Golden-era Gibson

The slope-shouldered, punchier voice of golden-era Gibson flat-tops has its own modern custodians, and the strongest edge here is employment: Kevin Kopp spent ten years in Gibson's Bozeman Custom Shop under Ren Ferguson before opening Kopp Guitars in 1999, and his slope-shoulders and advanced jumbos carry that decade directly — Leo Kottke plays two. Dale Fairbanks describes his work plainly as vintage-inspired flat-tops in the pre-war Gibson tradition: featherweight builds, hide-glue construction, a dry, punchy voice, made in the Burlington, Vermont workshop he shares with Adam Buchwald of Circle Strings. And from Canterbury, Alister Atkin — who also builds in the pre-war Martin idiom — looks to the forties: his Forty Three studies the wartime J-45, his Historic L1 the small-body Gibsons, and he has built replicas of a 1943 J-45 for the Buddy Holly Foundation. The territory runs less to strict replication than to homage, but the reference is just as specific — the lightly built flat-tops of Gibson's golden era, heard dry and punchy rather than big and ringing.