The Gibson CS-336 is a semi-hollow

electric guitar An electric guitar is a guitar that requires external amplification in order to be heard at typical performance volumes, unlike a standard acoustic guitar (however combinations of the two - a semi-acoustic guitar and an electric acoustic gui ...

manufactured by

Gibson Guitar Corporation Gibson Brands, Inc. (formerly Gibson Guitar Corporation) is an American manufacturer of guitars, other musical instruments, and professional audio equipment from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and now based in Nashville, Tennessee. The company was forme ...

's Custom, Art & Historic Division ("CS" is an abbreviation for "Custom Shop"). Introduced in 2001, the CS-336 was the Custom Shop's first "tonally carved" guitar, meaning that the back, center block, and sides are carved from one single piece of wood (mahogany). This solid block of wood is mated to a carved maple top. After over 100 years, the CS-336 also represented the realization of company founder

Orville Gibson Orville H. Gibson (May 1856 – August 19, 1918) was a luthier who founded the Gibson Guitar Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1902, makers of guitars, mandolins and other instruments. His earliest known instrument was a 10-string mandolin-guita ...

's goal to produce an instrument with one-piece back-and-sides construction. The CS-336 is a scaled-down version of another Gibson guitar, the

Gibson ES-335 The Gibson ES-335 is the world's first commercial semi-hollowbody electric guitar, sometimes known as semi-acoustic. Released by the Gibson Guitar Corporation as part of its ES (Electric Spanish) series in 1958, it is neither fully hollow nor ful ...

Evolution and related models

In 1996, Gibson's Custom Shop introduced the ES-336 ("ES" is an abbreviation for "Electric Spanish"). The ES-336 had a one-piece mahogany back and a contoured maple top. When the CS-336 was introduced five years later, it added the center block and top bracing as an integral part of the back and top pieces (the final step in creating a tonally carved instrument).

ES-335 The Gibson ES-335 is the world's first commercial semi-hollowbody electric guitar, sometimes known as semi-acoustic. Released by the Gibson Guitar Corporation as part of its ES (Electric Spanish) series in 1958, it is neither fully hollow nor ful ...

: Introduced in 1958 and the key shape basis for all models listed below.
ES-336: Introduced in 1996, this model was replaced by the CS-336 in 2001.
CS-336: the subject of this article; Gibson's first "tonally carved" guitar.
CS-356: constructed in the same manner as the CS-336, with a range of "upscale" appointments such as gold-finished hardware.
ES-339: same shape as the 336 and 356 models, but not a tonally carved instrument - it has the laminated maple top, maple centerblock, and spruce contour bracing construction of an ES-335. This combination makes the ES-339 a lighter and less expensive guitar than the CS-336. The neck profiles on the CS-336 and ES-339 also differ. The ES-339 offers either a 1959 neck profile (a rounded, chunkier neck) or a slim 30/60 neck.

CS-336 features

Each CS-336 is adjusted by one of Gibson’s Plek machines before it leaves the Custom Shop. Key features of the CS-336 include: * An overall body size that is 13 inches wide, 16 inches long, and 1 11/16th-inches deep. * Two Gibson ’57 Classic humbucking pickups * Gibson two-tone pot, two-volume pot, a three-way selector switch control configuration and ABR-1 bridge * Nickel hardware * Single-ply binding on body’s top and back * One-piece mahogany neck with 22-fret rosewood fingerboard * 24.75" scale length, nut.

References

{{Gibson ES Series C Semi-acoustic guitars