Medium Cool

Striking the middle ground between its Thinline brethren, Gibson's ES-345TD remains a versatile, if underrated, gem.

IN THE LATE 1950s, Gibson was in the last throes of trying to make its flagship Les Paul solidbody fly in a skeptical market.

Adding a luscious sunburst finish in 1958 to the humbucking pickups that arrived in '57 hadn't quite done it, even if those same ingredients would in future decades make it one of the most desirable vintage guitars of all time.

But the company must have felt confident about the semihollow archtop it introduced in '58. The ES-335 wasn't allowed to linger on its own for long before it was joined by not one but two moredeluxe variations on the theme: the top-of-the-line ES-355, introduced later in 1958, and the ES-345, introduced in 1959, which sat right between the "3" and the "5" in features and adornments.

Initially called the ES-345T (for "Thinline") and later the ES-345TD for "Thinline, Dual pickup," it had the same basic construction as the ES-335 and ES-355, made with a semihollow body built from laminated maple top, back and sides, and a solid-maple block down the center. To this was glued a mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard that was less fancy than the ES-355's ebony with blocks, but its split-parallelogram inlays were still dressier than the ES-335's rosewood with dot markers, and, later, small blocks. Further elegance was found in the ES-345's four-ply top binding and gold-plated hardware, while everything else was virtually identical to the appointments of its less-expensive sibling.

The main exception was the deluxe wiring loom with six-position Varitone switch and stereo output, features that it shared with the ES-355. This configuration sent each pickup to different legs of the included "Y" cord for routing to individual amps or a single stereo combo, like Gibson's own GA-79T.