Alejandro Escovedo's Les Paul

Alejandro asked me to build him a guitar like a Les Paul Custom only lighter and better to play on stage. This guitar would be traveling a lot and needed to be rugged. I built him a guitar basically off my jigs for making a late 50's Les Paul Standard. It is slightly thinner and the Maple top is only 1/2" thick over the mahogany back. The neck is stiffened with carbon fiber to give it added stability and a more articulate tone.  He played it a lot and decided the humbuckers didn't really work with his rig. He brought me some records with the tone he was after on them. We listened and eventually we found some Dearmond Pickups from the 60's that have all the aggressive tone we were looking for. I fabricated some plates to mount them in the humbucker rings and wired them up. It looks like this:

The headstock inlay art is a representation of Al's tattoo, he uses this art a lot as his mark.