Mr. Jelly, plenty of us on the AGF have personal history with the Gibson Nick Lucas model - in my case, both with the originals from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, and also with the modern guitars that Gibson has built sporadically since the 1990’s - but not all of us have yet had a chance to respond to your query.
I’ve played a bunch of them, including originals in maple, mahogany or Brazilian rosewood, in 12 fret, 13 fret and 14 fret configurations. I’ve also played a number of modern ones, all of which have had maple backs and sides.
The Gibson Nick Lucas model is one of those guitars that sounds terrific in the right hands, probably one of the greatest steel string acoustic guitar designs EVER. But here’s the catch: it also accurately reflects your skill level as a guitarist.
I’m a pretty good guitarist, but not a great one. So in my hands the Gibson Nick Lucas model sounds pretty good.
Not great.
What you’ll find with these guitars is that the players who sound absolutely fabulous on them tend to be highly skilled fingerpickers who can play more than one line at at a time. These guitars sound GREAT in their hands, because of the clarity: Scott Joplin rags sound magnificent on them because you can hear every melody note and every bass line.
But as strumming guitars, they’re kind of a mismatch. Yes, Bob Dylan used a natural finish Brazilian rosewood Nick Lucas model on a couple of albums early in his career (before the guitar got stolen,) but if you listen to those albums you can hear that he really didn’t get all that great a tone out of the guitar.
Fortunately, the songs he was writing at the time were so riveting that nobody cared much about the guitar tone...
Another characteristic of the Nick Lucas models is that they’re very projective, and the player can’t really hear exactly what the tone sounds like out front. This is true of all acoustic guitars to an extent, but it’s especially true of the Nick Lucas model. I suspect that Slide496’s guitar sounded better out front than he thought it did, because that’s very typical of the Nick Lucas model.
Anyway, as many times as I’ve tried to get a great tone out of Gibson Nick Lucas models, I’ve never been able to do that to my satisfaction. But the same guitars in the hands of others have sounded much better.
So I know that the lackluster performance that I could coax out of those guitars has been the result of my own limitations as a guitarist, not the limitations of the guitars themselves.
Short version: Gibson Nick Lucas models are marvelous, even magnificent instruments, but it’s necessary to have the right touch and be at the necessary skill level to get the most out of them.
Hope that makes sense.
Wade Hampton Miller
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