I was in his department. Ted McCarty just wanted me
to build a new pickup and I thought, Well, why don’t
we get an improvement? Because every time you got
a regular guitar near an amplifier, you had to twist
yourself to get away from the hum.
“So I thought, Gosh, there are humbucking choke
coils, so why can’t we build a humbucking pickup?
A choke coil is where they have two coils wound,
one on one leg, one on the other, and since they
were wound and connected just right, they would
eliminate any hum pick-up.
“We used it in audio amplifiers at Gibson in the
early 50s, the GA-90 I think it was, which had a
tone choke. If you put an ordinary coil, single coil,
in there, it would pick up hum from the power
transformer. I didn’t want that, so I had them make
me a humbucking choke coil.”Ted McCarty
“I came up with that idea of putting the block of
wood down the middle of the 335. All I could think
of was like a solidbody guitar with wings, instead of
wood out there. Les Paul was probably right with his
plank, but the thing is, that looked funny. So what we
did was to make one that looked like a guitar, only it
was hollow out here and solid down here. But it had
a fine tone.
“The centre block as I remember was maple, good
hard-rock maple. On top of that was spruce, because
we kerfed it so that you could put the top on it and
it would bend a little bit. I guess maybe that was top
and bottom, because the block of wood was just plain
flat sides. We had to fill the space between the block
and the top and back. We started out with an idea of
making one with a solid block down the middle and
then, hey, wait a minute, we got to have something
to fill it. So then we used spruce, and we may have
even used some other soft wood. The block made
the guitar stiffer, so it had a brighter tone than an
acoustic. But it was a fake [laughs]. It looked like an
acoustic, but it wasn’t an acoustic, it was an electric.”Seth Lover
“I had in mind that if we can make humbucking
chokes for amps, why can’t we make humbucking
pickups? So I designed the pickup. I think I had
started work on it in ’55, and it was in ’57 I think
they first started building them, they put them in
the 175, a Les Paul, the 335, some other models.
I gave it that humbucking name – it was bucking
the hum that you pick up.
“When the sales force over in Chicago saw it,
they said they didn’t have anything to talk about.
So [laughs] they wanted adjusting screws and that’s
why we brought it out with the adjusting screws.
Also, I set the pickups in the guitar with the screws
towards the bridge and towards the fingerboard.
People wanted to know: why did I do that? For
decorative purposes! [laughs].the firm’s humbucking pickup; Phil Manzanera,
guitarist with Roxy Music (1971-83 and recent
reunions); Ted McCarty, who joined Gibson in
1948 and later became its president (1950-66);
Eddie Phillips, guitarist with The Mark Four
(1963-66) and The Creation (1966-68 and recent
reunions); and Mike Voltz, who joined Gibson
in 1984 and has overseen much of the company’s
ES-series production in recent years.ORIGINS OF THE 335
Ted McCarty
“The idea for the 335 was primarily one I came up
with to make a solidbody guitar in sound, but looking
like a regular acoustic guitar. And we never patented
that. I patented some [Moderne, Flying V, Explorer]
because I knew what Leo would do. So if I had a
patent, he wouldn’t dare. A lot of the others, I never
bothered with patenting. It costs money to patent a
guitar shape or whatnot.
“Now, the difference between the 335 and the
instruments that followed it, the 345 and 355, was
primarily a matter of dressing them up. The 355
I think had gold parts on it, the 335 was the cheaper
one: they went up the line. We put more inlays in
the 345 and 355. You could dress these things up
with binding – make it thicker, black-and-white,
cream – like for the Les Paul.”Seth Lover
“Walt Fuller was the chief engineer at Gibson, the
guy in charge and I did a lot of design work for him,PREVIOUS SPREAD, LEFT
Recent Gibson USA and Gibson
Memphis reissue models in
Sunburst and Cherry
PREVIOUS SPREAD, RIGHT
Ted McCarty, the originator
of the 335 family’s ingenious
feedback-suppressing
centre-block construction
THIS SPREAD Gibson’s
promotional literature
emphasised the range’s
thinline body, semi-solid
construction and player-
friendly neck
AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE GIBSON ES-335
66