“I’m more of a humbucker player onstage, but I like P-90s because they roar while also driving up the ‘middle’ of any band”: Joe Bonamassa on why he loves the P-90s on his 1958 Gibson Les Paul Special – and the origins of its ‘TV Yellow’ finish

I’d like to talk about one of my favorite guitar designs, the Les Paul Special. The one I’m sporting for this column happens to be a 1958 model in “TV yellow”; this lime/tan-type color was used so that you could see the guitar on black-and-white television screens back in the 1950s, thus the color naming.

The original models were painted white, but they soon discovered that, on B/W TV, the guitar body would miraculously vanish; all you could see was the fretboard, pickups and pickguard. Darkening the body to this unusual color solved the problem, and part of the iconic stature of the instrument was born.