Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Van Halen: Ibanez Destroyer


Back in time when bell-bottoms were about to make way for the skinnies, the Jap guitar manufacturers had a lucrative occupation- they were enjoying their fills as copycats. One of the more well known brand names in this notoriety is Ibanez, more so for their remarkable craftsmanship, which was about to knock off the genuine articles in their own turf, than their reputation for being mere blatant reproductions.
This scheme of things even caught the attention of one Edward Van Halen who took a liking for the manufacturer's interpretation (which possess negligible differences in essence) of Gibson's fabled Explorer guitar simply because the korina wood used sounded fantastic. However, one day, possibly under the influence of foul constellation alignment which conjured bad karma, the aforementioned Mr. Ed decided to give his Ibanez a creative touch by hacking off a substantial portion of the instrument beyond its bridge's hard tail. The entailment of this spur of inventiveness resulted in total annihilation of immaculate tones; it was a gonner.
The issue here is, how much wood is substantial for good tones to manifest? We know that there are guitars with lesser fibre in the body which sound great, we need not tread the Explorer excess to possess ear candy but it all boils down to the design per se. The Explorer was conceived in such an outline by the designer to give off great tone in view of the volume of wood used. Mess with this formula & the consequences might be dire (tone-wise) as discoved by EVH.

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