Gibson Nighthawk - Similarities To Fender Guitars

Similarities To Fender Guitars

With its set neck and maple-on-mahogany body, the Gibson Nighthawk was still very much structurally and aesthetically a Gibson. But certain key aspects of the Nighthawk design took it into Fender territory. The slanted bridge humbucker had less gain than the regular Gibson humbucker and had a bright, sharp tone, closer to that associated with Telecasters and Stratocasters. The mini-humbucker neck pickup had a mellower and warmer tone than the bright bridge pickup, closer to the sound of the neck pickup in a Stratocaster than the regular Gibson humbucker. The middle pickup, which was only available on some Nighthawk models, is a single-coil design almost identical to the middle pickup of the Stratocaster and so sounds quite similar. The scale length of the guitar (the length of the string between the nut and the bridge) was the standard length used by Fender, 25½", rather than the normal Gibson length of 24¾". This important difference, increasing the tension for a given gauge of strings, made the guitar feel more like a Fender from a playing perspective and added to the tonal similarities. The smaller-than-normal Gibson body was closer in mass to a Fender guitar than a typical Gibson Les Paul and the string-through-body bridge is similar to the system used on Telecasters.

Some models of the Custom used a Floyd Rose locking vibrato unit instead of a traditional Gibson Vibrola or Bigsby vibrato tailpiece. The Floyd Rose has some similarity to the tremolo system used by Fender Stratocasters, although Stratocasters do not normally use locking vibrato systems.