Gibson Custom Memphis – Memphis, TN

October 22-25, Bill and I ventured back out to wonderful Tennessee to visit the 4th factory of our Gibson factory tours, in Memphis. The day we arrived it was moderately warm, and overcast, and we were right around the corner from famous Beale Street. As usual, when we travel most of the day, we were quite hungry and proceeded to eat our first barbecue meal. This was by far, not the last, either!

Gibson Custom Memphis was a spacious factory compared to the others we had seen. It was inside of a beautiful building in the heart of downtown. The same facility also had several ballrooms and meeting rooms, much like a small convention center, where they had many performances throughout the year. And of course, at the top corner of the block, was a Gibson Showcase restaurant/lounge where other great bands have played. This was a beautiful facility!

The second day rolled around and we walked outside to realize it was no longer warm, in fact, it was quite chilly, and it rained during the rest of our visit. Nonetheless, the hospitality was great, the city was wonderful, we didn’t get a chance to visit Graceland, but we drove by Sun Studios. Enjoy the pictures of the tour!

Gibson Acoustic Custom Shop – Bozeman, Montana

September 25th and 26th Bill and I were in Bozeman, Montana, which, by the way now ranks at the top of our list of the most beautiful places we have visited yet! The weather was favorable, and allowed us to enjoy the wonderful scenery of surrounding mountains.

Of course, we weren’t there for the scenery. This was factory 3 of 4 of the Gibson factories we are working on. This particular one, was the wonderful factory of Gibson Acoustic guitars! We had the pleasure of being guided through the factory by the well known master luthier, Ren Ferguson.

This factory is a well organized and well ran operation that takes great pride in the extensive hands-on work, while still embracing opportunity to use modern technology to help maintain certain consistencies.

Enjoy the photos and stay tuned for the videos.

Gibson USA & Gibson Custom

Our main reason for the trip to Nashville, TN was to visit the Gibson USA and Custom Factories. This was a great experience! It was a bit of a drool factor to see the hundreds of SG’s and Les Paul’s, V’s, and the new Reverse V’s, just to mention a few.

In this slide show there are 291 images from these 2 factories! Enjoy them!

We will be putting together individual videos for each factory, then after we cover the Gibson Bozeman and Memphis factories we will be looking at a definitive project to show the family of plants.