Joe Bonamassa compares the three versions of the Gibson Les Paul Junior

Joe Bonamassa compares the three versions of the Les Paul Junior that Gibson built between 1954 and 1961 in a column published by Guitar World on 18 October 2026. All of them carry a single P-90, a large single-coil pickup in the bridge position, with one volume and one tone control, a setup Bonamassa says was all a player like Leslie West needed.

His first example is played on a 1956 Junior he bought from Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French. That model is a single-cutaway, all-mahogany guitar; add a contoured maple cap and it would be a Les Paul Standard. In an E minor pentatonic solo he rolls the tone knob from 10 down to zero, a sound he says Eric Clapton “patented” in the early Cream days on “I Feel Free”.

In 1958 Gibson switched to the double-cut Junior, with cutaways on both sides of the body, offered mainly in cherry red. Playing a 1960 example, Bonamassa notes that not all P-90s sound the same, though all have a big, midrange-heavy tone. In 1961 came the SG-style Junior, with a much thinner, contoured body that sounds slinkier and brighter because of the lost mass. Gibson now offers true-to-vintage reissues of all three.

Joe Bonamassa is an American blues-rock guitarist, born in 1977 in New Hartford. His newest studio album is “Breakthrough” (2025), according to MusicBrainz. On 8 October, mbuzz reported that Fender had unveiled the Tone Master ’59 Twin-Amp JB Edition amplifier developed with him.