and fitted three original 'double black' PAF's, three original potentiometers stamped "134 6140" (October, 1961) and two original Sprague "Bumble-Bee" capacitors. He then re-wired the entire three-pickup control circuit to exact 1960 specification. With all that said, this is still an original '60 Custom - with no breaks or repairs to the neck or body, a very old factory? refin, completely re-wired with correct specification parts and now offered at a fraction of the price of a 'virgin' example. Housed in a later sixties Gibson five-latch black hardshell case with yellow-orange plush lining (9.00).

"In a move designed to widen the market still further for solidbody guitars, Gibson issued two new Les Paul models in 1954, the Custom and the Junior... The two-pickup Custom looked classy with its all-black finish, multiple binding, block-shaped position markers in an ebony fingerboard, and gold-plated hardware, and was indeed more expensive than the gold-top. Paul said that he chose the black colour for the Custom. 'When you're on stage with a black tuxedo and a black guitar, the people can see your hands move with a spotlight on them. They'll see your hands flying.' The Custom had an all-mahogany body, as favoured by Les Paul himself, rather than the maple/mahogany mix of the gold-top, giving the new guitar a rather mellower tone...The Les Paul Custom was promoted in Gibson catalogues as 'the fretless wonder' because of its use of very low, flat fretwire, different to the wire used on other Les Pauls at the time and favoured by some players for the way it helped them play more speedily...The September 1954 pricelist showed the Les Paul Custom at $325 and the Les Paul Junior at $99.50. The gold-top meanwhile had sneaked up to $225" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 25). The Custom was the first Les Paul model to receive the company's Tune-O-Matic bridge, used in conjunction with a separate bar-shaped tailpiece, which offered for the first on Gibsons the opportunity to individually adjust the length of each string, thus improving tuning accuracy.