Panda: Page Meets Green

An Indonesian custom build, four years of New England winters, and one wiring harness that refused to surrender quietly.

Panda arrived with all the ingredients of a great guitar: a striking burled top, unusual panda inlays, and more ambition than its original execution could quite support. After several years drying and settling in Boston, the guitar finally came to the AceSage bench for the resurrection it deserved.

What followed became one of the most ambitious projects on the bench — fretwork, a new TUSQ nut, hardware and setup work, and a completely reimagined control system inspired by two of rock’s most famous Les Paul sounds: Jimmy Page and Peter Green.

Page Meets Green

The heart of Panda is the switching. The control harness takes its inspiration from Jimmy Page’s famously flexible Les Paul wiring, then adds the hollow, nasal out-of-phase character associated with Peter Green. Push-pull controls open up series, parallel, coil-split and phase combinations far beyond a conventional two-humbucker guitar.

The goal wasn’t complexity for its own sake. After all the soldering, troubleshooting and a few genuinely maddening broken wires, Panda emerged as what it was always supposed to be: a great-playing guitar with an enormous range of usable sounds.