Quote:
Originally Posted by RLetson
When I Googled the Citation model, I noticed two things that account for price and one that probably accounts for acoustic quality. First, everything about that model, from materials to features, screams "top of the line." Second, these were limited-run instruments that clearly must have gotten a lot more individual attention from the builders--so labor costs would be significantly higher. And if the builders spent a lot of time carving and voicing the box, that is likely to affect the instrument's voice, perhaps even the consistency of voice. (I suspect that a custom-shop model is more likely to be influenced by the oversight or even hands-on attention of a single craftsman.)
I'm sure I have offered this anecdote before, but it has a bearing here. Nearly thirty years ago, my friend Tom Crandall built an archtop in his grad-student apartment. He used nearly all hand tools (though he says he did have some kind of power tool to rough out the top and back), and once the guitar was structurally complete but unfinished, he started to voice it by stringing it up, playing, then unstringing and refining the top with a finger-plane, then playing, then planing again, and so on, until it had the voice he wanted. (The top has a marked recurve around its perimeter.) Then he French-polished it. The result is a very responsive and flexible instrument. And if built today, it would certainly have to have a five-figure price-tag (as big-name archtops do) to be a viable commercial item.
I suspect the Citations have something like that degree of labor and attention to sonic as well as cosmetic detail in them, even if they're not necessarily the product of a single pair of hands/ears. Which would also explain why, say, L-5s exhibit such sonic variability. There's only so much finesse one can expect of a commercially viable line of guitars.
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Well said and thanks for posting this. You said it much better than I could have done.
Edit: A good friend and pro musician who knew the people at Gibson who built these, told me that there were only two people involved. Unfortunately neither is alive today, so I doubt that any more will be built. Apparently, Gibson selected their top two luthiers, put them off by themselves and had them build limited runs of these, using only their finest selections of wood. They only built a handful each year of those years that they did the builds. The Super 4000 I mentioned earlier was only built for a short time with the idea of being a collector's item, while the Citation was simply to be the best that Gibson could produce, however many would be made. Each run of Citations was over a span of a couple of years, and I think there were three of these spanning from the late 60s-early 70s, then mid-90s, and then mid-2000s.
From what I understand, the Citation wasn't the only model that was built apart from the rest of the factory. Apparently the Johnny Smith and a few others were too.
There isn't much to be found about these, but here is what I found (and I found these after I had purchased mine and got a bit curious):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Citation
https://www.vintageguitarandbass.com...n/Citation.php
https://uniqueguitar.blogspot.com/20...nd-gibson.html
https://www.frettedamericana.com/pro...ibson-citation
Tony