Features

A Video History of the Gibson ES-335

Published

4 years ago

March 25, 2020

Keith Williams and his YouTube channel ‘Five Watt World’ present the history of the classic Gibson ES-335 guitar.

A great story on the Gibson ES-335… but first a word about the author/producer, Keith Williams and his channel ‘Five Watt World’.

YouTube is amazingly powerful! There are hundreds of thousands of hours uploaded every day on hundreds of thousand subjects. I have taken to using it for my major source of screen time entertainment as have many of my friends. Enter Rick Beato. If you don’t know about Rick Beato and his channel “Everything Music” which has as of this writing 1.4 million subscribers, please check him out. Through Rick, I learned about Keith Williams and his channel “Five Watt World”. Keith is a retired college administrator, a life long guitar addict with an overactive curiosity about guitar, amps, pedals and ‘YUP’ music.

This “history”on the ES-335 is very well done and I think many to most to all of you will enjoy it and getting to know Keith and his channel…

About Keith Williams:

I have been playing guitar since I was 14 years old, and it’s important to put that in historic perspective, that was 1974. By the time it was time to go to college I had successfully avoided learning to read music. But, as a sophomore in college, I switched to being a music major. That experience was enough to convince me that I was NOT going to be a full-time musician. I was off to work in colleges and universities and I continued to play music mostly for myself.

While working at Ithaca College I decided I wanted to study jazz. I found a guy who’d just completed his masters at New England Conservatory, Rick Beato. After studying with Rick for a year, I continued to muddle along like most of us do, trying to play over changes and working on this stuff on my own. Fast forward 30 years and I took early retirement. I was casting about for a way to be involved in music I decided to try YouTube. I quickly realized that no one had made video histories of the guitars, amps, and pedals that fill the mythology of modern music…so I made them myself. People like them and my Youtube channel “five-watt world” has grown to 70,000+ subscribers (as of 3/10/20) in less than a year and topped more than 4 million views to date.