Music Hey everybody, it's Will here. Hope everybody is doing well and I want to take a minute at the start of this to thank all of the new subscribers and supporters of the channel. I'm really enjoying getting to engage with everyone and hearing all your positive feedback and comments. It's really setting a great start for this 365 days of guitar series. Today's guitar review is a courtesy again of my buddy Colin Baker of the band Chosen Along. I'll put some links down in the description below so you can check them out. For today's review, we're having a look at a 1980 Gibson Howard Roberts Fusion. Now Howard Roberts is somebody that even if you don't recognize the name, you have certainly heard or been aware of his influence on music over the years. He was a noted session guitarist and educator. He's worked with everybody from Dean Martin to Eddie Cochran, to Phil Spector, to Chet Atkins, to the monkeys, just to name a few. He's performed session work on noted shows like Peter Gunn, The Brady Bunch, The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy and Benanza. Again, just to name a few. His recorded catalog of work is extensive. He's up there with somebody like Tommy Tedesco as far as the amount of things he has performed on. Using various instruments, actually not even just guitar. I believe he also played mandolin and possibly bass and a few other things. As an educator, he's also quite highly regarded. He's written for guitar player magazine, written some books, I believe, and actually co-founded the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles in 1977. Howard Roberts was primarily a Gibson guy, although interestingly, his first signature for it was with the epiphone company, although at the time they were owned by Gibson. It was a sort of a modified Gibson L5. It had a single pickup in the neck and a round sound hole. The fingerboard, I think, extended in a little further. He played these epiphone guitars until probably the early 70s, around the time that epiphone moved production to Japan. Eventually Gibson produced that version of the Howard Roberts model in the mid 70s. In 1979, it came out with an updated model, something a little more versatile, I guess we'll say. The original Howard Roberts is a decidedly jazz instrument, whereas this is more suitable if you want to play jazz, rock, blues, fusion, and actually the reason for the fusion branding was to market it as being a very versatile guitar. I have a hybrid between a 335, like I have behind me, the thinner guitar with the center block, and a Gibson 175, which is the thicker hollow guitar used by people like Steve Howe. This is an all maple guitar. It's maple top, maple back and sides, lovely figuring on that. The neck is a three piece maple neck. The hardware is made by Schaller, the Gibson branded tuners, and it has the Nashville style bridge. Interestingly, and I'll try to capture this on camera, maybe I'll just put a picture in, but there's actually little inserts in the underneath the bridge here, and I learned from reading the original Gibson literature that these were actually called the sustain sisters, and it was designed to add more of a direct coupling or something to add sustain. But it was an interesting thing. I'd never heard the term sustain sisters until seeing it in the literature for this guitar. This has an Ebony fingerboard. The pickups are a Gibson humbucking in the neck, a regular one, and then a so-called Gibson super humbucking in the back. Kind of like how Gibson today does like a 57 classic, and then a 57 classic plus. The only other thing that a lot of these did come with a Gibson TP-6 fine-tuning tailpiece, but this particular one has a stop tail. It may have been changed over the years. It's hard to say. Other than Howard Roberts, the most notable person who played a Gibson Howard Roberts Fusion, the original was Alex Lifeson of Rush around the 1980-ish timeframe, and it was used a lot on stage in the studio during that time period. Gibson in later years actually made variations, updates on the Howard Roberts Fusion, and they were the Howard Roberts Fusion II, as well as the Howard Roberts Fusion III. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to listen to this discussion portion, and I hope you enjoy hearing some sound samples of the Gibson Howard Roberts Fusion from 1980. If you enjoyed this 365 days of guitar content, please feel free to subscribe. I would really appreciate it. Share with your friends, like, comment, whatever you can do. It all helps. And thank you very much. Enjoy hearing the Howard Roberts.