Alicia, our host from Saturday's guitar forum get-together, had this magnificent custom Gibson Byrdland electric guitar! Her husband Jim, gave us the 411 on how he and Alicia were treated like royalty when they went to pick up this guitar at the Gibson Custom Shop factory. They had sent a bunch of candy there as a "thank you" gift and I guess it's true that you win more hearts with sweets than anything else! Either that, or the guys at Gibson are really just candy freaks!
The really interesting thing about this guitar is that it's a LEFTY version! According to Alicia, for all these years of making the Byrdland model (since 1955), none of the custom Lefty models had truss rod covers that were custom made. This meant that once you placed the truss rod cover on a lefty model, you can't read the name Byrdland right-side up! They were always upside down! But you can clearly see that on Alicia's guitar, the name is written the way it should be read. Well, this could be the only Gibson Byrdland out there that has this, because it was custom made for her.
When Alicia asked why it had never been done before, the only thing the guys at Gibson could come up with was, "We never thought about it before!"
Interesting...
By the way, to get Alicia to fetch the guitar to show it to all of us, Jim asked her to "Flip out the Byrd!" Good thing she didn't flip HIM the bird... lol
:)
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