Gibson Nighthawk

The Gibson Nighthawk was a short-lived electric guitar model line, manufactured by Gibson. The Nighthawk represented a radical change from traditional Gibson designs featuring many elements more commonly associated with Fender guitars. The Nighthawk superficially resembled the Les Paul, Gibson's "trademark" guitar. It had a maple top, and mahogany body.

Despite the success of other Gibson guitars, the Nighthawk was never a great commercial success; production of all models was discontinued in 1998. In July 2009 Gibson reintroduced the Nighthawk 2009.^[1]

Contents 1 Models 1.1 Regular models 1.2 Special editions 2 Pickups and controls 3 Similarities to Fender guitars 4 Notable Nighthawk players 5 External links 6 References

Models

Regular models

• The Nighthawk Custom had a flame maple top with many decorations. The headstock, body, and neck were bound, and came with crown inlays. The color options were antique natural, fireburst, and translucent amber.[2]

• The Nighthawk Standard was only bound in the body and the neck. The fingerboard inlays had a split-parallelogram pattern. The color options were fireburst, translucent amber, and vintage sunburst[3]

• The Nighthawk Special was a low cost version of the guitar, cutting out some of the purely cosmetic features of the other models in order to reduce cost. The Special had the same components as the Standard and Custom, but only the body was bound, and it had dot inlays and no holly crest headstock adornment. The color choices were ebony, heritage cherry, and vintage sunburst.[4] The price of a Nighthawk Special was about two hundred dollars less than that of a Nighthawk Standard.

Special editions

• The Landmark Series was a commemorative series of the Nighthawk, with paint & finishes uniquely representing United States national parks and monuments, as well as a transfer/decal feature indicating the national preserve it characterizes. It used 2 M-Series Mini-humbucker instead of the normal M-series mini-humbucker + M-Series Slanted humbucker.

• The Hawk was a low-cost alternative to the Nighthawk. It had normal alnico humbuckers instead of the M-series that the Nighthawk used, and it was plainer then the Special.[5]

• The Nighthawk 2009 was a limited-edition reissue of the Nighthawk released in 2009. It features a translucent amber finish, a P90 pickup in the neck position and an alnico humbucking pickup in the bridge position, and a fixed bridge. [6]

Pickups and controls

There were 2 alternatives to the Nighthawk Custom, Standard, and Special. The normal 2 pickup version, or the 3 pickup version that added an NSX single coil to the middle. The 2 pickup version only had 5 tonal varieties in all, but the 3 pickup had 10 tonal varieties due to the push/pull tone knob. While the tone knob is pushed down, humbuckers work as usual humbuckers, but if it's pulled up, they divide into single coil variations to sound more like Fender guitars.

Similarities to Fender guitars

With its set neck and maple-on-mahogany body, the Gibson Nighthawk was still very much structurally and aesthetically a Gibson. But certain key aspects of the Nighthawk design took it into Fender territory. The slanted bridge humbucker had less gain than the regular Gibson humbucker and had a bright, sharp tone, closer to that associated with Telecasters and Stratocasters. The mini-humbucker neck pickup had a mellower and warmer tone than the bright bridge pickup, closer to the sound of the neck pickup in a Stratocaster than the regular Gibson humbucker. The middle pickup, which was only on available on some Nighthawk models, is a single-coil design almost identical to the middle pickup of the Stratocaster and so sounds quite similar. The scale length of the guitar (the length of the string between the nut and the bridge) was the standard length used by Fender, 25½", rather than the normal Gibson length of 24¾". This important difference, increasing the tension for a given gauge of strings, made the guitar feel more like a Fender from a playing perspective and added to the tonal similarities. The smaller-than-normal Gibson body was closer in mass to a Fender guitar than a typical Gibson Les Paul and the string-through-body bridge is similar to the system used on Telecasters.

Some models of the Custom used a Floyd Rose locking vibrato unit instead of a traditional Gibson Vibrola or Bigsby vibrato tailpiece. The Floyd Rose has some similarity to the tremolo system used by Fender Stratocasters, although Stratocasters do not normally use locking vibrato systems.

Notable Nighthawk players

External links

• Gibson Nighthawk Landmark Series

References