Moving On
It’s been quite a ride for Gibson since its new leadership team took the reins in 2018. We catch up with brand president, Cesar Gueikian, to get the backstory on the newly created Murphy Lab
As far as its instruments go, Gibson is enjoying a renaissance. The new leadership team hit the ground running with the initial reorganisation and focus of its mainstream USA Production line into Original and Modern Collections devoid of the annual specification changes that confused and annoyed us in equal measure. The smaller output, higher dollar Custom Shop has seen similar focus, which, as of the start of this year, now has this new vintage-aimed strand, the Murphy Lab, named after Tom Murphy who instigated its creation back in 2019.
“Tom Murphy came to me with a guitar case – which he’d aged, by the way, so it looked like a 50s Lifton case,” begins Cesar Gueikian, Gibson’s brand president. “I opened the case and picked up the guitar. We have been working with a lot of originals from different collections – including my own – with Tom and looking at lots of guitars Tom had done in the past. I had no reason not to think it was one of those originals. I picked it up and said, ‘This is amazing, it’s great.’ The binding had all been rolled from playing, the checking on the lacquer, the ageing, the bracelets, the buckle rash… amazing! So I asked him, ‘Whose ’59 is it? Is it for sale?’ He then proceeded to tell me, ‘No, I just made this guitar and I wanted you to see it.’ I told him, ‘This is the future of ageing: you’ve stepped it up now. We’ve gotta go here.’ That was when we started to create the idea for the Murphy Lab.”
Tom Murphy needs no introduction. His pioneering ageing techniques have created many old-looking new Gibson guitars over the years and he helped create what we now know as the Gibson Custom Shop back in the 90s. Today’s Murphy Lab is a “restricted area”, we’re told by Cesar, that resides within the Custom Shop.
“We do create content and showcase Tom there,” says Cesar, “but what happens in there is almost like a trade secret. In addition to being a place, a lab, it’s a Collection. We make 50 guitars as part of the Murphy Lab Collection: different models and ageing treatments from ultralight to ultra-heavy. I think we have 120 people in the Custom Shop now, and Tom, plus five more in the actual Murphy Lab.”
Clearly, the output of the new facility is pretty low in comparison to that of the whole Custom Shop.
“It’s about 10 per cent. It’s very involved. It’s obviously very labour intensive, it’s all handwork and Tom’s doing all of that with his team. That’s why the lead times are so long. So if you pick up a ’59 that we make out of the Custom Shop, that might take from when it actually goes on the schedule – and the lead time to go on the schedule is over a year – around two, let’s say three weeks from when it starts being made to when it’s actually finished, where it can take up to two months for an actual Murphy Lab model. Yes, they’re very expensive to make as they require a lot of hours of labour. It’s a very involved process to make that ageing in a very authentic way.”
In terms of the woodworking, though, are the Custom Shop model and the Murphy Lab the same?
“Yes, the way the body starts and then its neck is fitted [is the same]. Once it reaches the point when it’s ready to finish it goes into the Murphy Lab where the process starts – the finishing, the Murphy Lab lacquer, the lacquer breaks, the handageing and then the aged hardware. All of that happens in the Murphy Lab.”
You state that you’ve managed to reverseengineer the original formula of the nitrocellulose lacquer Gibson used back in the 50s and 60s. How does that differ from the nitro you use in the Custom Shop, or indeed on the USA production guitars?
“It’s a great question, but that’s obviously a trade secret! But, yes, we did reverseengineer it by taking original lacquer and decomposing it then recreating it and then running tests. We ran a lot of tests! That was one of the breakthroughs: how that lacquer was reacting to the process of checking.”
And presumably the new lacquer is more consistent than what was used before?
“In the past, yes, the technology wasn’t there to do the quality checks and consistency checks that we do today. Definitely back in the 50s the lacquer would have been slightly different depending on the batches. Today we have great consistency, and the one we use in the Murphy Lab is slightly different, but we continue to use nitro across everything. It takes about eight layers of nitro to make a Gibson guitar – a process, just that alone, that can take three days, sometimes more.
“Other guitar manufacturers use polytype lacquer that you can take and dry within 30 minutes under an infrared light.
“The nitro is a big plus in how the guitars are going to age over time, which I think will be very gracefully”
And that seals the instrument, so the instrument – in my opinion – starts to die. No, I’ll take that back, it’s not that the guitar starts dying, it’s just that the guitar becomes a unit that will never change; it just will always be that way. With Gibsons, I believe the nitro makes the instrument age gracefully. It will continue to evolve and the nitro will continue to evaporate and it’ll create that look that has made us so famous. It’s different, it’s more time consuming, more expensive and it’s the Gibson way. Nitro is just one of the steps we continue to use and I think the Murphy Lab nitro is a big plus in how the guitars are going to age over time, which I think will be very gracefully.”
Authentic ageing relies on access to the real thing, something that is part of the Murphy Lab process in the form of an everincreasing database of ‘golden era’ guitars.
“It’s different, it’s more time consuming, more expensive and it’s the Gibson way”
“There are two different things. One is scanning the guitars, basically creating an MRI of an actual guitar – that is, hundreds of images of one guitar that are giving us all the different measurements. In the 50s and 60s, every guitar was, as you know, a little different. Someone was too hungry at midday and did a little less on the neck roll and that neck, back in 1959, for example, is bigger. When they came back from lunch they might have gone a little too far and that next neck is thinner. Or one of the team winding pickups got distracted and they overwound.
“Every guitar is a little different back then, but that is what makes them unique. That’s awesome. The scanning gives us that information, by serial number, so we have a database of all these ’59s and ’58s, ’57s and guitars from the 60s. We’ve scanned lots and lots of guitars from every year so we have a database of their dimensions. Then, in addition to that, we take hundreds of pictures of each instrument for the way that they’ve aged with a laser focus on the way the lacquer has checked, where it’s aged, where the dings are, the buckle rashes, where’s the pick wear. It’s all captured in that library of images.”
What about the pickups – do you age those as well?
“No, not the pickups themselves, just the hardware. We make our own PAFs at the Custom Shop and those are the ones that go into the Murphy Lab Collection.” [Editor’s note: as we mention in our review, the plastic parts don’t go through any ageing process at the moment.]
Are there any IDs to tell someone that, maybe in 10 years’time, this is a Murphy Lab and frankly not the real thing?
“Well, one in the serial number – that’s basically the guitar’s ID. I actually don’t know right now if we’re doing it on all of them, but we do put an ML stamp in the electronics cavity. But the serial number alone is what tells the difference.”
It’s early days for the Murphy Lab, but the initial reception has been very promising…
“We already knew we were going to be in back-order mode with the Murphy Lab. What has surprised me is the extent of it. The order of magnitude is bigger than I thought and therefore now the lead times are longer. Not that I love that because I’d love to be able to fulfil on the order book faster, but that’s the reality of where we stand today: it’s a very long lead time.
“The strategy we set out immediately after taking over the company was being a guitar company again and [to] focus on making guitars – from the reorganisation of our guitars into Collections and all the changes you saw that we made originally, the Original, Modern, Custom Shop… and now the Murphy Lab. All of that is in service to that strategy, which was also, initially, about taking production down to organise a quality team across all our ‘craftories’ [a word Cesar uses to describe the different guitar-making hubs within the Gibson facilities]. Now we have that, and we’ve had that in place for quite a while – a very big quality team inside each one of our craftories led by a team that works with everybody. That was the original governor of capacity: quality.
“Then we went into the journey of quality control, making the best guitars we’ve made in 127 years. Then we started to increase capacity and we did that pre-Covid. So we entered Covid in back-order mode because of the changes we had made. But we’ve kept on our path of increasing capacity governed by quality. We didn’t say, ‘Covid has increased demand so let’s make more guitars without regard to the quality, governor.’ We kept that and we kept our capacity plan, and have ramped up just like we did before Covid. So we’re still on our path, our strategy, and that’s not going to change.”
“We already knew we were going to be in back-order mode with the Murphy Lab”