Gibson has unveiled a pair of jaw-dropping Custom Shop ES-330s that take the hollowbody back to the Golden Era of electric guitar design, with a 1959 first-year reproduction, and a 1962 model that subtly refreshes the instrument with a SlimTaper neck.
The ES-330 often gets overlooked. Blame the Beatles. But we’ll get to Lennon/McCartney/Harrison in a second. Perhaps it is only the success of Gibson’s semi-hollows that put the ES-330 in the shade. Just as rock was turning up the volume, the fully hollowbodied ES-330 got a reputation for feedback that centreblock-equipped models such as the ES-335 and ES-355 effectively killed.
And yet it remains one of the most compelling instruments in the Gibson catalogue, past or present, precisely because you can play petty much anything on – jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, indie, pop, fusion, shoegaze, alt-rock and whatever. To think that Gibson went some years without making them.
Cast your mind back to 2024. The ES-330 was the electric guitar comeback of the year, and it wasn’t even close, as Gibson officially brought it back into production, offering the original hollowbody in Sixties Cherry, Natural, and Tobacco Sunburst nitro finishes, with Ebony available direct from Gibson.
The only question was why it ever went out of production in the first place? Dog-ear P-90s, trapeze-style tailpieces, that hollow construction that means it will squeal if you really jack the gain, there's nothing quite like the ES-330 – except maybe the Epiphone Casino.
But, as Gibson notes, the ES-330 got there first, unveiled in 1959, two years before the Casino. If the Beatles had been wedded to the ES-330 like they were the Casino, guitar history might have been different. No one would talk about the Casino first, the ES-330 second.
The Gibson USA ES-330s are no cheap date. They are serious high-end electric guitars. But these Custom Shop Historic Reissues dial up the level of detail with VOS finishes and, crucially, era-specific specs.
The 1959 ES-330 Reissue is offered in Vintage Natural and Vintage Burst, has the classic thinline maple/poplar/maple build with a glued-in mahogany neck, shaped into a rounded 1959 profile.
It has the celluloid dot inlays on a once piece 12” rosewood fingerboard. Many will credit the Historic no-wire ABR-1 bridge and trapeze tailpiece help for boosting its sustain – though the long neck tenon on both of these guitars will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting too.
The 1962 model is not that different. Here the neck has the more svelte SlimTaper profile, while the gold Top Hat-style tuners now have silver insets. There are mini block inlays instead of dots, and Gibson is offering it in Vintage Burst and Sixties Cherry.
At £5,249/$5,999, the prices on these are hefty but include a Lifton guitar case, and one special guitar. Head over to Gibson for more.
