Gibson Victory Artist 1982

• Solid maple body • Laminate maple bolt-on neck • Rosewood fingerboard • Two type VIIIB humbuckers • Active and passive modes

Comes with shaped hard case.

The Gibson Victory Artist is a two-pickup, active version of the Victory Standard - with passive mode, and notch-filtered active mode.

As well as having a striking new body style, it was equipped with new entirely new hardware throughout: two specially designed type VIIIB humbuckers, upright in the bridge position, and slanted at the neck, a new bridge TRI-4 wedge bridge, and Schaller open gear machine heads. In fact the only nod towards Gibson tradition is the Thunderbird-esque headstock style.

The Victory Artist was quite a departure for Gibson, design wise; it didn't look like anything the company had produced before. One new and useful feature was the two-octave 24 fret neck. Naturally, reaching the top E required a deep lower body cutaway, which in itself is unusual in a Gibson guitar. Part of the beauty of this bass lies in the precise way certain structures are aligned, and the way the curves flow around this: the body cutaways, though curved, lie on a plane parallel with the butt of the neck, two sides of the scratchplate and the neck pickup. The pickup orientation was to "yield the widest spectrum of tonal reproduction", but it also fits tremendously with the overall aesthetics. The neck actually meets the body at the 16th fret, making for an extra long neck joint; described in the owners manual as giving "better neck to body contact" and improved sustain.

The controls (as illustrated in last image) are as follows:
[1] Master volume control
[2] Bass control -5 to 5
[3] Treble control -5 to 5
[4] Pickup selector switch
[5] Mode selector switch (passive, active with notch filter, active)