Gibson Original Collection ’80s Explorer

Cooler Than the Other Side of the Pillow

Genius is rarely understood in its own time, so maybe that’s why it took guitar players twenty years to catch on to how cool Gibson Explorers are. Since Explorers are considered so iconic now, it’s hard to believe that they were a total flop when Gibson introduced them in 1958, but initial demand was so low that the first production run only consisted of thirty-eight guitars! Now that we guitar players have collectively figured out that playing an Explorer makes you look ten to twenty percent cooler than you actually are, the value of the original examples has skyrocketed, and their market value hovers around a quarter-million dollars.

Thankfully, you don’t need to mortgage your house to get your hands on one of these awesome American-made Gibson '80s Explorers from the Original Collection! Sixty years after the Explorer’s infamously cold initial introduction, Gibson has knocked it out of the park by building some of the finest pointy guitars of all time for their Original Collection. These awesome axes rank above Christopher Columbus on any reputable list of the greatest explorers of all time, so let’s take a closer look and see why they always make Wildwood employees stop in their tracks whenever they see or hear one!

The magic of the modern Explorer begins with the quality mahogany Gibson uses to make the bodies and necks. They select each cut of wood with the utmost care, and this ultimately leads to guitars of exceptional resonance and beauty. To electrify the sweet sounds these tonewoods create, Gibson called upon the services of their '80s Tribute pickups. These hellacious humbuckers have a fat, rich sound with oodles of sustain, and though they excel for heavy, aggressive genres of music, they also possess a delightful capacity for subtlety and enough versatility to handle anything from classic rock to funk to country to jazz.

That’s the '80s Explorer in a nutshell: sure, it looks flashy enough to make anyone you’re interested in romantically swoon and become weak in the knees after you bust out that two-handed tapping lick you’ve been working on (at least, that’s how it always plays out in my daydreams!), but all that murdered-out swagger belies the '80s Explorer’s incredible versatility and spectacular tone. Even if it had plain Jane looks, the '80s Explorer would still be an amazing instrument with tone in its bones. The fact that it’s cooler than Miles Davis eating ice cream in an igloo is just a bonus! We invite you to experience the joy of pointy guitars by playing an Original Collection '80s Explorer, because we know it will bring you endless inspiration (and give you 500 cool points!).