“It has been used on dozens of famous recordings under the stewardship of its previous three owners”: Watch Chicago Music Exchange’s guitar genius Nathaniel Murphy play a virtuoso solo Led Zeppelin cover on a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard

Chicago Music Exchange had a unicorn in its vaults in the shape of a stunning 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, used on “dozens of famous recordings” that has now been sold, for an undisclosed but guaranteed megabucks fee, but before they released it back into the wild the Illinois gear institution turned loose its resident guitar virtuoso, Nathaniel Murphy, on the guitar and shot one last video with it for posterity.

What do you play when you’re on camera and have a super-rare electric guitar with a six-figure price tag and a two-and-a-half minutes of footage to shoot to remember it by? 

Well, Murphy chose a specialist subject, rearranging Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter for solo guitar, and it’s a typically stunning piece of playing on a guitar most of us will only dream of playing.

This is the last in a series of YouTube clips that CME shot with Murphy and this guitar, with him previously using it to demo the store’s vintage guitar amp stockpile, playing it through a a ‘60s Selmer Twin Selectortone and a Park 2x12 50-watter from the ‘70s. 

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It is a clip that deserves a decent pair of heaphones. Murphy, whom many of you might know by his the name of Zeppelin Barnatra, under which he has amassed a formidable following on social media, broke out some good stuff to play this Burst on. Of course, you need a tube amp for a job like this, and Murphy chose the superlative Magnatone Twilighter Stereo. 

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It would be tempting to reach for something on a pedalboard but with an amp like this and a guitar like that you don’t need to go overboard. The Twilighter’s tube-driven reverb and onboard varistor-based pitch-shifting vibrato was enough, and Murphy is the kind of player who could make anything sound good let alone the most sought-after guitars from Gibson’s golden age.

CME was coy on the details of this guitar, declining to shed more light as to whom it belonged to, though the company’s CEO, Andrew Yonke, suggested that there is a good chance that we have heard it in action before. 

“This 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard #9 0830 has been known to us for almost 20 years,” he said. “And it has been used on dozens of famous recordings under the stewardship of its previous three owners.”

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What a tease. Maybe we’ll hear more of it now that it has changed hands. For more on Murphy, you can follow him on YouTube, where you can watch him play Oasis for Noel Gallagher and play some incredible Beatles medleys.