The Gibson Firebird is a model of electric guitar.

The Gibson company released several new types of guitars during the 1950s to combat Fender's successful and modern guitars, such as the Stratocaster. Fender's range of colours, shapes and multi-coil pickups were endorsed by a lot of superstars of the 1960s, such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, and others.

Gibson had released the Les Paul, but their other releases (Flying V and Explorer) were failures. The owner of Gibson at the time, Ted McCarty , hired a car designer named Ray Dietrich to design a guitar to combat Fender.

Dietrich basically took the Explorer design and rounded the edges. The most unusual aspect of the design is that the guitar is somewhat "backward" in that the right-hand horn of the body is longer than the other. Thus, the original Firebirds were unofficially referred to as "reverse".

Since then, many model types have been released of the Firebird. Epiphone, which is owned by Gibson, have also re-released the Firebird model, as well as the other guitars from that era.