Jooky's All Gold

Jooky's All Gold? Nahhh...

Well, I've been thinking about what I can do for the Music Radar £100 challenge, and my first thought was to go the Matt Bellamy (of Muse fame) route and do a tribute to him. He famously uses a rather spiffy guitar with a built-in Fuzz Factory, and funny midi controlling pad. OK, the midi would be pushing it for a hundred quid, but I figured I could come up with a Sophie or something (well, until I remembered how shaky-handed-soldering isn't ideal.)

Naturally, two other people who are planning to get involved have already talked about 'Doing a Bellamy', so that kinda went off the agenda.

More to the point, it was hardly original, and it would be nice to have a different slant on it.

So then I got thinking about Gibson. Now Gibson, despite what everybody says about the old 'uns being better than the new ones, for me, are still the benchmark. Fenders I love, but they are still the Ford to the Gibson Cadillac, but they do amuse me a wee bit as they seem intent on making everything they do into a Limited Edition, or instead something totally off the wall that nobody wants.

Now innovation, I'm all for and some of their recent stuff is great on paper, but putting effects into guitars (and I know I do it, but I only do one at a time) seems odd. One thing guitarists spend a lot of time doing is trying new effects, worrying about what order they go in and generally mythering around the place looking for something they probably traded for an obscure eastern European transistor years ago.

The other thing they do (Gibson I mean) is mine their own heritage and keep releasing 'Tribute' models that are basically tributes to themselves, I guess, as well as the odd artist that used to play their guitars - and a few that didn't.

So coming back to the original point, I thought it was about time that somebody did a tribute to Gibson, in all it's incongruous and often clanging mixture of historically inaccurate and modernistic klunkiness.

So that's what I'm going to build, a tribute to the old - a gold top Les Paul - with a nowhere-near-seamless integration of something modern effects-wise. I'm thinking P90s and multi-fx, and maybe a few flashing lights. I'm thinking klunky and stitched together. Most of all I'm thinking it should use real gold. All for under a hundred quid...

Sounds like a plan, don't you think?