Since trying out a Heritage guitar in a shop in the late '80s, I had wanted one. After graduate school, university position, getting a start with our family, I was able to save money for purchase of high quality guitars. I renewed my guitar tech hobby in the late '90s, bought, fixed up, and sold many Korean guitars... working up to higher end goals. My collection slowly grew, 71 Gibson SG, 78 Gibson ES 345, 78 Gibson Les Paul Custom... These ladies are beautiful...
In 2007 I purchased my first Heritage, an H575 Antique Natural finish. I hated the Schaller pickups, replaced them with Seymour Duncan Sh-1 '59s, set up a coil tap... put in a tusq nut, this guitar is a beauty and can cover a variety of jazz to rock to country tones, plays wonderful...
But.. I still was looking for the higher end... sold off all my cheapies, taught overload classes at the university, made some $ doing guitar mods and repairs... saving...
Last fall I found her... Golden Eagle... she is a dream... but she needed a bit of work. This is a thinline model. Label is Heritage Custom Shop... on the label is the name original customer?), and details "Alm brg" (Aluminum Bridge?), HRW pu (HRW pickups).
Jim, the guy who had the guitar before me, said he used it for Ted Nugent-like rock tone (ala Gibson Byrdland) and it is clear that Jim used this guitar extensively, while seemingly taking good care of it. However, I have had to make some small repairs. The previous owner had stuffed the guitar with foam and installed foam f-hole covers to lessen amp feedback, I removed these, plus some two way tape installed inside the guitar.
When I received it, the Golden Eagle had a problem with noise... clearly there was a grounding problem. The wiring harness had been altered by a previous owner. The neck pickup tone pot had been replaced with a very cheap alpha 250k pot, and the ground solder had come loose. I replaced all the pots with high quality CTS 500k audio pots. Furthermore, it was clear that someone had altered the pickup wiring, with messy connections made to convert the original four wire leads to two wires. Finally, as all the shielding had been removed from wiring harness control cable, I rewired the entire thing.
I used high quality 3 conductor shielded cable for the entire harness, keeping the shielding intact for the entire harness, from the pickup switch through the pots, to the input jack (I removed the input jack wire with the bridged connectors..., replaced with high quality shielded cable, much quieter... is this bridged connector setup, noisy and clunky, really necessary?)
While the HRW pickups are very interesting, I need much more tonal versatility, playing soft jazz to hard rock jazz fusion... my favorite setup comes from the use of Seymour Duncan Triple Shot pickup rings... they have two mini switches on the ring, which allows you to select either coil, plus series, and parallel coil combinations for a humbucker pickup. I installed two bridge, archtop triple shot pickup rings, then a Seymour Duncan SH-2 Jazz pickup in the neck, and a Seymour Duncan SH-11 Custom Custom pickup in the bridge. With the triple shot pickup rings, the tonal variety of this guitar is simply amazing and very simple to work.
There is a gold Gotoh Nashville style bridge on the original Heritage rosewood bridge mount, which I assume is a replacement made by a previous owner.
One of the last modifications I have had to make on my Golden Eagle is a nut replacement. The previous owner had installed a stone nut (yes, made from marble mineral). While very interesting, this nut really over-emphasized high pitches and harmonics, and while that may have been good to sound like Ted Nugent, my needs point to more subtlety and variety. So I replaced the marble nut with a tusq nut.
After some minor truss rod adjustment and fretwork, this Golden Eagle was ready for my jazz and rock work. After this happy bit of shop work (I was trained as a guitar tech working in a music store in the early '80s... made a living doing guitar setups and mods through college days, and it is my big hobby today...) my Golden Eagle is quiet, responsive, has incredible tonal variety and versatility, and plays like a dream.
Cosmetically, this guitar shows clear signs of valued, but moderately heavy use, during the last 5 years. I replaced the black speed knobs with more traditional and high end Gibson 60's style gold-faced black knobs. I have carefully rubbed out the finish and touched up minor scratches.
I can honestly say that this is one of the very best sounding and playing guitars I have played. Friends and colleagues agree. Way to go Heritage...
... and while I continue to enjoy building solid body Fender knock-offs during summer vacation, and playing my Gibsons is wonderful, there is nothing quite like the Golden Eagle for me... all of us guitar players know the feeling when you play a guitar that feels like there is a direct connection to the creative part of your subconscious, when creative desire seems translated automatically into musical tone... this happens to me almost every time I play Golden Eagle... truly, a guitar romance in progress...
