Gibson Custom 1959 Les Paul Standard VOS with Handpicked Maple Top #14 Green Lemon Fade ~ Due early 2027

Les Paul Standard 1959 Reissue VOS in GGreen Lemon Fade with Lightweight Hand Picked Top and Carmelita neck carve. Due early 2027.

This is a picture of the handpicked top that will be on the guitar.

Selecting the Ultimate Gibson Custom Tops: A Dispatch from Nashville

I flew into Nashville a couple of days before my meeting at Gibson to acclimatise to the time zone, ensuring I’d be fresh for top-picking duties. It was also the perfect excuse to check out the local vintage guitar stores and catch some great live music.

Suitably refreshed and ready to go on Monday morning, I drove to Gibson Custom to meet with Thom Fowle. I was ushered into the top-picking room, where three trolleys holding over 200 tops awaited me. After catching up for a bit and getting everything into place, it was time to get to work.

With so many gorgeous slabs of figured maple sitting there, it was difficult to know where to start. After surveying the room, I decided to begin with the torrefied maple, as it’s rarely available in this kind of quantity. Torrefying (or baking) the wood removes moisture and sugars, making the wood sound older and drier. It also darkens the maple and brings out more of the flame, so we’ll be looking at more golden-brown, natural and dark-red bursts for these.

When picking tops, I’m looking for a deep, 3D flame that stays in view from all angles. I spent a lot of time moving the wood around to check the depth of the figuring and see how it shifts in the light. Spraying them with water often coaxes out a bit more of the grain, so the spray gun was called into action quite a bit.

The next stage was sorting the best pieces into "definite" and "maybe" piles. Four hours later, flagging a bit, we downed tools for a spot of lunch. Then it was right back to work, where those rather large stacks needed to be honed down to a manageable number. As evening approached, the task was nearly done and we called it a day. At this point, I still had too many tops, meaning some hard choices were waiting for me in the morning.

On day two, I headed back into the Custom Shop with a fresh head and ready to finalise the choices. Plenty of toing and froing ensued and after some serious deliberation the decisions were made. We then moved onto the next phase: photographing and numbering our tops.

We took two types of photos: one of the wood “in the raw” and one with a Les Paul body template placed over it, which helps you visualise exactly how it will look on a finished guitar.

With the work done, we wrapped things up, and Dustin, the head of Made to Measure, popped in for a chat. Looking back on two days of hard but incredibly fun work, I feel it’s an absolute privilege to come out to the USA and work with a company like Gibson. I certainly didn't envisage doing this sort of thing back on that freezing cold Monday in January 1987, when Chris and I first opened the doors to Coda Music.