For tabs and text of this video lesson, see the July 2024 issue of Guitar World –
https://bit.ly/GW2020w
TALES FROM NERDVILLE by Joe Bonamassa
TOOLS OF THE TRADE, PART 14
This month, Joe Bonamassa talks about one of his favorite guitar designs, the Les Paul Special. The one he’s sporting for this column happens to be a 1958 model in “TV yellow”; this lime/tan-type color was used so that you could see the guitar on black-and-white television screens back in the 1950s, thus the color naming. The original models were painted white, but they soon discovered that, on B/W TV, the guitar body would miraculously vanish; all you could see was the fretboard, pickups and pickguard. Darkening the body to this unusual color solved the problem, and part of the iconic stature of the instrument was born.
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