Johnny Marr’s 1984 Gibson Les Paul Standard

Johnny bought this guitar in 1984 at the A1 Repairs shop in Manchester. According to Marr, he was looking for a different sound for The Smiths’ next album, Meat is Murder. This Gibson Les Paul went on to be used not only on that record but also on many other projects, including his post-Smiths performances with The Pretenders, Bryan Ferry, Talking Heads, Modest Mouse, Electronic, New Order, and Noel Gallagher’s Pretty Boy.

My red Les Paul is the guitar that’s on more records that I’ve done than any other guitar, by a mile, It’s on everything I’ve done. It’s my go-to for that thing that I think people think that I do all the time. Which I do a lot, but not exclusively. But I do think it makes me play that way—which might surprise a lot of people, with it being a Les Paul.

Johnny Marr on the Most Important Guitars of His Career | Interview

The guitar was however perhaps most famously used on The Smiths track How Soon Is Now. Marr used his Epiphone Casino for the rhythm track, John Porter’s 1955 Telecaster on the slide part, and he used this Les Paul for the main tremolo riff heard in the intro.

‘How Soon Is Now?’ was the one, though. I wanted to write a track with an intro that you couldn’t forget, something that you knew straight away was The Smiths. In that regard, it was very “worked on.” I arrived at the studio with a demo of the whole thing, apart from the tremolo effect—though that was bound to surface on a Smiths track sooner or later, ’cause at that time, I was playing Bo Diddley stuff everywhere I went. I wanted it to be really, really tense and swampy, all at the same time.

The tremolo effect came from laying down a regular rhythm part (with a capo at the 2nd fret) on a Les Paul, then sending that out into the live room to four Fender Twins.

Johnny Marr

Mods

Sometimes in 1985, Marr modified the guitar by installing a Bigbsy tremolo on it, inspired by one of the Les Pauls he’d seen Neil Young play.

Sometime after 1986 (if you know the exact date of this mod, be sure to post it in the comments) he installed a set of Seymour Duncan humbuckers. Furthermore, he installed a coil tap in it.

This feature allows for the reduced number of active windings within one of the humbucker’s coils, which results in lower output and more treble response, more akin to a single-coil pickup. Marr uses this when he’s doubling up arpeggios.