Built to be encountered, not photographed.
1978 is the first Boutique Laboratory Guitars instrument built around the Pre-Internet finish technique — an approach intended to preserve visible and tactile texture rather than turn the instrument into a perfectly homogenized manufactured surface.
The idea comes from a pre-internet relationship with guitars: you didn't see a new instrument on a screen first. You heard about it over the phone, and someone came over to actually hold it.
1978 is meant to be encountered in person — touched, played, turned in the light, and experienced as an object rather than reduced to how perfectly its surface photographs.
Sonically, its GFS VEH humbuckers bring the attitude of Eddie Van Halen's legendary "brown sound" into the pickup package — hot, immediate, aggressive and energetic, without needing an elaborate electronics package to get there.
Serial number B-EL-G-S6-007_26, stamped by hand in the neck pocket — build 007.