Gibson Explorer

Posted by in Gibson Electric Guitars

The Gibson Explorer guitar is one of the most daring designs in the annuls of Rock History. Especially considering this bad boy was born over 50 years ago! Back then things were pretty conservative, so you can imagine that this thing shook up the establishment back in the day.

Score another “can’t-miss-this-guitar-from-a-mile” for Gibson.

A Slow Start for the Explorer

The Gibson Explorer guitar got a slow start. You could say this thing was“ahead of it’s time,”… by about 20 years! Introduced at the same time as the Flying V, these Toxic Twins were aimed at the “Space Age” craze everyone was fixated on in 1958.The trouble was that people didn’t really dig either design at the time, and Gibson stopped making the Explorer and the Flying V after only a short time.

It wasn’t until other guitar makers starting churning out copies in the 1970s that Gibson brought back the Explorer.

You could buy a quarter million dollar house (or a million guitar picks!) with the money made from selling one of the original Explorers today! True production numbers are a mystery…gone forever, but experts estimate that the original number of Explorers created is less than 50.

U2′s the Edge talks about his Explorer & Rig

Prime Players of the Gibson Explorer:

  1. James Hetfield
  2. Eric Clapton
  3. The Edge

Playing the Explorer

The Explorer (known as the Xplorer today) stays in line with Gibson’s “two humbucker, 3-way toggle switch” design philosophy.The tone, of course, is very warm and full. If you use the bridge pickup, though, you get an idea of why this is such a popular “metal” guitar: that tone cuts!

On the flip side, that same biting tone is what made some of U2′s The Edge have such an incredible shimmering clean tone, so this guitar is definitely versatile.

Like the Flying V, the Explorer really stands out onstage and produces a really reliable tone in the studio!

 

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