I may have just scored a great deal. Or not. $550 + $50 shipping for a first generation Gibson Les Paul Studio Robot. It's not blue like most 2008 first gens: The downside is two of the tuners don't work and it doesn't come with a charger. I'm hoping the tuner issue is a pretty easy fix...if the parts are available. As far as the charger, I guess they're out there. I hope. Natch? Help me out here. I figure at the worst I just bought a Les Paul Studio for $600, which isn't a bad deal. And it just happens to be a Robot in a rare finish. It's either going to cost me a few bucks to bring it up to speed as a collectible or I just have a Les Paul.
...and a good deal just got even better. The guy sent me a message that it cost $90 to ship the LP. So I basically just paid $500 for an LP Studio, that just so happens to be a robot. Awesome.
Reply to @NatCH rep:I got it on e-bay, the guy had just listed it http://www.ebay.com/itm/152433439549?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:I Some initial thoughts, I don't want to clutter the drunk thread with stuff many don't care about. I haven't plugged it in yet, but I know what an LP sounds like and thus far I'm assuming all the regular LP electronics are up to snuff. The guitar isn't thrashed, there's some light "Buckle rash" on the back, but it's more 501 button rash, it's not deep. So I'm guessing it sounds like it should. As I said in the drunk thread, it plays nice....like an LP should. It's like coming home actually, I've played LP's most of my life and I haven't played one in about 5 years. It's kind of hard for me to put it down. It's a later first gen robot, it actually says Les Paul on the headstock, which is one of the reasons I bought it. The first few runs of robots were riddled with problems. One cause of concern for me is the truss cover is missing. #1 Why was someone messing with the truss rod?, and #2 How do you lose the truss rod cover? It's also missing two screws to the cover for the battery/lower CPU....once again, why was someone in there? The only problem I've noticed playing it is the pick guard. It's warped or something...it's noisy if you come in contact with it in a certain way, which I seem to do a lot. I've never come across that problem before. I haven't really had a chance to mess with the robotics, I let it do it's thing and then manually tuned what wasn't right. I was half drunk by the time it showed up and didn't feel like trying to troubleshoot why two of the tuners don't work. All in all, I'm thrilled with it. If worse comes to worse, I'll just throw a set of Grover's on it and have a regular LP Studio instead of a robot.
toytoy, sounds like you got a sweet deal. In other news, I wish I could do any of these three things as well as he does all three of them at the same time. More than a gimmick, just very impressive:
It turns out that almost all of the replacement robot parts are available from Gibson. When I first checked a few parts were unavailable, but they're now showing up. Awesome. I have my bonus from work coming in a couple of weeks and I'm buying everything. Even shit I don't need right now. I want the parts just incase. I plan on keeping this guitar forever, which is something I've never said about any of my guitars. Not only is this thing gorgeous, it plays amazing. And it's a Les Paul. A ROBOT Les Paul. The two tuners that don't work are the D and A tuners, so I'm assuming that at some point in time those two tuners got knocked hard enough to cause a malfunction. The first thing I'm going to do is replace those tuners and see if it will completely tune itself. Hopefully it will.
I just ordered the 2 tuners, the charger and the power cord for the LP. $200. Ouch. I really hope I'm right in my assumption that the tuners have malfunctioned. I can hear them whiring, but they don't actually do anything, so it's seems a fairly safe assumption that they're stripped out or something similar. I still need to get a case and that's going to run about another $200 for a correct Gibby case.
Just picked up the case for the LP. A 2008, Made in Canada "Gibson USA" case. Oxymoron, I know. All you can buy new now are the "Gibson Gear" cases which are pieces of crap compared to the "Gibson USA" (Made in Canada) cases. Whatever. Now I need to dig up a new handle for the case, the one I bought isn't looking so good.
Sorry it took me a while to reply to all of this. Sounds like you got a good deal, depending on the price of all the parts. Those LP Studio Robots look to be selling around $750 in working condition, so you'll probably still come out ahead. More importantly, you got a guitar you love. I may be wrong about this - but I believe that the original Robot guitars are only supposed to be tuned by the Robot technology (meaning you can't start twisting them on your own) - again, I'm not 100% on that, but it might be the reason two of them don't work. Me, personally, I never got into the Robot guitars. And neither did a lot of customers. The first models (your version) were really popular - then they started switching the design so it was like a Gibson without the look of a Gibson. The "Les Paul Dusk Tiger" was the latest version when I started at my job, and it took about a year and a half to sell the last one. It was the LP body but with a weird chrome control plate that took up a lot of the body. Then they came out with the "Firebird X" model a few years after, which started at $5,000. Three years later, our last one was sold for $1800.00 and well below our cost. I think it's ugly as sin, and that's probably why it didn't sell quick. Rumor is that Guitar Center actually struck a deal with Gibson to sell them all back to the company at pennies on the dollar. This guitar had every single bell and whistle you could think of: built-in effects (that could be controlled with a BlueTooth dual foot pedal setup), each pickup could be switched from humbucker to single coil, it had the Robot tuners. The finish was a metallic swirl that was a tribute to the paint swirls left on the floor of the factory after the 2010 Nashville Flood. And the X - makes it extreme, I guess. I mean, this guitar would be amazing to the young kid getting into guitar and wanting to have it all right there for him to use! Problem is, he doesn't have $5,000. And most of the guys that do are gonna spend it on a Custom Shop R9. So after that debacle, they had the 2015 models. Gibson basically took every complaint about Gibson and changed up every spec to cover it. Plus, they added the new "Min-e-Tune" system to every guitar. Again, I'm not a fan of the robot tuners, but this one was at least contained in the headstock only and could be removed without any mods to the guitar. However, the necks were widened while the string spacing stayed the same (to cover the complaint of strings slipping off the edges), the nut was changed to brass and made fully adjustable (to cover complaints of the nut having burrs or being cut too high), and the pick guard was made so you could just pop it off and on (which I thought was a good addition). Oh, also, the prices increased about 30% across the board. The problem is, a vast majority didn't like the neck width, and so Gibson sales dropped dramatically. 2016 took everything back to pretty much where it was before 2015, and sales have gotten back to normal. It was like Gibson decided 2015 was the year to address every single criticism that was posted on online guitar forums, and when they did, those guys said "well, I'm a Fender guy, so it's not like I'll buy a Gibson anyway." Just some interesting info for anybody who might wanna know. I'm not trying to dog on Robot guitars - as I said, the original models, like yours, still have a lot of fans. It is a good find, and let us see it when it's all fixed up! Oh, another thing - we have a lot of customers that want to order Gibson cases, and I always explain to them that it's going to say "Gibson GEAR" instead of "Gibson USA." I honestly think the main reason is that Gibson doesn't want to be actively aiding counterfeiters in making the guitars look more realistic. So the cases have to have that difference. Believe me, if you work around guitars all day, you can tell a counterfeit Gibson the moment you open the case - but for a lot of people they can't pass up what seems to be the deal of the century.
It's something like that. If you just start cranking on the tuners, you are going to break them (Which may be what happened to mine.) To tune them manually you pull out on the tuning knob to disengage the robotics and tune as normal. As far as cases, I've heard from several different people that the "Gibson Gear" cases are inferior in quality to the older "Gibson USA" ones....did they change manufacturers at that time? Lower QC standards? Or are the folks I've talked to just being label snobs?
To be honest, I've never seen a Gibson Gear case in my seven years of working at the store. Usually when a customer wants a Gibson case, once they hear that it says "Gear" and not "USA," and that it costs around $150, they decide on getting a Gator case for half the price. The "Made in Canada" cases are good quality, especially the ones with the faux snakeskin print on them. Newer cases are switching back to the brown cases with a dark red lining (as opposed to the super pink plush).
I got the case, charger and tuners for the LP. Case is as it should be (And the wine red looks great laying in the white fuzz,) I plugged the charger in and everything lit up and reported as it should. Now I just need to change out the tuners I think are bad to see if everything is up to snuff. This is where it sucks renting. My metric wrenches are somewhere in my truck. Somewhere.
Wow. I just checked e-bay for a Fender Showmaster. I paid $350 for my last one with a hard case. An H/H is running $800+ now, with a gig bag. For a Korean guitar. Son of a bitch. I should've kept mine.
One of my favorite guitarists put up a you tube lesson for one of his songs. You can rag on Stryper for a lot of things, but not for their musicianship. Michael Sweet is a great singer and a highly underrated guitarist. I'm also curious about that baby LP with a maple neck he's playing....does anyone have any idea what it is? It reminds me of a 3/4 sized LP Gretsch I had other then the neck.
Just picked up a used Boss BR 900CD 8 track for $150 delivered. I don't really like the fact that it uses a flash card for storage, but at this price I can't complain to much (They were $800 list when new.) I was going to pick another Tascam, but I've always found the Tascam on board effects kind of flat, so I figured I'd go with the company that makes effects.
Hey everyone, been working on my open chords as I begin learning guitar. Not an expert, but I'm getting there. What I'm wondering is if you know of any online resources where I can find appropriate songs/ artists to give some variety for practice. For instance, I have a Hal and Leonard 4 chord songbook with songs using D, G, C, and Em . Right now I'm trying to get better at the F chord but would rather not buy a whole songbook just to work on that. Problem is that the bands I like or genre I listen to (rock, alternative) use mostly power chords and I'm not there yet. I know about ultimateguitar.com and justinguitar.com and andyguitar.co.uk, just crowd sourcing to see what else is out there
You already know about what I would suggest off the top of my head, maybe try searching you tube for "How to play (Song)" and start following recommendations from there. I've chased down that rabbit hole a few times and ended up learning something I'd never even thought about learning. If I remember correctly, the open F was kind of a bitch for me to learn, but once the light bulb went off that it was a movable chord form (Move it up two frets you have a G, two more and it's an A, etc...) I suddenly saw what a useful fingering it was. I'd be lost without it. Keep at it, you won't regret it. In other news, I got my 8 track and finally got to hear my LP use her voice. Just gorgeous, like it should be.
For what it's worth....coming from a guitar player who has dabbled with keys....I've had great experience with Yamaha keyboards. They're kind of lower mid line, but the sound and feel of them have always worked for me.
I'm not aware of any keyboards that are weighted AND light-up, AND full-size. Usually, light-up keys are found on the smaller keyboards. non-weighted, 61 keys or less, and a lot of bells and whistles like drum beats, chord progression accompaniment, "call and response" lessons and all that. Personally, as a guy that took piano lessons, you want to learn on a real piano or a realistic keyboard. A full size piano is pretty standard around the world, so why learn on something non-weighted? That just makes you have to work harder when you start getting better, and sometimes that can ruin a kid's confidence and make them want to quit. But anyway, I would recommend Yamaha as well - better sounds and better feel. Their weighted 88-key models start around the $600 mark. There's also a newer Roland model that is really good as well, but I forget the model number. Feel free to PM me if you need more info, or have any questions. And the obligatory "I can hook you up and have it shipped to your house" pitch - I am in sales, after all.
Here's another great resource for guitar players: https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarLessons365Song/videos Why wasn't this shit around when I was playing? We had our ears and that was pretty much it. We had to figure out every riff, fill, and solo....and then argue about if it was right or not. Multiply that by the 60 or so songs we'd play every night and you come up with a lot of damned time. I've been playing with this tonight. I'm sure I'll forget everything by tomorrow morning.