Gibson Custom Shop NASHVILLE Trip!
Published on 25 February 2025
If you love Gibson guitars, then you’re going to want to read this blog!
If you’ve ever wanted to get a peek behind the scenes of one of the most prestigious custom guitar workshops in the world, then make yourself comfy, because in this article, we are going to take you into the Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville!
Yes, we’ve recently returned from a 3 day visit to Nashville, Tennessee for a very special project, and whilst we’ll keep certain details under our hats for now, we are also happy to show you some exclusive pics of our trip!
Contents
Gibson Custom Shop
The Gibson Custom Shop is where the greatest hand-made Gibson guitars are crafted. Located within the company’s Nashville premises, the Custom Shop is none the less quite distinct from the standard production line.
This is the dream factory, with the world’s top guitar builders giving their greatest efforts to make the ultimate Gibson guitars and basses. When you think of just how iconic Gibson’s historical models are (and I hardly need to list them but, hey: Les Paul Standard, Les Paul Custom, SG, ES335, ES355, Flying V, Explorer, Les Paul Junior…and so on!), and you factor in that these are the finest vintage replicas being made anywhere in the world, this place starts feeling like six-string Shangri-La!
And that’s before I even mention the Murphy Lab! Gibson Custom Shop is home to Tom Murphy’s special Lab where he and his team masterfully age certain instruments for the inimitable patina of age. He’s a renowned master of the art (not all relic jobs are equally executed, let’s be honest here) and you can watch a conversation I had with him last year right here:
The Mission
When our team members went over to Nashville, they had a mission in mind. They had one full day in the workshop (a snowstorm actually brought production to a halt on one of the days!) and, besides being invited to tour the premises and check out the various builds, areas and processes, our guys were tasked with the main purpose of the journey.
They were to personally eyeball over 200 of Gibson Custom Shop’s finest figured maple blanks, and to pick out the very best - the absolutely ultimate pieces available - for making into a special run of Les Paul guitars!
In the end, we selected 30 tops for 30 custom spec’d, custom ordered guitars. What did we order? Well, you’ll have to wait and see! I promise you though, it’ll be worth the wait.
The Custom Shop Experience
On the day of the Custom Shop visit, the morning was spent touring the location and seeing the work in action. This was a real privilege for us, as it’s not an experience that’s offered to everyone. No public tours are offered and very few retailers are invited, so we were very excited to be allowed access to this most hallowed of creative spaces!
The tour brought home just how hand made everything at Gibson Custom Shop actually is. The hand-work put into crafting each guitar is beyond impressive: it’s a labour of love for every Les Paul, SG and ES guitar that is created here.
The artisans who build each instrument - some of whom have worked at Gibson for 30 or 40 years - are the very people who built the guitars the Slash plays, and that Jerry Cantrell plays. This is the top of the mountain right here, and we got to see how painstaking that journey really is. Gibson Custom Shop has a dedicated R&D team that basically has to create all the tools that are then used to make the individual guitar models in-house. So, when they reissue a new model, it's actually a huge project that involves a great deal of research, development and testing in order to make sure the CNC's are as accurate as possible. The tools to make each part of the guitar need to be created and tested prior to the builds commencing.
This level of self-resourcefulness and in-house building is impressive on a lot of levels, because many comparable brands simply choose their parts from a catalogue. Here, you’ll see pickups being handwound, 335 bodies being bound up tightly to allow the glue to set, you’ll see finishes being hand-sprayed in the booths…it’s like Santa’s Workshop for guitar maniacs!
As our guys took the tour, they noticed some very cool details, such as a specially developed omnidirectional CNC machine that uses an actual vintage guitar to make an exact replica of a given guitar. They say specially developed machines for creating trapezoid inlays in ebony: the machine itself had to be developed and created before the Gibson team could make the fingerboards they wanted to make! There is a commitment to levelling up in quality that is easy to miss when the guitars often look superficially similar to regular production instruments. That is of course because those production guitars are already built to a very high level, but the devil, as they say, is in the details. These people are really paying attention to the details!
The Figured Tops
After the tour, our team were taken to the area where the timber selections would take place. Before leaving for Nashville, our guys agreed on a game plan: as a company, we already have some wonderful Les Paul specimens available with a tight flame, so the aim here was to find some beautiful wide flames, some uniquely beautiful figuring. Deep was good, wavy was good, as long as there was a lovely wide flame happening.
We cannot wait to show you these!
The Story So Far
Well, our guys are back with us, and the guitars have been ordered. It’s now time for the usual excruciating waiting game - which can be anywhere from 6 months to 2 years - to see the finished guitars.
These will be special guitars, created by Gibson’s most experienced Custom Shop builders, made to our special specs and featuring wonderful figured maple tops hand-selected by us, one by one. Needless to say, these guitars are not going to be available anywhere else, and each is going to be unique and wonderful.
Stay tuned for more about these guitars, because it’s going to be special! In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this special peek into the inner workings of the Gibson Custom Shop with these exclusive photos!
Click to View our Gibson Custom Shop Selection
