Beets

My guitars are my favorite material possessions. I collect, but mainly for purpose. I try and get guitars that have features not found in my other guitars – woods, shapes, electronics, appearance, etc. This one has P-90 pickups, which none of my other guitars have. So today I’m gonna blab about my newest guitar, a Gibson Rick Beato signature Les Paul Special Double Cut, in sparkling burgundy.

I chose to spotlight this one first because I actually got a compliment on my playing while I was using it. I put on a slow, heavy stoner-metal type drum loop on Youtube, tuned the guitar to drop-D, and just started crunching away on some doomy riffs along with those drums. I just improvised for like 15-20 minutes and was repeatedly getting goosebumps. Arms, back, calves. I was hitting the right chords, nailing all the artificial harmonics I wanted to, and was just cracking away like I was bashing out completed songs. Natural transitions to new riffs I’d never played before, all staying in time…it was magical. So inspiring. My wife actually came downstairs to compliment me on my playing and the riffs flowing out. She’s always supportive, but this one really stood out. Like, she went out of her way to say she was impressed. Far out! Just one of those compliments that was a little more special to a music lover than, “I like your hair today.”

After a couple of minutes of jamming, I rolled off the tone knob all the way on the bridge pickup and my eyes turned into saucers – that was the fuzz sound I’ve been looking for! I’m a distortion guy, not so much a fuzz guy, but I’ve wanted to have that sound handy for variety for a long time.

I’ve tried a few fuzz pedals and have eliminated some others based on their sounds on online demos. Fuzz is a cool sound, but I just haven’t found one that works with my schedule. Fuzz tends to be either too inarticulate, too “extra,” too mid-rangey, too muffled, too much octave that makes chords flubby, etc. Nothing’s ever quite right. It might be fine for playing some Sleep riffs, but I like to play faster stuff too and that’s when it loses me.

I asked ChatGPT about it, and this is what it said:

Why the tone knob suddenly matters (a lot)

Wide coil + lower inductance than humbuckers → way more upper mid info to sculpt.

Rolling the tone back doesn’t just kill highs; it reshapes the midrange.
You’re not dulling the sound — you’re focusing it.

On the bridge pickup especially, full roll-off =
thick, vocal, cocked-wah grind without the quack or fizz.

The tone pot forms a low-pass filter that:

Kills ice-pick highs

Leaves the upper mids intact

Your amp is still distorting full signal dynamics, not a pre-mangled fuzz waveform

The pickup’s wide coil keeps harmonic content alive even as the top end collapses

So those P-90 pickups with their inherent tonal “honk” or “quack” mixed with the high frequencies pulled out with the tone knob rolled back is the magic sauce for Iommi doom fuzz! Gee, imagine that. He also used a double cut student-model Gibson (SG) with modified single coils. Wonder why I’m getting that sound?

But far be it to say that’s all it does. It actually sounds frickin’ great playing metal riffs I’d normally use humbuckers on. It’s super articulate, but obviously noisy as fuck too given that they’re still single coils. Simply roll back on the guitar volume to 8 and it’s all but gone, and then you have a couple notches left for when you need the boost. Much more functional than most knobs for humbuckers or some other single coils. Or use a noise gate. Or don’t.

Current favorite riff to play on it is the Even Flow riff. But of course, me being me, I can’t just play it straight. Gotta be obnoxious with it. So, it sounds more like Jared James Nichols and Zakk Wylde playing Even Flow than it does McCready/Gossard. Sorry/not sorry, I guess.

Clean tones? Yeah. All the spank I’m looking for with a Telecaster sound, but more grit. More gravel in the throat. Initially I was thinking of just getting the LP Junior Double Cut that only has a bridge pickup, but I’m glad I held out for the Special that has a neck pickup too. It’s slightly quieter than the bridge pickup, but perfectly mellow and so effortlessly pulls off that Clapton “woman tone” he used in Cream, when you (again) roll off the tone knob on that neck pickup.

Besides those glorious P-90’s, the other big draw to this model guitar was the lack of grain filler in the finish. As much as I love the gloss nitro finish on most Gibsons, I’ve always had a soft spot for those thin satin finishes on the cheaper Gibson models, and quintuple extra credit for the lack of grain filler. It’s sanded smooth, but yet I can still feel the grain of the wood in my hand, and as a guitar player, touch is one of my most acute senses. The gloss finishes can get sticky after playing a while, but so far, zero issues with the satin here. I’ve actually worn the satin finish off the back of the neck so it’s shiny already, you can see where it transitions to the headstock that the light refracts there, whereas it’s already reflecting light on the neck portion.

This guitar is far and away the lightest electric guitar I own (about 6.5 lbs). At one point the prevailing thought was the heavier & denser the wood, the moar toan it has. This guitar certainly proves that wrong. Not only is it the lightest guitar I have, it’s the most resonant. It’s quite loud when played unplugged, which is about as good of a green flag you can get in an electric, outside of neck feel.

I’m also a huge dork and have started naming my guitars recently. (Don’t worry, I don’t refer to my guitars as an animate woman or anything, like so many of us cringe-ass guitar players do. “She has such beautiful curves, and if you treat her just right, she’ll moan with absolute delight” etc. Gross.)

I dubbed this one “Beets,” for Rick Beato and the color. Funny thing is I don’t even really care much about Rick Beato – he’s a YouTube guitar influencer guy – so it’s ironic that I’d get his signature model. My other signature model guitars – EVH, Ritchie Blackmore, Kirk Hammett – make a lot more sense given my musical tastes. But that’s a mark of a great guitar, that someone loves it for what it is, rather than the signature on the truss rod cover.

Great job, Beets. If I ever run into you at the airport, I’ll have to corner you and tell you about it.

XOXO