Gibson has launched the newly updated Les Paul Studio, offering the ever-popular US-made entry-level model in a quartet of crowd-pleasing finishes and equipping it with coil-splits for extra versatility.
This, says Gibson, is “the one”, which is to say it is the electric guitar that you will go to time and time again, aka workhorse, and the accessible price (these retail for £/$1,599) places it within reach of more players than its more high-end siblings.
“We designed the Les Paul Studio to be precisely that type of guitar: the perfect musical companion, the guitar you won’t be able to put down,” says Gibson. “The one guitar you’ll be able to rely on every time and will find yourself reaching for again and again.”
But what differentiates the Studio different from the Les Paul Studio Modern that was launched in February of this year. Well, for starters, this new Studio has a gloss nitrocellulose finish, while the Studio Modern was satin.
The Studio Modern also borrowed a lot of elements from the Les Paul Modern, including the sculpted neck heel and thecompound radius ebony fingerboard, and it came with 498 humbuckers.
The Les Paul Studio is more of your traditional Les Paul vibe, only stripped down. There is no binding on the body. The cap is plain maple, not figured. And the neck is glued to the body in the traditional fashion.
Les Pauls are notoriously beefy, necessitating the purchase of a thick, padded guitar strap, but this promises to be a lighter load, with Gibson applying its Ultra Modern weight relief to the body.
With Burstbucker Pro humbuckers at the neck and bridge, we have all the classic Les Paul tones you buy a single-cut like this for, but the dual volume, dual tone control setup features push-pull coil-splitting so you have two core tones, per pickup, with some some snappier single-coil sounds should you need them, and the capability to blend them.
Elsewhere, the hardware is very much on-brand for the model, with an adjustable aluminium Nashville Tune-O-Matic bridge and stop-bar tailpiece, and a set of Vintage Deluxe tuners with ‘Keystone’ buttons.
So too are the dimensions, with the Les Paul Studio measuring up with a 24.75” scale length, a 12” radius on the Indian rosewood fingerboard, and a 43.05mm Graph Tech nut.
The frets are medium jumbo. The inlays are acrylic trapezoids. The neck is mahogany, with a SlimTaper profile.
The Les Paul Studio ships with a soft-shell guitar case and is available now in Cherry Sunburst, Blueberry Burst, Wine Red and Ebony. You will find black pickguards on the latter two models, cream ‘guards on the former.
Head over to Gibson to find out more.
