I am a big fan of both Gibson and Fender. If you gave me a choice between a Les Paul and a Strat and said I could only play one for the rest of my life, I’d strike you in the solar plexus and take both and run. Joke. The Budget Guitarist never condones violence.
So here’s the thing – I own two lower end Gibson Les Pauls. And my 70’s Tribute Les Paul was marked down because of sharp fret ends. This is how Gibson bashing starts. Dude walks into Guitar Center and pulls down a used Gibson Les Paul Studio or Tribute model, and what the hell? The fret ends are sharp! That means Gibson sucks, right? Quality control is out the window at Gibson! Time to go get on a forum or YouTube thread and tell the world that Gibson Les Pauls are overpriced and they suck, and if anyone asks, you say “I’ve played a ton of them and the fretwork sucked on all of them!”
Except it’d be bullshit! Before I learned about frets I would have made this mistake. Fret ends sticking out too far on a used guitar is not a fret problem. When the guitar left the factory, the frets were likely fine. What has happened is the wood has shrunk slightly.
Wood can shrink for a number of reasons. A guitar neck is not supposed to shrink at all, but it can happen, even on a good guitar, caused by changes in humidity/weather/etc. It doesn’t mean poor workmanship. It is possible that the guitar builder (in this case Gibson) didn’t dry enough moisture from the wood, so over time the wood got drier and shrunk a bit. Or the guitar could have been subjected to extreme weather variations. It’s used, ya know. As long as the neck is still straight, this isn’t a big deal.
When you see sharp fret ends on a brand new guitar, it is far more likely that the manufacturer cut corners… most likely they didn’t age or dry the wood enough, or they just plain didn’t do a good job on the frets. But on a used Gibson, sharp fret ends are about wood shrinking, not bad fretwork.
If there’s one piece of advice I can give you, it’s to buy a StewMac fret end file. And learn how to use it on fret ends. With this file and some practice, you can buy any guitar you want regardless of how sharp the fret ends are, and know you can fix them. It takes a little practice, but it’s fairly easy to file down and round fret ends.
Anyway, when people bash Gibson for “bad fretwork,” 9 times out of 10 they’re talking about the neck wood shrinking by a very small amount. The fretwork on my 70’s tribute, aside from the sharp ends which I fixed, is top notch. Better than my Fenders, for sure.
