Gibson basses. When Burt calls.

[MVE]

…Long and Short of it.

I would start a marketing campaign about how “everyone else” has the 34” scale all wrong and release a 36” with two PUs for bright rock bass playing and a 30” (fretless focused) violin bass with a single pu and piezo bridge for jazz playing.

Marketing 101, make something different and then convince people why they “need” it.

 

[Koshchei]

If I the CEO of Gibson calls in his right hand man Burt, and tells him to find someone with fresh ideas to run the bass guitar department, and you get the call from Burt. What changes would you bring?

1) Stop vexatious lawsuits against small companies who make a better product. The public doesn’t look kindly on rent seeking.

2) Fix the headstock angle. Detachable headstocks are not a feature.

3) Stop treating basses as the ugly sibling of guitars. What works for a guitar does not necessarily work for a bass. Invest some R&D to build a comfortable and useful bass, and then keep making it until popular opinion shifts.

 

[WillyW]

Ring…. Ring…. “Hello…. Ohh hey Burt, what’s up…. Uhhuh… you’re gonna do what? Uhhhuh, Wait this isn’t Burton Cummins…. CLICK”

 

[AboutSweetSue]

Who is Burt?

 

[5StringBlues]

Who is Burt?

A lonesome cowboy?

 

[Hues]

Make all their necks as comfortable as the Les Paul Junior Tribute.....

 

[JW56789]

IF I were in the new regime at Gibson:

Re-Issue the Ripper. To my mind, the closest they ever came to a mainstream bass that would compete honestly with the rest of the market. Traditional EB's are married to that tone, and T-Birds often struggle with neck dive. Contact Seymour, use his Ripper pickups, use the HipShot replacement Gibson bridge and update the rotary switch functions. The re-issue they attempted some years back was still-born alongside the originals.

A subtle fine-tuning of the Thunderbird (puh-leeze go to UltraLight keys !) by smart engineers would cure the neck dive. Offer them with Nordstrand passives or let Lindy Fralin take a whack at updated pickups. It's iconic, but just needs a little careful fine-tuning to really make it a useful alternative. Do NOT give up the neckthru construction, and add the Hipshot bridge.

A new version of the Victory Bass: Easier as they weren't as iconic as their other offerings. Take about a 1/2" out of an often heavy body, streamline the slightly-too-big headstock, and work with EMG or Bart for replacement pickups and tone network, and keep that slanted neck pickup, a visual landmark for these. Make this a sophisticated choice, in various woods.

And finally, what with the selling-like-hotcakes Jack Cassady's, a real, ES-based long scale bass, fretted and fretless, within the genuine Gibson line.

Despite my frequent snipes ('Gibson Bass is an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or government intelligence') with a little careful development and input from accomplished players, the roots are there. They just need to go to finishing school. Gibson basses always seemed to me the way bass guitars in the early days were also-ran, extra income products made by a guitar company. Ease them into a product identity where they finally feel and look like basses built by a bass company, they might laugh all the way to the bank.

Stranger things . . . . . have happened.

Quoting myself from a thread earlier this year.

You have to make the commitment to be a REAL player in the bass business.

I'd also go with having lines of classic re-issues, and new axes or resto-mod versions of their classics.

Add a real 335-style EB (and here you can with a few tweaks use this for a Gibson brand Jack Casady). Investigate whether a Jazz Box styled F-hole archtop bass is doable and makes sense. Imagine a cross of a Super 400 and a Takamine B10 !

Revive the solid-body Chet Atkins format to work for a short- or medium scale bass with Rick Turner's nylon ABM strings.

A medium-scale LP Bass so the proportions will look right, not the recent ones with the wrong peghead and the bridge pushed back to the rim of the body.

Make provisions for five-string, left-hand, and fretless where it makes sense.

And add a Custom Shop Menu for the More Money Than Sense club.

Use the vintage parts where right (TBirds look best with the chrome pickups in chrome rings), but be sure and reach out to guys like Hipshot, Babicz, EMG, Fralin, and the best aftermarket suppliers, as we'd see on other competitive brands.

Carefully consider whether so-so Steinberger and Tobias copies are really worth the money . . . . and the dent in your reputation from the bad memories of the old days and just how meh these axes are. You want Classic Vibe or Vintage Modified, NOT Affinitys.

No, I'm not Burt.

 

[two fingers]

Chambered body Victory bass.

Other than this one throwback to history, I think a fresh lineup is needed. Young players will drive the sales numbers necessary to make basses a worthwhile endeavor for Gibson. Let's face it. If EVERYBODY on TB who would actually buck up and buy his / her ideal Gibson bass custom built without compromise at fair market price, I predict Gibson would sell 200 basses. Why would they bother? The answer is that they don't.

Gibson will need to attract a different group through cool, innovative products marketed directly at them. They will need to ignore the people who complain about companies rehashing S.O.S., but don't buy anything new or retro from said companies. Those people buy used Jazz Basses and used Stingrays and brag about the great deal they got.

I think Gibson got close with the 2013 - 2019 EB series. If they would have bumped out-of-box quality a little more and offered something a bit more exciting than natural finish or matte black, I think it would have done ALOT better. It checked alot of the boxes that many players clamor for in a bass. It really is a great bass that is now another underselling, discontinued item in the giant list of such items.

Exactly this. Gibson has the data. They have all the sales numbers they need to figure out what works and what doesn't.

If they made a reissue Ripper or Grabber it would sell (likely) DOZENS not hundreds or thousands....especially if it were $2,000 or more. (It would have to be made in Mexico, Eastern Europe or Asia to be any less...and that would offend even more people than the price tag would.)

If they made a big hollow body bass, it would sell dozens, not hundreds or thousands.

If they made another bird, it would be the WRONG bird. It would be berated for not being reverse enough, or be too reverse, or not having the proper controls ot pickups or tuners or color offerings.

Gibson sells a zillion guitars per year. They do fine with guitars. If they had EVER done fine with basses, they would be actively pursuing bass business.

Everybody seems to think their dream bass would be a huge seller. That's simply not true. There's not a vintage EB style that would sell worth a crap as far as real numbers. There's not a Les Paul bass, not a bird, not a Victort or Liberty, not a Grabber or Ripper that would sell thousands and thousands of units per year. Period. It just wouldn't happen.

 

[deff]

First thing I would do is make new pickups sound more in line with modern players. Second I'd realize that ergonomics is a major factor in modern bass designs and I'd design a new line accordingly using a lot of maple and other woods known for being rugged yet inexpensive in order to get the price down to what people are willing to pay.
Third I'd reissue some older designs with some modern upgrades that I said earlier. Mahogany necks replaced with maple, snappier pickups instead of mud, and absolutely no more 3 point raised bridge. Granted the older loyalists will hate the new reissues but if those guys bought new basses we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Last, give Epiphone the ability to make all of these as well in order to compete at all price points. This is important because it give an entry point to new players, who you then sell an upgraded USA Gibson to 5 years down the road. IMO this is why Squier/Fender, Ibanez and the rest continue to do well.

Edit also not to be dramatic but whoever has been in charge of QC I'd have security escort them out of the building.

Actually the current run of EB pickups are pretty fantastic sounding. It's simply that only a handfull of people have used them and there's not a whole lot of hype out there. I'm not exactly sure about what specific criteria you have for more "modern" is though.

 

[deff]

Exactly this. Gibson has the data. They have all the sales numbers they need to figure out what works and what doesn't.

If they made a reissue Ripper or Grabber it would sell (likely) DOZENS not hundreds or thousands....especially if it were $2,000 or more. (It would have to be made in Mexico, Eastern Europe or Asia to be any less...and that would offend even more people than the price tag would.)

If they made a big hollow body bass, it would sell dozens, not hundreds or thousands.

If they made another bird, it would be the WRONG bird. It would be berated for not being reverse enough, or be too reverse, or not having the proper controls ot pickups or tuners or color offerings.

Gibson sells a zillion guitars per year. They do fine with guitars. If they had EVER done fine with basses, they would be actively pursuing bass business.

Everybody seems to think their dream bass would be a huge seller. That's simply not true. There's not a vintage EB style that would sell worth a crap as far as real numbers. There's not a Les Paul bass, not a bird, not a Victort or Liberty, not a Grabber or Ripper that would sell thousands and thousands of units per year. Period. It just wouldn't happen.

I would argue that there are at least a few smaller manufacturers making RD style basses that sell quite well. I think that Gibson would have trouble competing with those companies who have taking points from that design concept.

 

[Engle]

First thing I would do is make new pickups sound more in line with modern players. Second I'd realize that ergonomics is a major factor in modern bass designs and I'd design a new line accordingly using a lot of maple and other woods known for being rugged yet inexpensive in order to get the price down to what people are willing to pay.
Third I'd reissue some older designs with some modern upgrades that I said earlier. Mahogany necks replaced with maple, snappier pickups instead of mud, and absolutely no more 3 point raised bridge. Granted the older loyalists will hate the new reissues but if those guys bought new basses we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Last, give Epiphone the ability to make all of these as well in order to compete at all price points. This is important because it give an entry point to new players, who you then sell an upgraded USA Gibson to 5 years down the road. IMO this is why Squier/Fender, Ibanez and the rest continue to do well.

Edit also not to be dramatic but whoever has been in charge of QC I'd have security escort them out of the building.

Isn’t this what you described?
EB Bass 4-String 2018

 

[five7]

A Gibson version of a d -rock 5 string that costs less and is just as good.

 

[two fingers]

I would argue that there are at least a few smaller manufacturers making RD style basses that sell quite well. I think that Gibson would have trouble competing with those companies who have taking points from that design concept.

I don't think that the total sales of every RD influenced bass annually from every company making them reaches into the thousands. As such, it wouldn't be worth Gibson's time to mess with it. Basses influenced by the various birds? Possibly. But, then again, Gibson couldn't make ALL of the birds. So which one(s)?

Nah. They have crunched the numbers over and over. If making basses were viable for them, they would already be doing it. They didn't make a corporate decision to be "anti bass". They simply looked at the numbers and said "Why bother?" for the most part.

 

[blue4]

Isn’t this what you described?
EB Bass 4-String 2018

That is what I described. They need to do more of that and actually support it by putting them in stores. I have 3 GC, and two other music stores around that I've been in countless times since 2018. Never seen or heard of it.

 

[Fun With Dirt]

A Les Paul SG Custom in classic white with gold hardware. Thunderbird pickups in the neck and middle position. Mudbucker in the neck. Not that I think it will sell. Just want one without dealing with the Custom Shop backlog. lol

 

[Deleted member 165050]

Add a real 335-style EB (and here you can with a few tweaks use this for a Gibson brand Jack Casady). Investigate whether a Jazz Box styled F-hole archtop bass is doable and makes sense. Imagine a cross of a Super 400 and a Takamine B10 !

I'm in! Where do I sign?

 

[Grapevine921]

I'm liking the ideas I read through hear about a short scale non reverse T bird. I think they'd have an easy winner. Put plenty of chrome on it and price it as close to the Les Paul junior bass as they can.

 

[Deleted member 165050]

Nah. They have crunched the numbers over and over. If making basses were viable for them, they would already be doing it. They didn't make a corporate decision to be "anti bass". They simply looked at the numbers and said "Why bother?" for the most part.

But Gibson does make basses, and always has. It's just that basses aren't their core business.

I even saw a Gibson acoustic cello for sale once, wish I'd bought that...

 

[two fingers]

But Gibson does make basses, and always has. It's just that basses aren't their core business.

I even saw a Gibson acoustic cello for sale once, wish I'd bought that...

But the sentiment here is that they don't make ENOUGH basses (as in different models) and that they don't take basses very seriously.

I'm simply saying that if it made sense economically to do so, they would already be doing it.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

100%. Build 'proper' Steinbergers, or give the brand back to Ned.

I thought the molds were shot and the costs to make new molds too high to justify given the niche market. Thus, Moses necks were used and then Moses went away.