The name kind of says it all…
The first guitar I designed and built from the ground up.. for me!
This guitar, for me, was putting my years of playing into what I would consider the ultimate ‘Live’ guitar.
The body consists of Australian Ash, with an American Walnut cap. The Ash was chambered before the cap was glued in place, so in fact it is a chambered body.
The neck is plantation Mahogany with a Rosewood fret board. It has 24 frets and it is full access, even for a short fingered shredder! Mother of pearl dot markers show the way, and I used medium gauge fret wire, optimizing for legato style playing. Scale length is 24 3/4 inch; even so the neck has a feel of being long, as it does not join the body until the 17th fret.
The hardware is all Gotoh. That’s bridge, tailstop and matching heads. The scratch plate incorporates the pickups, and for pickup adjustment I use 2 screws on the top and 1 at the bottom. This allows the angle of the pickup to be set and stops the pickup flopping around.
My choice of pickups is a Dimarzio Air Norton for the neck. This has a DPT mini toggle switch for series parallel operation. The rear pickup is a Dimarzio Steve Special (the same setup that John Petrucci uses).
I have played this guitar for 6 months now (as at April 2008) and I can’t think of any way to improve on it, IMHO it’s perfect - for me.
