One that got away... Little Lucille

As I've hinted at, I don't generally get rid of guitars. I tend to buy more and keep them. However, I did let one get away a while back, and I'm still not sure if I made the right choice. Probably not. It was a Gibson Little Lucille, which is the BB King signature series of the Blues Hawk. They were only made a couple or three years from what I recall, and this one was from 2000.

The F hole cutouts were always striking to me. The gold hardware and knob tops really set off nicely against the black body. The soap bar pickups (P90's) were very bluesy, but never what I was really looking for. I really did like that there were fine tuners like a Floyd would have even without having any sort of tremolo. However, once we get past that, I started to lose interest in what the guitar had.

Even though it looked cool, the low output and strange control configuration (master volume, master tone, 3-way pickup selector, and 6 way rotary Varitone control switch with "pull to bypass" function) was awesome for blues. However, if you weren't playing blues, it didn't seem to have much else. I would label it as a one trick pony, which was probably perfect for BB King since he didn't venture outside of blues and could afford to have some of his other "Lucille" family of guitars along in case he wanted something else.

After holding on to it for a dozen plus years, I eventually traded it straight across for an Ibanez Prestige that I really like but sadly don't play enough. I'll have to talk about that in an upcoming week's post.