Gibson’s outsider basses: Grabber, Flying V, and the Thunderbirds that never played it safe
Four Gibson basses, four different ways of refusing to be ordinary. The vault’s Gibson collection tells the story of a company that couldn’t leave bass guitar alone.
Gibson never wanted to be in the bass guitar business. Or more precisely – Gibson made peace with the bass guitar slowly, reluctantly, and entirely on its own terms. Where Fender designed the Precision Bass from scratch as a bass instrument and built a company around it, Gibson spent the 1950s and early 1960s adapting existing guitar thinking to the low end before eventually arriving at something that felt genuinely original.
The result, across several decades and multiple product lines, was a series of bass guitars that looked and sounded like nothing Fender was making. Some were commercially successful. Some were curious dead ends. All of them were interesting. The vault has four: the 1977 G-3 Grabber, the 1981 Flying V Bass in Silverburst, the 2013 Thunderbird IV in Vintage Sunburst, and the 2020 Non-Reverse Thunderbird in Sparkling Burgundy. Together they sketch an argument about what happens when a company refuses to follow the common template.
The G-3 Grabber (1977)
The Grabber arrived in 1974 as Gibson’s attempt to produce a bass that could compete in the mass market at a lower price point – single cutaway, maple body, bolt-on neck. It is, in almost every way, un-Gibson. The original Grabber featured a sliding pickup: a humbucker mounted in a channel routed into the body, adjustable by hand for position. Move it toward the neck and the tone opens up. Move it toward the bridge and it gets tighter and more focused. In practice, most players find their position and leave it there – but the idea is genuinely interesting engineering.
The G-3 is the three-pickup variant, replacing the single sliding pickup with three fixed single-coils. It reads like Gibson trying to build a Jazz Bass from first principles while refusing to look at what Fender had done. The sound is its own thing – brighter and more articulate than a standard humbucker Gibson bass, with a clarity that suits certain contexts well and others not at all. It’s one of the most unusual instruments in the vault, and one of the most fun to pick up.
The Flying V Bass (1981)
There are few instruments in the vault I can say with confidence that most working bassists have never encountered in person. The 1981 Gibson Flying V Bass in Silverburst is one of them.
Gibson produced the Flying V Bass in limited numbers during the Norlin era – the same period that produced some of the brand’s more controversial manufacturing decisions.
The V body shape, designed for a guitar, translates awkwardly to the bass in practical terms: it’s physically unwieldy to sit with, and requires a specific strap position that takes some adjustment to get used to. None of this is what matters. What matters is the Silverburst finish – a pearl-white that fades to a charcoal burst at the outer edges, applied over the dramatically angular mahogany body – and the sound, which is distinctly Gibson: warm, thick, and surprisingly musical for an instrument that looks like it was designed primarily to be photographed.
Short-scale, all-original, and genuinely rare. The Flying V Bass is not a practical instrument. It is absolutely a significant one.
The Thunderbird IV (2013)
The Thunderbird is Gibson’s most famous bass and the instrument that most clearly defined what the brand does differently from Fender. Neck-through construction. Reverse body offset. Dual humbuckers with a sound that is famously difficult to tame in a mix – powerful, woolly, with a low-mid emphasis that fills a room or obscures everything else depending on how it’s used.
The 2013 Thunderbird IV in Vintage Sunburst is the standard-bearer in the vault: a modern American instrument that carries the 1963 design with a minimum of revision. The neck-through joint gives it sustain that bolt-ons simply can’t match. The humbuckers are loud. It is emphatically not a subtle bass, and it doesn’t pretend to be.
If the P-Bass is a precision tool, the Thunderbird is a blunt one – and sometimes that’s exactly what a piece of music needs.
The Non-Reverse Thunderbird (2020)
The Non-Reverse is the stranger of the two Thunderbirds in the vault. In 1965, Gibson briefly reversed the body orientation of the Thunderbird – pointing the horn forward rather than back, in a shape that looks almost symmetrical compared to the original. It sold poorly and was discontinued after two years. In 2020, Gibson brought it back as a production model, and the Sparkling Burgundy example here is one of the more visually striking basses I own.
It sounds different from the standard Thunderbird, too. The different body orientation shifts the internal resonance – less of the aggressive low-mid thump, more of a focused mid-range that sits better in a band mix without as much EQ intervention. For regular use I find it more immediately practical than the standard Thunderbird. It’s also considerably less common in the used market, which matters to no one until it suddenly matters to everyone.
Why this collection exists
These four instruments don’t share a tonal signature. The G-3 is bright and odd. The Flying V is warm and theatrical. The Thunderbird IV is enormous and demanding. The Non-Reverse is focused and refined. What they share is a refusal to behave the way bass instruments are supposed to – which is to say, they don’t sound like Fenders, and they don’t try to.
That’s not a criticism of Fender. The P-Bass and Jazz Bass are exceptional instruments for reasons documented at length across the rest of the Bass Vault. But the Gibson basses exist as a reminder that the low end has more than one vocabulary – and that the most interesting instruments in any collection tend to be the ones that arrived by a completely different route.
What unites these four basses isn’t a sound. It’s a stance. Gibson has spent decades making bass instruments on its own terms – inconsistently, sometimes eccentrically, often commercially unsuccessfully, and entirely without trying to be Fender. That stance is the through-line. The collection exists because that stance produced four genuinely distinct instruments, and a vault that has all four says something the individual instruments cannot say alone.
It’s all about the passion!
Made and meant to be shared, an absolute must-see!
Unleashed creative showcasing with basses in unexpected locations.
Henrik Bonde Hanfgarn Bass player, passionate keeper of the bass vault and bass escapade extraordinaire.
Gear I love to use: TC Electronic Blacksmith, Fender Bassman ’67 (AB165), Ampeg bass cabs and the Line6 HX Stomp when it calls for quick and compact solutions.
All about that bass, no treble
You’ve come to the end of the page, but don’t worry! This bass collection is meant to be played and seen and there’s more low-end rumble from Fender bass, Gibson basses, Epiphone, Lakland and many more for you to discover in The Bass Vault.