This is my quote-unquote 1957 Gibson Moderne reissue — and I’m going to tell you, and you can fight me in the comments, it’s a great guitar. Take everything else away — the hype, the price, even the shape — and it plays great. That’s the thing I don’t think you hear from a lot of other channels. I use this thing all the time. I use it on recordings, I play out loud with it. It inspires me to play, and it’s so different from any other guitar that I just really want to pick it up.

It’s an all-mahogany guitar. In theory it probably should have been Korina, but it’s pretty lightweight for what it is. And it has one gigantic baseball-bat neck that I love. I used to be big on the thin-neck guitars, but once you get one of these Custom Shop really big 1957 reissue necks, you’ve got to try it — because you might never go back. It fills up your hand much like a baseball bat would, but still allows you to play very easily.

It’s pretty fancy when you think about it — the gold hardware, the badge at the top, that crazy string tree, the gold pickups, the true ABR-1 bridge with the posts drilled directly into the body, and these really cool cream-and-gold knobs. I’m not going to tell you it’s going to win beauty pageants — it’s kind of like a half Flying V and half I-don’t-know-what. But it’s got Custom Bucker pickups, the nitro finish, really great fretwork, and a bright resonance — it sounds great plugged in and not plugged in, and louder than it should for a solid-body. The headstock is very impractical, very odd — but kind of hard to look away from.

I fought wanting this for a long time. I told myself I’m never going to get a Moderne — it’s not different enough, it’s ugly looking, all the things. But then when you’ve got 90% of the Gibson ’50s guitars that have ever been made and this is the one that you don’t have, well, you start making exceptions. This one came out in 2025, made out of mahogany, and I kept an eye out for it — usually after about a year the hype dies down and you can buy the dip. I saw this one come up for sale at a really good price, worked out a deal for even less, and it showed up. It’s great. I love it.

Just to be clear, this did not actually come out in 1957. This was just a concept that supposedly they made one of, and it was there at the NAMM show that year, but it’s never really formally been surfaced since. And whether Billy Gibbons ever decides to show off the one that he supposedly has, then maybe that’ll change that story. But this here kind of fits in with the Theodore, in a model that could have existed — this one a little more so than the Theodore. That one never existed at all.

And as someone who’s purchased a lot of Gibson guitars in the last five, six years, I can tell you the quality is really good. People love to hate on it online, but I have not had one where I’m like, “this thing is really poorly made.” I can’t justify that they’re worth the money — but for those who say domestic manufacturing means something to them, this is what it costs to pay craftsmen.

So this fits in great with the rest of my ’50s models, or could-have-been ’50s models. And I sincerely hope they never find additional models that should have come out in the ’50s, because then I’ll just have to buy it. One question for the comments: what do you think about the Futura? I’ve always said I’m never buying it — it’s essentially an Explorer. But does it need to be in the collection at some point? Let me know.