guitarlab

Project "Old Black":

A Guide to the Destruction of a Cultural Icon (in 5 painful steps)

If you are a vintage guitar collector who only handles instruments with white cotton gloves: Please leave this page immediately. Press Alt+F4. Run away.

For everyone else: Welcome to my personal Frankenstein experiment. The object of desire is a Gibson Les Paul Standard 50s. A piece of cultural heritage without equal. And that is exactly why I am about to destroy it.

Why? Because Neil Young exists. And because I’ve set my mind on recreating his legendary "Old Black." No matter the cost (mostly to my nerves). Here is the log of this glorious madness.

Phase 1: The Total Gutting

The first step feels like sacrilege. We lay the lady on the operating table and remove... everything. All the electronics? Rip 'em out. The old bridge? Gone. The original pickups that have represented the holy grail of tone for 70 years? Straight into the drawer.

The guitar now lies naked before me. It hurts a little. But as the saying goes: You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs—or in this case: Where solder flows, market value plummets.

Phase 2: The Swiss Cheese (Drilling & Bigsby)

We have to drill holes. Real, irreversible holes. Because without a Bigsby B9 tremolo, there is no Neil Young sound.

But careful: We are operating in slow-motion mode here. Why? Because chemically speaking, the old nitrocellulose lacquer is a distant cousin of explosives. If you let the drill spin too fast, friction creates heat. And with nitro, heat leads to fire. I want to sound like Neil Young, but I don’t want to end up like Jimi Hendrix at Monterey, torching my instrument right there on the workbench.

So: Drilling at the speed of a shifting sand dune.

Having averted spontaneous combustion, my golden rule for tightening screws now applies:

"After tight comes loose." (Or as mechanics say: Tighten it until it strips, then back off a quarter turn).

And being the pro that I am, I naturally ignored this advice. I cranked the tremolo screw with the confidence of a man who has absolutely no grasp of physics. A short, dry “ping.” Then silence.

Phase 3: Open-Heart Surgery (The Firebird Conversion)

Now things get fiddly. Neil Young’s sound doesn’t just appear out of thin air; it comes from a Gibson Firebird pickup at the bridge position. The problem: Back in 1953, Gibson didn’t anticipate that decades later, someone would have such a stupid idea.

The routing for the original P90 is wider than the Firebird Mini-Humbucker. The mounting ring doesn't fit. It looks like a square peg in a round hole. The solution? 10mm wood strips from the hardware store. The corners of the P90 cavity need to be filled in so the new ring actually has some wood to bite into.

Phase 4: The Gold Must Die

The old bridge stud holes? I already slapped some filler on those earlier. Let’s get to the grand finale. I let a professional handle the paint job. It’s pricey, sure, but... nitro and explosives, remember?

The top is sanded smooth—smooth until nothing remains of the glory of days past. Then, we reach for the can. Black. Jet black. It’s going to be as dark as my soul while I commit this crime against guitar history.

The Verdict

In the end, there she stands. She’s certainly not original anymore. An appraiser would probably suffer a heart attack just looking at her. But when you plug her in, crank the amp, and work that Bigsby, it’s right there: The hiss, the growl, that "Old Black" vibe.

Did I just ruin a 1953 GoldTop? Maybe. Does it sound killer? Hell yes.