Single File
Covering a vast price range, Gibson and Epiphone have a Junior for every occasion and budget
EPIPHONE LES PAUL JUNIOR £469
To kick o the Junior style, this Epiphone-branded single-cut in its dark Tobacco Burst-only gloss looks suitably moody. It uses a ‘Lightning Bar’ compensated wrapover bridge with an Epiphone P-90 Pro dog-ear and mahogany with laurel ngerboard construction. Elsewhere, the dualpickup Les Paul Special in TV Yellow costs £489, while Junior champion Billy Joe Armstrong has his own Classic White signature Junior at £529, with the same Lightning Bar bridge and P-90 Pro.
www.epiphone.com
EPIPHONE CORONET £439
A cost-e ective way to experience the singlepickup Coronet style, this model uses the perhaps more classic and larger ‘buttery’ pickguard, here a three-ply, plus the output jack socket is face-mounted, not side-mounted. It comes in Cherry or Ebony nishes and again uses allmahogany construction with a laurel ngerboard, and the single pickup is that P-90 Pro dog-ear with a compensated wrapover. The twin-pickup Wilshire (£529) comes with dual soapbar P-90s and in the same nishes.
www.epiphone.com
GIBSON LES PAUL JUNIOR £1,499
Moving into Gibson USA’s range, this Les Paul Junior model kicks o the line-up, just as it did historically. The gloss nitro nish is available in two colours, Vintage Tobacco Burst and Ebony, and again it’s all-mahogany but with an unbound, dot-inlaid Indian rosewood ngerboard. It’s the guitar that the Charlie Starr signature model is based on but without the modded parts, and it comes with a standard output P-90 dog-ear pickup and non-Historic hardcase.
www.gibson.com
GIBSON CUSTOM SHOP 1957 LES PAUL JUNIOR REISSUE £3,799
Want to get dangerously close to the original ame, just as it would have been new back in the day? Then the Custom Shop’s models kick o with this Historic reissue. The hide glue construction is old-school, as is the vintage-style circuit, with a vintage-correct nylon nut and ‘50s rounded medium C’ neck prole. We get an original-style lightweight wraparound bridge, three-on-a-strip Kluson-style tuners with white buttons, and a VOS nitro nish in Vintage Tobacco Burst or TV Yellow.
www.gibson.com
GIBSON CUSTOM SHOP 1957 LES PAUL JUNIOR ULTRA-LIGHT AGED £4,199
Going up to the next Gibson Custom level is this single-cut Junior in its classic TV Yellow, here with light ageing by the Murphy Lab. It gets very, very close to a real 67-year-old piece that’s been played in. In fact, trying out one of these might be expensive! “From the solid mahogany and hide glue construction to the vintage-style wiring, the classic Les Paul Junior is back… and ready to ‘ruin’ you,” says Gibson. We couldn’t agree more.
www.gibson.com
GIBSON CUSTOM SHOP 1958 LES PAUL JUNIOR DOUBLE CUT HEAVY AGED £7,799
Approaching the price you’d expect to pay for an original vintage piece, this one-o double-cut Junior, in TV Yellow with dark tortoiseshell celluloid pickguard, looks like you’ve taken it on hundreds of gigs (and you can with the Historic ’Gator Skin hardshell case). There’s also the single-cut 1957 Les Paul Junior in Vintage Sunburst with Murphy Lab heavy ageing at the same price, for those of us who don’t want to take the real thing on the road.
www.gibson.com