THE electric guitar by which all others are measured.

Now let's get into some of the 'nuts and bolts' of this historic guitar...

While it has survived in what we'd consider Above Average condition, it wears its years proudly, with natural play and handling wear throughout. The prior owner acquired this guitar c. 1981, where it had gone through a few changes. We highlight some of these in the detailed forensic photos in the listing, but explaining them sometimes helps to add a level of context.

Most notably is the change in tuners. The guitar had been "Grover'ed" prior to the early 80s - a quite common modification done to the likes of Bursts, ES-335s, and SGs throughout their lives, predominantly starting in the late 60s and continuing through the 70s at a seemingly steady pace. Thankfully, the original Kluson single-line tuners remained with the guitar, and are still with it today. As does happen with the older Klusons, the buttons have shrunken and degraded beyond their useful life. The buttons still remain on the tuner shafts, but they've been boxed up for preservation, and a nice functional pair of Historic Makeover spec Klusons have been installed in their place. What's leftover from the old Grover conversion is the presence of some small Maple collar inserts in the bushing holes of the headstock, as well as a half-dozen screw holes from the change in mounting style.

Another common modification particularly common in the 1970s was the removal of the original nickel-plated pickup covers. This LP had its covers removed at some point in its history, but they'd been reinstalled, and very cleanly at that. Whoever reinstalled them used as much of the original solder as possible, and kept distortion of the cover to a minimum. Again, we point to some of the photos to show the quality of that work. The pickups themselves show no evidence of modification beyond having their covers removed.

The more obvious alterations are the addition of the strap button on the back of the heel and the replacement of the original input jack plate. While the strap button relocation is a bit puzzling, it's not totally unheard of. The input jack plate replacement, however, is about as common as you'll find any modification on a vintage Gibson that shared this part. The replacement clearly happened very early on, and the work is clean without modification to the body. Instead of sourcing a proper vintage (or vintage-correct) replacement, we decidedly to leave that bit of history intact. To be honest, it's a lot sturdier than the plastic!

There's some evidence of what might be a small amount of overspray on the back of the body in the buckle rash area, but it also presents as old work to the point where it blends in quite cleanly with the original finish on the guitar.

The M69 pickup surrounds, pickguard, knobs, ABR-1, stopbar tailpiece, and studs are original to the guitar. The wiring harness is as well, with a full set of original Centralab 500k potentiometers showing the 44th week of 1958 for their manufacturing dates. Original bumble bee tone capacitors also remain.

Another cool feature about this Burst is the fretwire. This guitar was completed early enough in the year to be outfitted with the smaller fretwire found on LPs from 1952-1958. While they show some wear over the years, there's still enough wire to work with. We felt it was important to leave these intact and let the next owner decide what works best for them. There's no doubt that the guitar plays well (queue up that Duke Levine video again!).

Celebrating our first Burst in the store's 56-year history is quite a feat, and that's not lost on us. It's been an incredible honor to steward such an iconic piece of guitar history back out into the world. Now that we've had a taste, we look forward to a future where the opportunities to continue those celebratory experiences only increases.