For more than five decades, the Les Paul Standard has been established as the ultimate performance instrument in terms of tone and playability and has always been one of the best lookers on stage, too. Now, Gibson Custom brings the high-performance Les Paul Custom Pro, crafted with all the features of the prized original Les Paul Standards but upgraded with new performance features. Rendered with the utmost quality in craftsmanship for which Gibson's Custom Shop is known and using the finest traditional tonewoods, hardware and pickups, the Les Paul Custom Pro is a true stealth fighter in terms of versatility, hiding split-coil and phase switching within its straightforward-looking control layout, plus a useful "kill switch" for contemporary stutter effects. All this, and the Les Paul Custom Pro boasts killer looks, too, with a luscious highly-figured maple top.

As with the best Les Pauls crafted since the early '50s, the Les Paul Custom Pro starts with the legendary tonewood pairing of a solid carved maple top glued to a mahogany body, strategically channeled to enhance resonance and reduce weight. Marrying maple's clarity and definition to mahogany's richness and depth produces a tonal complexity that no single-wood guitar has ever matched, and degrees of resonance and sustain that are only further enhanced by the deep-set quarter-sawn mahogany neck with 17-degree back-angled headstock. Optimum playability is insured by a fast but comfortably rounded neck profile, and a final set up on Gibson Custom's computer controlled PLEK machine, including a PLEK-cut Corian nut. Traditional body and fingerboard binding, acrylic trapezoid fingerboard inlays, and single-ply plastic pickguard emphasize the Les Paul Custom Pro's heritage, and make the incredible versatility that lies beneath it all even more surprising.

Probe the beating heart of the Les Paul Custom Pro Electric Guitar with AAA Maple Top from Gibson Custom, and you find a deceptively cunning switching array powered by two of Gibson's most impressive pickups. The BurstBucker 2 in the neck position and BurstBucker 3 in the bridge are crafted in the image of the original PAF humbuckers of the late '50s, with unpolished Alnico II magnets and unevenly wound coils for that characteristic edge and bite heard in great vintage pickups. Each pickup has been wound with four-conductor wire to enable a complex array of switching possibilities. Push-pull switches on each pickup's independent volume pot provides coil splitting for convincing single-coil sounds, while the bridge pickup's push-pull tone control provides reverse-phase switching, and the neck pickup's tone pot doubles as a useful "kill switch." Add it all up, and there's a startling array of tonal options from this straightforward-looking Les Paul. It's all anchored by the legendary pairing of a nickel-plated ABR-1 Tune-o-matic bridge and nickel-plated stopbar tailpiece, with high-performance kidney button Grover tuners to keep you tight and in tune.