Gibson Custom, working with the Cerati estate, has built 60 recreations of Gustavo Cerati's 1965 ES-335. Sixties Cherry, aged by the Murphy Lab, factory double pickguards, Grover kidney button tuners, and a B7 Bigsby. It ships in a custom hardshell case with a leather back pad and a certificate of authenticity.
You can buy one at exactly one place: Gibson Garage Miami, in person or by phone, starting September 18. That's it. Sixty guitars, one counter.
I spent twenty-five years behind a counter like that one, and I want to tell you what's actually interesting about this instrument, because it isn't the limited-edition math.
The Guitar Behind the Guitar
Cerati bought the original 1965 ES-335TD at Rudy's Music in New York in the mid-'90s. Here's the part that matters to me: he didn't customize it. He bought it that way. The second pickguard, the leather back pad, the Bigsby — that work was already done when he found it, by somebody whose name nobody recorded.
That's how most great guitars actually happen. Somebody modifies an instrument for reasons that made sense to them, it sits in a shop for a decade, and then the right player walks in and the modifications turn out to be exactly what that person needed. I've watched it happen maybe a dozen times in my career and it never stops being remarkable.
That guitar then went straight into the three most important nights of Soda Stereo's public life: the 1996 MTV Unplugged session, the 1997 El Último Concierto farewell, and the 2007 Me Verás Volver reunion. Cerati's early years were a Jackson San Dimas — that's the Nada Personal sound, and it's a completely different animal. The 335 is the second act.
A word on the year, since Gibson chose to put 1965 on the label rather than build a generic 335. 1965 is a transitional year for that model and not a flattering one to collectors. The neck was getting narrower at the nut, and the stop tailpiece had been giving way to the trapeze on many examples. Guitars from '65 have historically appraised below the '59-'64 run for exactly those reasons.
Which is why I like this release. Gibson didn't reach for the blue-chip year. They built the guitar the man actually played, transitional neck and all, and put a Bigsby on it because his had one. That's a tribute rather than a product, and after twenty-five years of appraising instruments I can tell you the difference is usually visible from across a room.
Gibson has not published a price that I can find, and a Murphy Lab Custom 335 with a Bigsby at a sixty-unit run is not going to be modest. If you want one, call Miami. That's the whole distribution strategy and I'd be lying if I pretended otherwise.
Now the Part You Can Use
Here's my honest assessment of the tone question: the ES-335 was the least unusual thing in Gustavo Cerati's signal path.
A semi-hollow with a pair of humbuckers into an amp is a sound. It's a great sound, it's been a great sound since 1958, and a Reverend or an Epiphone or a Sire will get you into the neighborhood for a very small fraction of what that Miami phone call is going to cost. Anyone who tells you a $6,000 semi-hollow gets you to Cerati's records is selling something.
What was unusual was everything downstream. Cerati ran a TC Electronic G-System — a rack-grade multi-effects unit controlled from a floorboard at the front of the stage. An EBS MultiComp is listed among his pedals on his official site. By his 2009 touring rig there was a Pigtronix Polysaturator in there.
Read that list again, because it tells you what kind of player he was. A compressor, a saturator, and a programmable effects system with genuine stereo routing. That is a processed signal chain, deliberately, at a time when the fashionable position was that processing was cheating. He was building textures, not chasing an amp.
And every piece of that is free in a modeler you already own.
Building the Cerati Architecture on a Modeler
Three things do most of the work. None of them require a 335.
1. Compressor first, and commit to it.
The EBS MultiComp is an always-on studio-style compressor, not a country squish box. Put a compressor block at the front of your chain — Deluxe Comp at Threshold -28dB, Ratio 2:1, Attack around 60ms, Mix 60% is a sane starting point — and leave it on for the whole set. The attack figure is the one people get wrong; too fast and you kill the pick transient that makes a clean semi-hollow part audible in a dense mix. Our compressor placement guide covers the pre-amp versus post-amp decision, and for this sound it genuinely belongs in front.
2. Saturation instead of amp gain.
A Polysaturator is a low-to-medium gain dirt box with a lot of headroom, and it is doing something different from cranking an amp. Set your amp model clean or barely breaking up and get your grit from a drive block with the Gain low and the Level high. You want the harmonic content without the compression that comes with a saturated power stage, because the compressor in front is already handling dynamics and two stages of compression in series is how clean parts turn to cardboard.
3. Stereo, and stereo that survives.
This is the piece people skip and it is the piece that makes those records sound like those records. The G-System's value was a genuine stereo effects path — modulation and delay spread across two outputs rather than one signal with a chorus on it.
If you're running to a PA in stereo, use it: a stereo chorus or a dual delay with slightly different times on each side. If you're running mono into a house console — which is most of us, most of the time — you need to check that your wide patch doesn't collapse into a phasey mess when the sound person sums it. Our stereo width tricks that survive mono piece is the whole procedure, and it takes about ten minutes to verify.
For chain order on the ambience side, the dream pop clean chain piece is built around a different genre but the identical problem: how to stack chorus, delay and a modulated reverb without any one of them eating the others. And if the result sounds crowded rather than large, delay vs. reverb: which one is crowding the room will tell you which block to cut.
One Thing the Modeler Can't Give You
I'll be straight about the limit.
A semi-hollow body has a resonance that a solidbody doesn't, and it interacts with the room and with amp volume in ways no block models. On the MTV Unplugged material especially, part of what you're hearing is a hollow-bodied instrument being played gently in a quiet room, and there's no Low Cut value that produces that.
What you can do is stop fighting it: play a semi-hollow or a chambered guitar if you have access to one, back the gain off further than feels right, and let the compressor and the stereo field do the work the distortion would otherwise be doing. That's the actual lesson from Cerati's rig, and it costs nothing.
The 335 is a lovely guitar and sixty people are going to be very happy. For the rest of us, the useful inheritance isn't the instrument. It's a man who figured out in the 1990s that a compressor and a well-built stereo field would carry a song further than more gain would — and then proved it on three separate nights that people are still talking about thirty years later.
