Gibson Les Paul Custom

The Gibson Les Paul Custom is a solid body electric guitar from the late 1950s and early 1960s, built with a black gloss-finished body, tune-o-matic bridge, stop tailpiece and so on. They were among the first guitars to have the new Gibson PAF Humbuckers - 'PAF' standing for 'Patent-Applied-For'.

Steve Hackett used to have two Les Paul Custom guitars, which he played with Genesis during the Foxtrot era in 1972 after the 1959 Gibson Melody Maker. However, both Les Pauls were stolen - one from Sheffield City Hall on 3 October 1972 and the other from Imperial College London on 18 November 1972, both where the band played their respective shows - according to a Melody Maker magazine clipping from the 2nd December 1972 issue. And neither of them were recovered.

Nonetheless he would later buy another Les Paul Custom, which was heavily modified with a Floyd Rose tremolo, Roland Hexaphonic pickup and controls for the Roland GR-700 guitar synthesizer: "A really fat sounding guitar with a warm tone plus the added facility of mixing the neck and bridge pick-ups together - creamy, bitey, nutty, crunchy!"