This nicely preserved 1954 Gibson Les Paul Model, often called the goldtop because of its iconic gold finished front, has just come in from the family of its original owner from Athens, Georgia! I'm thrilled to have another uncirculated '54 goldtop in the shop. I'm always a Gibson guitar buyer but I'm especially looking to buy nice examples of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s Gibson Les Paul guitars. You can contact me here to sell a Gibson guitar.
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Check out another one here: 1954 Gibson Les Paul Model goldtop guitar
The family knew that their vintage Gibson Les Paul was a valuable guitar, but they reached out to me for a professional's opinion on its value. You can contact me here to chat about a vintage Gibson guitar appraisal. We chatted about the guitar at length and I gave them a document for the value for insurance purposes. I also expressed interest in acquiring the guitar for myself, but it took a few months for the owners to decide to sell. I was happy to be the buyer for it!
The Les Paul Model was Gibson's first full production solid body electric guitar for intended for Spanish style playing and debuted in 1952. The initial design suffered from a shallow neck pitch and an unpopular bridge style, but Gibson had designed a new wrap tail piece style bridge for it by 1953. The neck angles took a few more months to correct, but most 1954 goldtops will have a proper neck pitch intended for the strings to wrap over the tailpiece instead of underneath like the original design.
This 1954 Gibson Les Paul Model features the update wrap tail style tailpiece with early style thin ears securing it to the bridge posts. It also feature two P-90 style pickups which were used on the Model (or Standard) until the introduction of the Humbucking pickup to the model in 1957. The attractive gold finished top hides an arched Maple cap over the solid Mahogany body. Gibson replaced the gold finished top on the Standard with a Cherry Sunburst style finish in 1958 (check out this 1958 Gibson Les Paul Standard Cherry Sunburst).
