Bursting With Pride
As the new Gibson Slash Collection is unveiled at this year’s NAMM show, we grab a moment away from the crowds with the man himself to chat about his latest collaboration with Gibson…
On a sunny California afternoon, Slash is holed up in a hotel room near the Anaheim Convention Center, where the NAMM show is underway, and where his guitars are causing a stir. Unlike other one-off collaborations with the guitarist who, with Guns N’ Roses, went a long way toward single-handedly putting the Les Paul back on the map in the late 80s, Gibson’s Slash Collection encompasses a full line of instruments. At launch, the range offers four new electrics – the Slash Les Paul Standard in November Burst and Appetite Burst, as well as limited-edition Anaconda Burst and Vermillion Burst – alongside two Slash J-45 Standard signature models (in November Burst and Vermillion Burst).
For Slash, one of the key selling points of collaborating with Gibson on a project of this scope was that the Slash Collection guitars would be part of the Gibson USA production line, and therefore more readily available and affordably priced than limited-edition Custom Shop models.
“It was really a revelation,” Slash says. “For the last year-and-a-half or so I’ve been using a couple of Custom Shop Les Pauls that I sort of designed, but that I basically did just for myself. And they’re great guitars. So when Cesar [Gueikian, Chief Merchant Officer at Gibson] said he wanted to do a core Slash line, which was basically those guitars plus other things that I wanted to do, like bringing the Appetite guitar [the limited-edition Gibson Custom Slash Appetite For Destruction Les Paul] back as a USA guitar, I said, ‘Fuck yeah, that’d be great.’ ”
The new Slash Collection Les Paul Standards use classic ’59 Les Paul design and specs as their foundation, with AAA maple tops, solid mahogany bodies, mahogany necks and rosewood fingerboards with trapezoid inlays. From there, Slash and Gibson added a few personal artist touches: a C-shape neck profile, new ‘SlashBucker’ pickups, colourcoordinated hardware appointments and hand-wired electronics with orange drop capacitors (both the electrics and acoustics also feature personalised accents like a Slash ‘Scully’ signature drawing on the back of the headstock and his signature on the truss-rod cover). Some of the Slashspecific specs, the guitarist says, “are Custom Shop specs that I have on all my
“I went through five or six different prototypes during the last tour before we got to what you see”
guitars. So that’s what I think is so cool – in a way this is a USA guitar with pretty much every Custom Shop spec on it.”
One component that Slash has not had on his previous Les Pauls — and that’s because they didn’t exist until now — are the new ‘SlashBucker’ pickups. Of the new design, Slash explains, “It’s sort of a medium-output pickup. We wanted to focus on doing something similar to the Alnico II [humbuckers] that I’ve done in the past with Seymour Duncan, and since Gibson makes great pickups it seemed like the right thing for us to do it together.”
The pickups in all four Les Paul models are uncovered (“I just like the way they look,” Slash explains), but the Appetite Burst adds another nice visual touch — a ‘zebra’ colour scheme reminiscent of the coils on his famous 80s-era guitar.
As for the finishes, Slash has been using custom Vermillion Burst Les Pauls onstage with the Conspirators over the past few years, and took such a liking to the colour that he wanted to incorporate it into the Collection. “It took a long time to develop that Vermillion colour,” Slash says. “It was something that Gibson did that I then said, ‘Okay, let’s take this, and then do this and this and that to it.’ I went through five or six different prototypes during the last Conspirators tour before we got to what you see.”
As for the others, the Anaconda Burst finish was briefly available on a Slash Custom Shop model, while the Appetite
Burst is a take on the classic ‘lemon drop’ ’Burst hue. The November Burst is a lighter take on a traditional Tobacco Burst finish, and references the ’59 Les Paul that once belonged to Aerosmith’s Joe Perry (and which, thanks to Slash, does once again) and that the guitarist famously wields in Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain video.
In general, Slash says, the process of working with Gibson to craft the Collection was easy from beginning to end. “Since Cesar and everybody came on-board at Gibson it’s a completely different vision,” he says. “There’s more of a conscientious attitude about the history and the heritage of Gibson, and also what it is that Gibson represents and where it should go in the future.”
Beyond his own use, however, one of his favourite things about the new Slash Collection guitars is they’re not just for him. Rather, these are premium instruments that are also aimed at the typical working player. “There used to be a time when the only way you could get a really good signature Les Paul was through the Custom Shop,” Slash says. “Which meant sending people to a place where 90 percent of them couldn’t really afford to buy the thing. So, it’s really exciting to me to do this through [Gibson] USA.”