For a Gibson loyalist with a resume as action-packed as Warren Haynes’, it seemed obvious that the rock guitar veteran eventually be honored with a signature guitar.
After some Les Paul creations as part of Gibson’s Inspired By series in 2022 and 2023, a fully-fledged, P-90 stocked signature arrived earlier this year, bearing his name – but, he says, he wasn’t convinced about the idea at first.
“I've played Gibson all my life, and they've just been really wonderful to me through the years,” he tells Setlist.fm. “So when they [Gibson] first started approaching me about making a signature model Les Paul years ago, maybe decades ago, my first reaction was, ‘Well, there's only one Les Paul.’
“Les Paul invented the electric guitar, and I happened to play a Les Paul guitar. There's nothing really special about it, so I kind of prolonged the conversation.”
Haynes liked his Les Paul as it was. A signature build would have been pretty straightforward, he understood that. Were a model to bear his name, it had to stick its head above the stock guitar parapet in some way.
“Eventually they were like, ‘Well, if you come up with some stuff about yours that's very different…’” Haynes explains. The firm was desperate to twist his arms, and this change of tact struck a chord with the guitarist.
“So we were able to make a Les Paul that was different than normal,” he says, with work beginning after Gibson had first copied his 1961 ES 335. “We're talking technical shop now, but the big difference is that it has P-90 pickups instead of humbucker pickups. And that's not normal, but I really like it a lot. I think they did a fantastic job. It was an honor to do that.”
Having spent most of his career playing humbucker guitars, the switch to P-90 pickups, which sit somewhere between the bite of a single-coil and the girth of humbuckers, was a shock. Even for Haynes. But he says change is a good thing.
“I’m really loving the hum-free P-90s,” he beams. “It’s a really cool tonal change, and the boost offers even more tonal options.”
The move comes after gear guru Joe Bonamassa made a bold claim that “most people who are real dyed-in-the-wool Gibson people will say behind closed doors that their favorite pickup is a P-90”.
“They're cleaner,” he argues. “There's a sparkle on top that a humbucking pickup doesn't get.” And that argument is compounded with his gorgeous Copper Iridescent Epiphone Les Paul signature. So, are we witnessing a P-90 renaissance?
“We’re all looking for new inspiration,” Haynes believes. “Some of us have been playing humbuckers for a long, long time. Most of the sounds I enjoy come from the guitar anyway. I’m not depending on pedals for the majority of the sounds that I use. I like to change the volume knob on the guitar to get a lot of different sounds that way, and P90s are definitely great for that.” A P-90 Firebird is also expected to follow in its wake.
Haynes has also sat down with Guitarist to discuss the greatest riffs of his career and the stories behind them after he reunited with Derek Trucks to finish an old Duane Allman song as a tribute to the late great.
