But these are both American-made Gibson pickups: the neck unit is a P-94, basically a standard single-coil P90 with a humbucker footprint, and the one at the back is an 84T-LM. There’s a humbucker at the bridge and what looks like a P90 at the neck – an arrangement that immediately calls to mind Duesenberg, especially with those uncovered bobbins and metal ‘frames’. Lee’s squiggle on the back of the headstock is the only giveaway if you’re more keen on the guitar than you are on the artist – and it really is a squiggle, so if your favourite guitarist is Tang from ZingZillas, you can always tell people it’s his, and they’ll never know.įinally, let’s have a closer look at those pickups. It’s a hea vy instrument with a moderately chubby neck, and the smooth feel of it in the left hand will appeal to tattoo-less blues players and cruise-ship strummers as much as it does to metalheads.

The heel and headstock have been glued on rather than carved from the same piece of timber as the neck, and generally, while our review guitar came with a loose output socket and some less-than-perfect neck binding, the quality of finish is decent. There are no joins visible on the back it must be a veneer, the cheeky scamps. The one-piece maple cap looks nice but, looking at the guitar from the bottom, we can see the body is made from at least five bits of mahogany. There’s fancy binding around the headstock and both front and back of the body, while the simpler binding on the neck runs beneath the fret ends. The combination of walnut and gold feels warm and sophisticated, in a way that doesn’t necessarily go with Malia’s own wardrobe, and that’s accentuated by the opulence of the pearloid fret markers and headstock patterns – which seem to have been borrowed from the Gibson Les Paul Artisan of the late ’70s.

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