Gibson announced the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 50th Anniversary Flying V on October 20.
The design takes its cue from the band's logo: the heart with the Flying V through it, which first showed up on the 1976 self-titled debut. Gibson is making five gloss nitrocellulose finishes, 50 guitars in each, 250 worldwide:
| Finish | Run |
|---|---|
| Gainesville Gold | 50 |
| Graphite Metallic | 50 |
| Heartbreaker Red | 50 |
| Pearl White Metallic | 50 |
| Pelham Blue | 50 |
Gibson's people are calling the set the "Flying Five." The specs from the press release:
- Mahogany body, mahogany neck in a SlimTaper profile, 24.75" scale
- Rosewood fretboard, 12" radius, 22 medium-jumbo frets, acrylic dots
- Two 70s Tribute humbuckers
- Hand-wired controls: individual volumes, one master tone with an Orange Drop cap, three-way toggle
- Aluminum Nashville Tune-O-Matic and stop bar, gold-plated hardware, gold top-hat knobs
- Grover Rotomatics, Graph Tech nut, three-ply white pickguard, cream toggle cap
- "Heartbreaker 50th" truss rod cover and a reproduction of Petty's signature on the back of the headstock
- Gibson hardshell case
They're available now through Gibson Garage locations and gibson.com, alongside a Heartbreakers apparel and accessories line. I could not find a price from Gibson. One radio station's write-up says $2,799 per finish. Nobody else has that number, so treat it as unconfirmed until it's on Gibson's product page.
Adria Petty said in the release that the V "was an essential part of the imagery onstage for my dad as well as the band rose to fame in the 1970's." That's correct, and it's the right way to put it. The V was imagery. I'll come back to that.
How a Tribute Guitar Gets Valued
Twenty-five years behind a counter teaches you how limited editions age, and it isn't complicated. A run of 50 per color with gloss nitro, a factory signature and real artist-estate involvement generally holds its value. A run with a printed signature, poly finish and no family attached generally doesn't. This one has the first set. The Pelham Blue and Gainesville Gold will be the two people look for in fifteen years, because nobody else does those colors on a V and both names tie straight to Petty: Gainesville is his hometown, and Pelham Blue is the old Gibson custom color.
But I don't think most of these 250 are going to sit in closets, and the people who play them are going to hit a problem on the first night.
Look at the Pickups
70s Tribute is Gibson's name for the hot humbucker it puts on its '70s-flavored models. Gibson didn't print the specs in this release, but retail spec sheets for the standalone pickups agree on the basics: Alnico V magnets, wax-potted, about 15k DC resistance at the bridge and about 16.2k at the neck. One European retailer describes them, fairly enough, as aimed at "hot-rod sounds and drop tunings."
For comparison, a vintage-spec PAF reads around 7.5k–8.5k. These pickups have about twice the winding of the humbuckers your ear associates with "classic Gibson," and a good deal more than that over the single coils and Rickenbackers that actually made Petty records.
That's my point about imagery. Petty's sound — the one in your head when someone says "Tom Petty tone" — is jangle and light crunch: Rickenbacker 12-strings, Strats and Teles, small Fender and Vox amps right at the edge of breakup, and Mike Campbell playing the perfect part over the top. Our Refugee lead recipe is a good reminder of how that worked even with humbuckers involved. Campbell's "Red Dog" Telecaster had them, and the tone was still a small cranked Fender pushed into light breakup, not a hot pickup slamming a gain stage.
A 16k humbucker doesn't do light breakup without help. Plug this V into a preset dialed for a single coil and you'll get roughly 6 dB more signal hitting the amp model's input. On a modeler that isn't just louder. It moves you to a different spot on the gain curve, which is the whole subject of one modeler, two guitars, different output levels. Your edge-of-breakup preset turns into a crunch preset, and your crunch preset turns into a hard rock rhythm sound.
None of that is a knock on the guitar. It's a V, and hot humbuckers on a V make a great rock guitar. It just means the Petty sound on this instrument is something you dial in, not something you get by plugging in.
Getting Petty Out of a 16k Humbucker
The fix is to give back the headroom the pickups take. Three places to do it, in order of how much they matter.
1. At the guitar: the volume knobs. Those individual volumes are the most useful control on the guitar for this. Roll the bridge volume back to about 6–7 and a hot humbucker cleans up dramatically into a cranked amp. A tube amp responds to that better than a modeler does, though modern models get close. The mechanics are in volume knob cleanup: tube amp vs modeler, and the "set the amp hot, play it from the guitar" approach is in one amp, two sounds. Petty-style rhythm sits around 7. Turn it up to 10 for the solo.
2. At the amp: take a third off the drive. Our Vox AC30 settings guide has a Tom Petty / classic rock light-crunch setting with the Top Boost volume at about 2 to 3 o'clock. That number assumes normal-output pickups. With this V, start around noon to 1 o'clock and bring it up until the breakup shows up on hard picking only. On Helix that's the Essex A30 model. Helix amp blocks use a 0–10 scale, so if your single-coil preset has Drive at 5.5, try 3.5–4.0 for this guitar. Keep Bass low (about 10 o'clock on a real AC30, ~3.5 on Helix). A hot mahogany humbucker guitar already has more low mids than a Rickenbacker, and stacking bass on top turns the jangle to mud. If your amp is Fender-flavored, the same logic applies to the Deluxe Reverb settings. Back the Volume off by about the same proportion.
3. In the modeler: one gain block, saved per guitar. If you switch between this V and a single-coil guitar in the same preset, don't re-dial the amp every time. Put a Gain block (or input trim) at about −5 to −6 dB in front of the amp and toggle it on with a snapshot or footswitch labeled for the V. That one block pulls the operating point back to where the preset was built. The overdrive-with-humbuckers guide covers the same problem with a drive pedal in the chain. With hot pickups, you nearly always want the drive's gain lower and its level higher than the box suggests.
Pickup choice. Petty-style jangle on a two-humbucker guitar lives in the middle position, both pickups on, with the neck volume a hair under the bridge so the bridge pickup's top end carries the chord. Our pickup position guide explains why the combined position thins out and shimmers when you'd expect it to get thicker. That's the closest this V gets to a 12-string chime.
The Orange Drop Cap
One more spec. Gibson calls out an Orange Drop capacitor on the master tone but doesn't give the value. A typical Gibson tone cap is around .022µF. If it's that, the tone knob behaves normally until about the bottom third of its travel, then darkens fast. If it's a .047, you'll hit woman-tone territory sooner. The difference is laid out in the bottom third of the tone knob and cap value. And even with the knob on 10, the tone pot is still loading the pickup a little; that's what a tone pot at 10 still does. On a 16k pickup that small treble loss counts, because hot pickups are already darker than vintage-wound ones. Keep the tone on 10 for the jangle.
What I'd Want to Know
Two things I can't confirm from the release, and I'd rather say so than guess.
First, the price. $2,799 sounds plausible for a USA-built, nitro, hand-wired limited V with gold hardware, but one source isn't enough.
Second, why 70s Tributes. I have a theory and it's only a theory. Petty's V was a 1970s-era stage guitar, and a '70s Gibson pickup is a defensible "period" choice for a 50th-anniversary guitar about a band that started in 1976. That would make it a historically consistent pick, not a tonal one. I'd like to hear Gibson say it either way. If anyone at Gibson wants to tell me I'm wrong, I'm easy to find.
Either way, these are well-made guitars with real family involvement behind them, in colors nobody else puts on a V. Just roll the volume to 7 before you start playing "American Girl."
Sources: Rock and Blues Muse, Bravewords press release, Guitar World, Guitar Gangsters, 107.3 The Eagle (price report), The Music Zoo 70s Tribute bridge spec, Chicago Music Exchange 70s Tribute neck spec.
