SOLD! - 1967 Gibson ES-345 TDC Cherry

"Want to get Back to the Future?"
 
The ES-345 was introduced in the April 1959 issue of the Gazette and sold for $345.00 in sunburst finish. Since its debut this classic has been seen on stage by everyone from Dicky Betts and Chuck Berry to Elvin Bishop, B.B. King, Vedran Mirčetić, Freddie King, and Marty McFly...
 
The year before was a pivotal point in the evolution of the electric guitar for the Gibson company. Old models were changed and many innovative designs were introduced at the end of the this decade and the beginning of the next. The avant garde Flying V and Explorer were shaking off Gibson’s reputation as a conservative and traditional builder of instruments and the very first ES-335 and the Les Paul "Burst" would (later on) change the world of music forever.
 
Gibson was often just ahead of the competition in design changes, but they were truly inventing a new kind of instrument with the introduction of their double cutaway thinline electrics. The double cutaway design was almost immediately copied by the Fred Gretsch Company (redesigned Chet Atkins) as well as by Guild Guitars (Starfire series). The most important design innovation by far however was the semi-solid construction. The solid block of wood inside the hollow body gave both the sustain of a solid body with the appearance and feel of a hollow body. Up until 1958, Gibson guitar necks joined at the 14th fret. This new thinline series with it's double cutaway had a 19th fret neck joint that gave unprecedented ease of access to the upper registers.
 
The new ES-335 was an instant success and spawned a line of similar instruments with slightly different features. The first of these was the ES-355 which was essentially a 335 with the aesthetics of a Les Paul Custom i.e. multi-ply trim, an ebony fingerboard with block pearl markers, gold plated hardware and 5 piece split diamond peghead logo.
 
The next incarnation of the thinline introduced by Gibson brought back the concept of a stereo guitar that Gretsch had experimented with in the late 40’s (Project-O-Sonic). Rather than splitting the treble and bass strings into a stereo image like Gretsch, Gibson took the simpler solution of splitting the neck pickup from the bridge pickup with the use of a special “Y” cable into a newly designed Gibson GA-88S stereo amplifier. The new stereo guitar was also outfitted with a Varitone circuit which provided 6 preset tones. The new stereo guitar also sported gold plated hardware and split parallelogram fingerboard inlays.