
“Some can tell you a lot about a guitar, and some don’t really tell you anything. “Serial numbers can be extremely tricky,” says Gibson Customer Service Manager Jason Davidson, whose team fields calls and emails regarding every Gibson division. But, with more than 75 years of shipping records in the Gibson books, and dozens of variations on numerical schemes used over the years, sometimes do little to shed light on the origin of a mysterious Gibson.

Like a fingerprint or a social security number, the series of digits inked or impressed on the back of a Gibson headstock can go a long way toward identifying a guitar.
