I wanted to follow up my post from last month when the Gibson Garage opened. I finally had the opportunity to visit the store this past weekend, and I really enjoyed it.
The Gibson Garage is a retail store containing the full range of Gibson, Epiphone, and Kramer product lines.
I was curious about the Custom Shop experience, and spent some time discussing the process with one of the salespeople. You can customize the entire guitar if you want, including picking your own top from a literal wall of options. If you want to go that route, they pull down a wall containing the wood tops from which to pick.
I was able to check out the new Murphy Lab guitars as well, and while I can’t really comment on how they compare to other aged Gibsons, they did seem fairly realistic and certainly felt great to play. They had an ES-335 that was phenomenal.
One of the interesting things about the store is that there’s a conveyer belt that goes around the store with a ton of guitars you can select from in addition to the floor displays. In addition to the electric guitars, they had an acoustic room, but I unfortunately did not have time to check out the acoustic room. Now that Gibson owns Mesa Boogie, they also have a Mesa Boogie room where you can check out the Mesa Boogie amps.
It was interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that the salesperson said most of the people visiting the store are tourists. The store is in the downtown area and is certainly surrounded by tourist locations.
I think Mark Agnesi has done a great job with the store, and I would recommend checking it out if you’re in the Nashville area. I ran out of time, so I’ll be checking out the store again soon.
