The wait is over. After a long-tease, in which we have seen Gibson CEO Cesar Gueikian demo it, and the Lamb Of God guitarist tour with the prototype, Mark Morton’s first signature Les Paul is here – and it is one quietly radical electric guitar.
There’s nothing that screams METAL GUITAR about this one, nor is it too ostentatious. The Mark Morton Les Paul Modern Quilt has some AAA quilted maple bling on top, but this is muted a little by the satin Translucent Ebony Burst finish. As Morton says, it almost looks a little “deep purple” depending on how the light catches it.
But there’s no blood, fire, pointy edges. It’s a Les Paul. The more high-performance updates, if you will, are to be found when you pick it up.
As the name suggests, this comes from the Les Paul Modern design idiom, thus we have a mahogany body under the maple cap with Gibson’s Ultra Modern weight relief excising some of that timber.
The mahogany SlimTaper neck will be very familiar to anyone who has had the pleasure of, say, a ‘6os Les Paul Standard, and it is glued to the body just like its forebears. But that neck join has been whittled away, with Gibson’s Modern Contoured Heel a feature that promises enhanced upper-fret access.
“I really wanted something that stayed in some sense, very classic to the heritage, the history of the Les Paul,” says Morton. “I didn’t want to do something too radical. But I also wanted something that looked heavy metal, that looked appropriate for the guitar player of Lamb Of God’s Les Paul. The quilt top and the trans-black satin finish felt kind of dark, and kind of metal to me, but not over the top.”
There are some other cool touches to Les Pauls of yore – most notably with the ‘60s style black dials with silver inserts a nod to the 1978 Les Paul Custom that the late John Sykes famously played. “I thought that was really cool,” says Morton.
Gibson’s Pickup Shop, master luthier Jim DeCola and Morton also developed an all-new electric guitar pickups. These humbuckers are based around a ceramic magnet, and it’s a familiar story of good cop/bad cop, with the neck a little “more conservative” in its output – a sort of ceramic PAF vibe – and the bridge humbucker, where the real action is for a Lamb Of God guitarist, is pure berserker material.
“That allows me to flip to the neck position and play cleaner,” says Morton. “To roll back the volume and not hit the amp as hard and clean things up quite a bit. And then, switching to the bridge pickup, it’s just a flamethrower. It’s, like, super high-output. When you’re really swinging at these bridge pickups, they give you all the game you want.”
These pickups are hand-wired to our usual LP complement of dual volume and dual tone controls, both with Orange Drop capacitors.
Morton has opted for a set of Grover Rotomatic locking tuners with Keystone buttons. Other signature details include Mark Morton’s signature etched into the truss rod cover.
The Mark Morton Les Paul Modern Quilt is out now, priced £2,699/$2,999, and that price includes a hard-shell guitar case. For more details, head over to Gibson,
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