Gibson Les Paul 70s Deluxe
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GUITARIST SEPTEMBER 2021
GIBSON LES PAUL 70s DELUXE
(with steel anchor bolts) are made by
Advanced Plating in Portland, Tennessee;
the steel saddles are pre-notched and
height adjustment is easy via the Allen-
keyed bolts. The tuners, meanwhile, do
appear to be nickel plated with nicely
antique-looking keystone buttons, but,
importantly, they feel smooth and positive.
We have no complaints.
Mini-Humbuckers
These mini-humbuckers were designed
by Seth Lover for the Gibson-owned
Epiphone line, and the reasons for
employing them are also well documented.
They were initially surplus stock once
Gibson had stopped USA production of
Epiphone, and they do give the Deluxe an
almost player-modded vibe, sitting in their
modified P-90 soapbar covers. Of course,
there’s nothing to stop you swapping over
to standard P-90s here.
The minis also mount to the guitar in a
different fashion from a P-90 or standard
humbucker. The pickup has a preset
height within its surround so, when you go
to adjust it, both the pickup and surround
move up or down. The bridge pickup is
fine, but the neck is right down as far as it
will go and it tilts in the opposite direction
to the rake of the strings. It’s not the end of
the world, but it does look a bit odd.
UNDER THE HOOD
What’s happening inside the Deluxe?
W
hile an original Deluxe invariably used brown plastic
coverplates for the control and switch cavities, here
they’re standard black. Inside the control cavity,
mounted via a conductive metal screening plate, are four ‘Gibson’
stamped CTS audio taper pots, nominally valued at 500kohms
as you’d expect with a twin-humbucker guitar. That said, both
volumes are lower – the neck drops to 422kohms, the bridge
closer at 496k – and we can’t help thinking that reversing these
would suit the guitar. The Orange Drop caps are .022microfarads
on both neck and bridge, and the circuit is wired modern-style,
like original Deluxes.
The pickups are labelled for lead and rhythm positions, the Pat
number is stamped on the baseplate, and the bridge is slightly
hotter, but not by much going simply by the DCRs measured at
output of 6.31k ohms (bridge) and 6.16k (neck). Gibson states
these wax-potted pickups are “vintage replicas of the original
mini-humbucker with Alnico II bar magnets” and “authentic in
every detail, from the cream-colored plastic mounting and coated
enamel-like wire, to the maple spacers and vintage braided lead
wire”. Typically both have the same polepiece spacing that we
measured at 49.54mm.
The rosewood ngerboard
here is almost ebony-like black
in colour, and we can’t help
wondering if it’s stained. The fret
work, however, is excellent and
this example was very well set up
3
4
3. The patent number is stamped on
the pickup base, while the sticker
tells us this is the bridge pickup
4. The tidy control cavity here
features Orange Drop caps and
modern wiring
Feel & Sounds
This new Deluxe is a big, chunky, weighty
beast. Hey, it’s a Les Paul! The neck feels
very similar to the Standard ’50s and
dimensionally is very slightly bigger than
the one we reviewed back in issue 448:
43.53mm at the nut with a 1st fret depth of
22.8mm filling out to 25.4mm by the 12th.
There’s no tapering to the shoulders, which
tells your left hand it’s bigger than it actually
measures. Did we say it feels big? The
fretting is perfectly good, from a low-ish
medium gauge (approx. 2.28mm wide by
1mm high). The nut is well cut and, once
strings are stretched and settled, tuning is
stable. The rosewood fingerboard is very
dark brown here, almost black, certainly
compared with our reference late-2019 Les
Paul Classic.
Rather like the Deluxe itself, the mini-
humbucker is far less a part of our sonic
DNA than the PAF or P-90. The smaller
pickup senses a narrower portion of the
string, and with a lower inductance and
output it produces a cleaner and brighter
sound. We’re not saying it sounds like a
Fender, because it doesn’t, yet it certainly
loses some of that thump and chunk; it’s
lower in output than our Les Paul Classic
with Burstbuckers 1 and 2. There seems
to be a little more cut to the attack, but it’s
smoother – less grainy, if you like – than our
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