NSuprise!!!!GD - Vintage edition.

Mark Wein

Mark Wein

Grand Poobah
Staff member
So having a vintage guitar store so close to my house has its ups and downs. On the up side, the owner is really cool, appreciates the traffic I've sent his way via students and social media and loves to trade when I don't have ready cash. Today I brought in a box full of leftover Premier Music inventory (strings, picks, straps and other accessories junk) that I would never be able to sell and he said he could use in his store. I went with my buddy Martin and after a while of playing a ton of nice guitars and a cool little Silvertone 1481 amp that I was thinking of picking up I played this 1961 Epiphone Century:

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The guitar has new Ping tuners on it, an obviously new replacement nut and an obvious neck reset but it plays and sounds awesome. To cover the rest of the deal I'm bringing him my old Marshall Jubilee 4x12 which hasn't been used onstage since 1998 and is so beat up it has no real vintage value. At this point in time I'd rather have the guitar and I've been getting rid of all of the gear I'm not actually using. Eventually I might find a used Avatar 2x12 for my Silvertone head but I don't need it anytime soon.
 
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I absolutely love the vintage cherry red finish with the white pick guard. It is sexy as hell.
 
Gibson bought Epi in 57 and moved production to a building adjacent to the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo. Epis from the 50-60's were often straight up copies of Gibsons of the era, and rumor has it that they were made from the same wood, on the same machines, by the same people as the Gibsons. I've heard in the early days that production between the two brands overlapped so much that the person building the guitar had to look at a build sheet to determine if the guitar got an Epi headstock or a Gibson headstock neck.
 
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Neat.
I played one of the new ones a couple months ago and wondered how the vintage ones stack up. Appearance-wise, they got pretty close.
 
Tiltsta said:
Gibson bought Epi in 57 and moved production to a building adjacent to the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo. Epis from the 50-60's were often straight up copies of Gibsons of the era, and rumor has it that they were made from the same wood, on the same machines, by the same people as the Gibsons. I've heard in the early days that production between the two brands overlapped so much that the person building the guitar had to look at a build sheet to determine if the guitar got an Epi headstock or a Gibson headstock neck.
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I think that this is essentially an ES-125 but it has a 25.5" scale length, which I really dig:

Century E422T


1958-1961 Epiphone Century E422T


1961 Epiphone Century E422T


1962-1969 Epiphone Century E422T
  • 1958-1969
Body:

  • Thinline body
  • Maple top, sides & back
Neck:

  • Set Mahogany neck
  • Rosewood fingerboard with pearl dot inlays
  • Open-bood style headstock with metal plate logo (1958-1961)
  • Elongated headstock with silkscreen logo (1962-1969)
  • 25.5" scale
  • 1.68" nut width
Binding:

  • Single-ply body
Electronics:

  • One NY humbucker pickup (1958-1961)
  • One dogear P90 pickup (1961-1969)
  • 1 Vol. 1 tone control
Hardware:

  • Nickel Hardware
  • Adjustable rosewood bridge with trapeze tailpiece
  • Tortoise-shell pickguard (1958-1961)
  • White plastic pickguard (1961-1969)
Colors:

  • Sunburst
  • Royal Burgandy
 
Whats funny is that the serial # says 1961 but the headstock appearance suggests 1962 according to the pictures above.
 
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