Gibson Guitars unveiled their new Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess at the 2011 Winter NAMM show last month and recently launched a detailed website highlighting the guitar complete with detailed specs, a bunch of closeup photos, and purchase information. You can check out the website at this link. Alex spoke a little about the Axcess in his Gibson interview from yesterday:

... we've been working on this for quite some time - a few years, really. The Axcess is a great platform, I think, because it has certain things that the traditional Les Paul doesn't. You know, the light weight, getting the vibrato arm on there, the changes that we made with the piezo pickups, the separate outputs - you know, it’s a great utility guitar.

I looked at it in terms of, "What do I need? Instead of switching through 14 or 15 guitars during a show, how can I pare that down, like, where I can get everything — as much as I can — into one guitar?" And this is really what it is.

It’s very playable. It’s a little heavier, I think, than the traditional Axcess model is. The sustain is great. The tonality’s great. We’ve gone through, I think, three generations of pickups to find the kind of windings that really suit the guitar. The vibrato system — the Floyd Rose — is obviously very solid.

The piezo sounds terrific. You can use it in different modes. You can use it off the main jack and just do a blend of both magnetic and piezo. Or you can do separate, which I would do with two radio packs — one for the magnetic pickups and one for the piezo.

It feels great and I think the finish is beautiful. We’ve got a nice, dark kind of tobacco sunburst and then this beautiful royal crimson that just looks so hot. So we’re really, really excited about it. ...

Thanks to Eric at Power Windows for the heads up.

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