Gibson brings back the ES-330: the strings that make a hollowbody sing

Gibson Custom has brought back the ES-330. On June 23, 2026, the brand relaunched the fully hollow archtop after an eight-year absence, with two era-accurate models in the Gibson Custom Historic Collection: a 1959 ES-330 Reissue and a 1962 ES-330 Reissue, both handcrafted in Nashville and revealed earlier in the year at NAMM (Gibson). They are available worldwide now.

The specs are a vintage clinic. Each one has a fully hollow, thinline three-ply maple body, a one-piece mahogany neck that joins the body at the 16th fret, a bound rosewood fretboard, and a matched pair of Dogear P-90 pickups. The 1959 wears an Authentic 1959 C neck profile and dot inlays; the 1962 gets a slimmer 1961 Thin D profile and small-block inlays. Both come in a gloss nitrocellulose finish with VOS aging and a hardshell case. Gibson lists Grant Green, Johnny Marr, and the broader Beatles and Rolling Stones circle among the players who made the model and its Epiphone Casino cousin famous.

It is a gorgeous instrument, and a boutique-priced one. But the part that actually makes it sound like an ES-330 is cheaper than the strap. It is the strings.

The one spec that matters most here is the one most buyers skim past: no centerblock. An ES-335 has a solid maple block running down the middle of its body. That block is what tames feedback and tightens the low end on a semi-hollow. The ES-330 has nothing in there. The body is empty, so the whole top resonates when the strings move it.

That is the source of everything people love and everything they complain about. The upside is a warm, woody, open voice with real acoustic volume, the reason the ES-330 earned the nickname "couch guitar," loud enough to play unplugged on the sofa. The downside is feedback. Push a fully hollow guitar into a loud amp and it will howl. Gibson even nods at this in its own copy, noting that silent stages and direct rigs have made fully hollow guitars more stage-viable than they have been in years.

For a string player, the takeaway is simple. A guitar this acoustically alive reacts to what you string it with more than a solidbody ever will. The wrong strings make a hollowbody sound thin and brittle, which defeats the entire point. The right strings lean into the warmth.

Heavier and warmer than a rock set. That is the whole rule, and it splits into two roads.

The first road is flatwounds. Instead of a round wire wrapped around the core, a flatwound uses a smooth ribbon, so the surface is flat under your fingers. The result is dark, mellow, and almost silent when you slide, which is why flatwounds have been the jazz-box default since the 1950s. They cost more, feel stiffer, and give up top-end sparkle, but on a fully hollow archtop that trade is often exactly what you want. The same warm-string logic plays out in the bass world, where we ran the full case in our flatwound versus roundwound guide.

The second road is a heavy roundwound jazz medium with a wound third. This keeps a little more cut and sustain than a flat while still sitting warm and dense. The defining feature is that wound G string. On most rock sets the G is a bare piece of steel; a jazz medium wraps it, which tightens intonation up the neck and smooths the tonal jump from the wound D to the G that mid-century archtops were engineered around. A surprising amount of the old jazz tone is that one wound string.

Both roads are helped by the ES-330 itself. The 24.75-inch Gibson scale runs looser than a 25.5-inch Fender at the same pitch, so the heavier .012 and .013 gauges that hollowbodies prefer feel far more playable than the numbers suggest.

If you want the full jazz-box voice, the canonical answer is the D'Addario EJ22 Jazz Medium (.013 to .056). It is the heavy nickel-wound set with the wound .026 third, the one D'Addario itself points at archtops and hollowbodies, and it is what turns a P-90 hollow guitar into the warm, woody, chord-melody machine it was designed to be. It is a real jump in tension from a rock set, so set your guitar up for it.

If a .013 set sounds like a lot, it is, and there is a gentler on-ramp. The D'Addario EXL115 (.011 to .049) is a half step heavier than a standard .010 set, with a plain third that still bends easily. It is the blues-and-jazz middle ground: warmer and fuller than a rock set, but you can still dig in and bend like normal. Start here, then graduate to the EJ22 when you want the wound third.

Here is the gauge tradeoff laid out, with a standard .010 rock set as the baseline so you can see what you are moving away from.

The reason the ES-330 is worth understanding is that it is two guitars depending on what you string it with. Gibson names the blues and jazz greats and the indie set in the same breath, and the spread is real. Load it with flatwounds or an EJ22 and a wound third, and you get Grant Green: dark, vocal, the post-war jazz electric sound. The Gibson hollow and semi-hollow family is blues royalty too, the same lineage that gave B.B. King his Lucille, and an .011 set on a P-90 hollowbody lands squarely in that warm blues pocket.

Run lighter strings and a brighter amp, and the same guitar jangles. Johnny Marr built a chunk of the indie guitar songbook on hollow and semi-hollow Gibsons with a far brighter, chiming voice than anything Grant Green chased. Same body, same pickups, completely different world, and most of the distance between those two worlds is the strings. That is the quiet argument for buying your tone in sets rather than in guitars.

This is the part the launch coverage will not lead with. The 1959 and 1962 ES-330 Reissues are beautiful, faithful, collector-grade instruments, and if a vintage-accurate Gibson Custom hollowbody is the guitar you want, these are the real thing. But the voice that makes a P-90 hollowbody sing is mostly the hollow body and the strings, not the year stamped on the label.

If you already own a hollow or semi-hollow guitar, an Epiphone Casino, an ES-335, a budget archtop, the cheapest upgrade you can make to chase this tone is a set of warm, heavy strings. For the cost of a single set you can hear most of what makes the reissue special. Start with the two sets above, browse the rest of the string catalog for your gauge, and put the money you saved toward an amp. The guitar gets the headline. The strings make the sound.