Gibson Blueshawk

USA Made in 1997. It has 22 frets on a 25.5 inch scale neck that has V provile. The neck is mahogany with Kluson tuners. The body has a maple top on a polar body with a nice cherry red finish. The top is pretty plain and although bookmarked, the finish doesn't really show it off. This guitar is semi hollow with 2 F holes. It comes with two passive Blues-90 P90 style pickups, a three way strat style pickup selector and a 6 position varitone switch. The body style is like the rest of the hawk series, a modified LP shape. The finish is the normal Gibson style finish. The bridge is a fixed fender style bride with the strings through the body. Came with a nice quality gig bag.

This guitar has a nice mid-ranginess similar to an other semi-hollow. I play is straight through a quality tube amp, no effects. With the stock pickups (Blues 90s) it had a very bright voice. The Varitone helps get a wide range of sounds; this control removes or emphasizes various frequencies, mostly in the midrange area. I must admit that the Blues90s didn't really give me enough punch with a band. When I examined them, they looked like a wide strat pickup, not as big as a real P90, which explained the thin sound. I solved this by buying a pair of Duncan P90s which improved the sound considerably. The sound the guitar gets is like a cross between a 335 and a Ric 360, which is very woody and responsive. It also has a good acoustic voice (not very loud tho!). Since I changed the pickups, I also removed the humbucking dummy coil, but the guitar is pretty quiet for using single coils. If you get one and don't like the sound, replace the pickups. For a hundred dollars, it improved the guitar 100%. This guitar is probably best suited to blues, classic rock or jazz. Not really bright enough for traditional country or metal. Very rootsy sounding.

I changed the strings to 10s and readjusted the neck and bridge, but the factory settings were fine. The pickups were adjusted well. The finish and frets were very well done.

I use this guitar live and it is really great. It seems built to last.

Gibson has always been helpful to me when I've called.

This is a nice guitar for what I bought it for - a more bluesy and jazzy guitar. It is really awesome for slide. I like everything about it except the stock pickups; Gibson should use real P90s, but for what they charge for it an extra $80-100 for P90s isn't too bad.