Gibson Original Collection Explorer

Cooler Than the Other Side of the Pillow
Genius is rarely understood in its own time, so maybe that’s why it took guitar players twenty years to catch on to how cool Gibson Explorers are. Since Explorers are considered so iconic now, it’s hard to believe that they were a total flop when Gibson introduced them in 1958, but initial demand was so low that the first production run only consisted of thirty-eight guitars! Now that we guitar players have collectively figured out that playing an Explorer makes you look ten to twenty percent cooler than you actually are, the value of the original examples has skyrocketed, and their market value hovers around a quarter-million dollars.

Thankfully, you don’t need to mortgage your house to get your hands on one of these awesome American-made Gibson Explorers from the Original Collection! Sixty years after the Explorer’s infamously cold initial introduction, Gibson has knocked it out of the park by building some of the finest pointy guitars of all time for their Original Collection. These awesome axes rank above Christopher Columbus on any reputable list of the greatest explorers of all time, so let’s take a closer look and see why they always make Wildwood employees stop in their tracks whenever they see or hear one!

The magic of the modern Explorer begins with the quality mahogany Gibson uses to make the bodies and necks. They select each cut of wood with the utmost care, and this ultimately leads to guitars of exceptional resonance and beauty. To electrify the sweet sounds these tonewoods create, Gibson called upon the services of their Burstbucker pickups. These hellacious humbuckers are based on the legendary PAF pickups of yore, and they put a delightful modern spin on the classic Gibson sound. The Burstbucker 2 in the neck position is slightly underwound, and this gives it a sweet, singing top-end, woody midrange response, and deep-yet-articulate lows. By contrast, the Burstbucker 3 in the bridge position is overwound, so it has punchy, snarling midrange to go with biting highs and tight, muscular lows. You would be hard-pressed to find a genre or situation in which these two sounds would not impress everyone with working eardrums!

That’s the Explorer in a nutshell: sure, it looks flashy enough to make anyone you’re interested in romantically swoon and become weak in the knees after you bust out that two-handed tapping lick you’ve been working on (at least, that’s how it always plays out in my daydreams!), but all that space-age swagger belies the Explorer’s incredible versatility and spectacular tone. Even if it had plain-Jane looks, the Explorer would still be an amazing instrument with a sound that works for everything from rock to metal to country to punk. The fact that it’s cooler than Miles Davis eating ice cream in an igloo is just a bonus! We invite you to experience the joy of pointy guitars by playing an Original Collection Explorer, because we know it will bring you endless inspiration (and give you 500 cool points!).

• Model: Original Collection Explorer
• Finish Color: Natural
• Weight: 7.68 lbs.
• Body Wood: Mahogany
• Neck Wood: Mahogany
• Neck Shape: Slim Taper
• Neck Dimensions: .840 1st - .920 12th
• Fingerboard: Rosewood
• Fingerboard Radius: 12"
• Fingerboard Inlays: Acrylic Dot
• Width at Nut: 1 11/16"
• Nut Material: Graph Tech
• Frets: 22 Medium Jumbo
• Pickups: Burstbucker 2 and 3
• Controls: 2 Volume, 1 Tone, 3-Way
• Hardware: Chrome
• Bridge: Aluminum Nashville Tune-o-Matic
• Tailpiece: Aluminum Stopbar
• Tuners: Grover Mini Rotomatics
• Pickguard: White
• Case: Hardshell Case