The Collection: Dweezil Zappa

[Music] hey everybody mark ignacy here for gibson tv today i'm in los angeles california outside the studio of my friend guitars dwezel zappa now when you grow up with eddie van halen as your mentor and frank zappa is your father chances are pretty good your tasting guitars are going to steer a little on the odd side and definitely heavily modified what you're about to see may shock you this is the collection with dweasel zappa greetings dude what's up well i'm gonna need a password to get past the sasquatch prevention cage new england clam chowder good enough yeah it worked come on buddy good to see you me too all right man we're here in the studio uh this is a pretty incredible room you got here thanks thanks i uh as a kid always kind of liked if you if you look up black and white imagery it's all illuminati which i'm not part of but yet the the the backgammon thing always looked cool to me as a kid you know on a backgammon board game but then you would see it in a bowling alley but it had a kind of like i think it was even in like the jetsons you know it has like that futuristic retro thing which just appeals to me we've got a lot of guitars to look at today yeah when did you get into guitars it was a musical family but when did you finally start to pick it up i got a guitar when i was about seven six or seven and it was a music man i mean not a music man defender one that was mcmaster music master yeah and so the small scale one it was kind of like a duo sonic uh you know similar to that and i would just kind of bang on the strings and make some noise with it but i didn't really know how to do anything with it i liked the sound of guitar and i was always fascinated watching my dad play guitar and i used to see him at concerts and and be mesmerized by it and at some point i figured that would be something that i would do but it wasn't until i was 12 that i started actually hearing music other than my dad's that i i could hear and think to myself i can envision doing that my dad's music was so complex and i loved it but i listened to it and i would think you got to know stuff to be able to do that you know that's complicated and not that van halen for example is not complicated because it's hard to play and it's complex in its own way but i the sound of it was so specific and it was so guitar and it was so like energizing that i i was like i gotta i gotta figure this stuff out so i went straight to trying to learn lead guitar like i didn't learn chords yeah i didn't do anything i was like i i going straight for eruption yeah oh man this is going to be fun man there's a lot of stuff the rabbit hole where uh where do we even start uh i don't know do you want to open cases and do reveals or you want to see what's in the little guitar boat first it's up to you you know i like cracking cases man can we open up a case really yeah where should we start i don't even know what's in them so let's let's find out this one right here yeah let's see what what we have i'm terrible i i always put cases or guitars back in cases the wrong way yeah this one is the main guitar that i played for probably the first 10 years of uh of touring um playing my dad's music and it was before gibson made the roxy guitar yeah so this was a lot of people always thought that the the roxy guitar was more of like this walnut color because it photographed that way so this is a really uh stock guitar except that i put this little uh switch in it so that i could get that out of phase sound you know of all the guitars that i have this is the one that probably got the frets most abused i usually don't have any problems with that but this one got played so much [Music] do you gravitate towards sg's is that where you feel most at home well the thing is i started off more of like a strat or charvel style player and when i started playing on the sg it was a little foreign because my your arm has moved a little for this way like you're picking is more forward but yet you have more freedom here so i had to change a lot about what i was doing technique-wise to learn a lot of the things i wanted to learn in my dad's music and it became that the sg was the easiest to play the hard stuff on yeah plus i changed so much about the way that i was playing in terms of like grouping the notes i do a lot of stuff where it's like three notes one note three notes one note three notes and that kind of stretch stuff that happens when you stretch a little bit more on the strat it's like it's harder for your fingers and uh and it's just harder to execute some of the hard parts so but this one i mean you know it's it's a stock guitar but it's just a custom shop yeah yeah custom shop sg but it it really is a nice one i mean you can see it's well it's well broken in yeah very cool man what i do to match some of my dad's sounds he had a sound that was called the dynaflanger sound which there was a piece of equipment that was basically it's a you can make it a flanger or a phaser but it has an envelope portion so that means if you hit it it will trigger it'll have like a slope to it so you could modulate a sound make it go out of tune which he did it would go sharp then flat then back to pitch if you use the wah pedal on it that's when it starts to get like really weird [Music] so you get this automatic doubling but it has this weird feeling like try playing on it and you'll see what i'm talking about it's like it's alive you're you're playing into the sound that's wild dude but it's like really expressive totally you can play and you're reacting to things in the moment that's what my dad loved to do was just like have these these moments where he could play and something would happen that was unexpected and it was like that's the only time that will ever happen for that audience or for him in that moment and that's that's why it's a really fun sound to play on stay in the uh the brown the brown case section here it looks like we've got another sg i think i know what that is yeah oh that's cool what are these pickups these are mcnelly pickups a guy from canada who makes all kinds of really cool stuff but this was a real beater of a of a just standard sg that uh there's a guy in mississippi who has a company called lucky town customs i wanted an sg that had some p90 pickups in it and these are like a p90 style the gold foil yeah he did this to this guitar uh he customized he basically got like a not so great sg because like the neck is is it like a 70s i don't even know what uh deluxe or something like that i don't know which one it actually is because it's it's one that he he ended up putting better parts on it and like this is like a futuristic retro yeah silver's killer with all the checking on it yeah and then this pickguard that's custom made for it you know [Music] how much of your dad's gear do you still have in your collection well the thing is i don't have a lot of it and that's because of the way the zappa family trust ended up dealing with with things but the things that um i learned over a period of time what he used how he used it it's more important to have the knowledge of the equipment and how to use it than to have the actual piece piece yeah and so when it comes to reverse engineering sounds and things i asked a lot of questions as a kid because you know that was my connection to him was music and guitar and and all this stuff so i would be in the studio whenever i could to ask him questions when it wasn't interrupting him working and he would get an idea of saying i want to make this sound and then he would find people that could help him get to that place with stuff and once he knew how to do it he could do it but it wasn't an immediate thing of like oh i know exactly how to make this sound when steve was in his band steve would be in the studio they'd be working on getting a guitar sound for a long time and steve once asked my dad why it was taking so long and he was saying because you want to have the sound the finished sound as you are recording which people don't really do chase it after yeah after the fact yeah yeah so you you know try to find the right frequency range and my dad was very very good at arranging material not only with the instrumentation but then to have it be very clear in the mix well this one this case looks a little bit like it's seeing some road it's uh i think some rats have eaten it up road rats yeah um but the guitar itself this is the actual roxy sg this is my dad's guitar right this is the one that's on the cover of all the stuff and it looks a little different because at some point twa back when twa was an airline they damaged the guitar and there was a little bit of a crack that ran through the body so my dad still wanted to be able to play the guitar but he didn't like the crack so they put this silver pick guard on it but these definitely are like tone knobs and different things that are preamp related pickup selection and phase reversal and this is that's i think this is the standard one that knocks these out of phase i mean of all your dad's guitars is this probably one of the more used ones or did was he because it's definitely one of the ones he's probably photographed with well the thing about it it started as a an sg special had like p90s in it right yeah dot inlays bound that yeah yeah and so he must have really liked the neck because this guitar got changed over so many times to become you know a different instrument what all is that you know going on with all of this extra switching and things that were were added this stuff is the same as what uh when gibson made the roxy sg that uh we they made like i think 250 of them or something we didn't do any of this electronic stuff in it because that's not what was happening at the time of the roxy so this was the holdover from that which was that you could have these go out of phase and then this made uh this one a single coil some of these are like a parametric eq like sweeps with the batteries yeah the batteries running sweepable but there was also a gain circuit in here so this is just volume and then one of these is going to be like this extra added gain one of the other sg's the the baby snakes sg which i don't have that used to have a green ringer in it and so it's like it's like an octave fuzz thing so if you hit two notes and you did something like this they the notes would go the opposite direction so you would have this like really weird you know like beating effect built into the guitar yeah yeah what's the story with the veneer on the headstock being natural that is the part that i do not really know and this one it's like it looks like it's smaller and beat up you know lost some of its mass around the edges there it has somehow but check out the action on this and my dad used to play seven through 38 back in the uh you know these are these are lines yeah these are nines on here but uh but seven through 38 with the with this guitar uh and then this looks like an add-on good heel heel repair at some point but you know they got the like yeah i got the little cracks here but these little little pearl dots yeah the pearl dots i don't know sap of history right there yeah this is a pretty heavy-duty guitar because uh it was the apostrophe and overnight sensation guitar as well so like cosmic debris yeah and you know all these different things that this guitar did but again like he must have really liked it because it it it just sort of transformed like at least three times like eddie van halen your dad was also a notorious guitar modifier and was always chasing things what are you in your journey as a guitarist are you are you a tinkerer do you like to to switch things out mess with sounds like that on the guitars themselves the guitars uh over the over the years of playing it used to be more that whatever guitar i picked up it was going to make me play a certain way and i was happy with that i didn't need to change too much of it for the feel or the sound i would just adopt whatever that was when i started playing my dad's music a lot i noticed that some of the things were so hard to play that i needed some more consistency with certain instruments so i was going to need a backup of a guitar maybe even two backups of a guitar in case something happened to it when you're playing that stuff that's so hard and you suddenly switch to a different guitar you've never played on you suddenly can't play that music because it's not it doesn't feel right so i hadn't experienced that before until i started playing my dad's music as much as it was i did end up tinkering with some sg's because at a certain point that guitar became the most comfortable to play but if we're playing a bunch of music that all segues together and we might have 40 minutes of music without taking any breaks and i need to have a bunch of other different sounds i needed the sg to have some more flexibility in terms of sound so i did tinker with a few of them and put in like sustainiacs and uh piezo pickups so that i could have a combination of different things and i could play songs from different eras and still have it be in the right context this is probably not what you're going to expect to see in a tweed case you're not going to expect to see this at all anyway because this is uh this is just a weird guitar okay is that a coonie from yeah performance yeah yeah oh no banana man banana what banana but then really have a close look at the fred what what the hell is that is that the biggest zero fret in the world or is well or is that dot i'm confused so look at the 12th fret it's split in two some of these frets are split in two because this is a micro tonal instrument but only at times only in certain sections what yeah it's bizarre i mean i'm not used to playing it yet i haven't spent enough time with it but we should plug it in and hear what it sounds like because it in the wrong hands [Laughter] my yeah that's crazy weird right what would you use this well the thing this is not for playing the pentatonic uh blues scale well the thing is that with this my goal would be to to find like a a cool almost like a funk lick that you could add the weird tones in and make a song around this this riff that just has a different tonality and so it's you're not trying to play as you normally would you're trying to bring out the the flavor of of what this is and it was made right down the street yes yes uh cooney cuny sugai who has worked on a lot of my dad's guitars over the years built stuff for a lot of l.a yeah steve and stuff so he but he used to work at fender and uh he's uh uh he's a great guitar builder uh and so i said hey can you stick some frets in between the frets and he was pretty much asking me why you know but you don't ask sometimes sometimes that's really just the reason to do it just because very cool but it's it's one of those ones that is a um you know when you find the right sound to go with it it'll be like you'll go that's a cool riff you know you put like a really cool drum beat no and it's a simple riff but like the personality you know that's what i want is i want to do something not complicated something cool and simple but just lets the sound of what that is be the main thing i keep looking behind me at this gold top that looks familiar and it's got a bunch of cables coming out of it well good luck picking it up oh boy that's that's no joke yeah oh here i'm gonna hand this over to you let you hold that it's like i don't i didn't try weighing it but i think it has to be plus 12 it's over 12 pounds this is like a really strange combination of things so my dad was photographed quite a bit in the late 60s with a gold top that started with cream p90s and then he went nuts on it and he put a telecaster pickup that's a telecaster bridge picker yeah and he changed to these black p90s these are the knobs that are volume and tone for this and then each one has its own volume and tone and then you can decide to make it so you can switch just to this pickup if you want to hear just that sound or you have a combination there's also the way to knock it out of phase you know so i think it's uh out of phase seemed to be a big yeah sound that your dad liked yeah it was definitely a sound that was used a lot um it was a really cool thing because a lot of times what he would do is he'd split his signal so he would have like his guitar being recorded direct and then he would go to an amp or maybe two amps even in the late 60s he was doing weird experiments like that it really added a weird character that put this guitar in the frequency range that you couldn't get otherwise and this is just from like some old old mod that was i think this was originally like a little switch yeah instead of this uh so i don't really know what what was up with that but this is how how it was but it has two um jacks two jacks because one of them is for a a piezo pickup so we gotta find a sound that is specific to this which should be right around the pieces of just in the saddles yeah it's in the bridge [Music] so that sound is is meant to be kind of close to what this synth track or what sounded like synth tracks which because it was multiple uh bass guitars tremolo picked playing these harmonies [Music] so that's one of the things that i would use in conjunction with sounds that were coming from the keyboards on stage to get as close to the record as we could how many songs can you do with this 14 pound guitar in a row before you guys switch out to something else well i was doing the whole show um the whole front half of the show which was the whole hot rats album and that's about a 48 minute stretch with that stretch yeah if your back can handle it oh yeah so like that's so that's like direct just like uh yeah because he would have used the di in the studio you know and so there's like a tiny tiny bit of like clipping added to it but and then you have the distorted amp [Music] part which was in the studio like a little combo amp and it was not a fender i don't remember the name but when i saw a picture of it i was like never even seen this amp before and it wasn't one that he owned [Music] but in the context of playing uh in the studio and when we're in trying to yeah that that feels better though right then yeah let's roll right around it yeah we've got another cool looking sg with some fun pickup things going on here what what is notice anything different about it though on the neck whoa wait what the hell is that it's uh it's missing part of the frets it's like half fretless half breathless what well the thing the thing about this is it's again like i have a a real interest in that uh that sound of like eastern music and uh the slidiness of uh fretless instruments but i wanted to see if there was a way to to be able to play keep the low strings in tune and then have the flexibility to do the the high string so high e b and g are all on the fretless part of the neck d a and e are all half fred yeah yeah let's let's see did we do this for you or no no no you had you had to seek someone out to do this well uh gabriel at echo park guitars uh was the the mad scientist that uh decided to give it a shot you know he ended up painting the guitar because this was a roxy sg this was an original gibson from the run yeah from the run yeah what else is like a gold so gold foiled the arm and pickup or something right at the neck joint yeah so the the thing that i was trying to experiment with is there's a sustaniac in here so that helps you when you're playing fretless when you when you use a sustaniac you lose the neck pickup while you're using the sustaining sustainiac so i wanted to see if there was a way to blend some other kind of a pickup with it and scientifically you really can't with the magnetic field it just creates crosstalk noise and then it ruins the sustain part then i put like a piezo style um pickup underneath this cover because it's not magnetic and so i was i was just trying to get another thing that i could blend in into the sound so here it's on like a [Music] like just a clean kind of sound so so here we're hearing the sustaniac and these are um these are flat wounds and it's a real just direct sound that's very violent but now so that pickup that's doing all the work of keeping that this note going is yeah i love uh you know having an instrument basically make you do something you wouldn't do otherwise you know like you have to react to it and this is one that um once i get it more dialed in i'm i think i'll have more fun with it i have a special bridge that uh fishman made for me because this has got a piezo pickup in it but i have to in order to be able to get it to be easier to play in tune down here and even play chords the bridge is broken in half so the low strings can stay here and then these can move even more forward a little bit because this is already pushed as far as it can go but to intonate it to where you can feel like the note is actually in tune in the middle instead of on the fret line this can't go far enough it'll be a work in progress it's kind of a frankenstein it's a beta test frankenstein guitar but um you know i think it has a cool vibe to it love the color yeah it's a really cool color um yeah again that was done by uh gabriel at echo park so it's pretty unusual for you know a a gibson if you look at it and go uh that's a gibson it doesn't look like it looks factory yeah yeah not quite another one that that has and i think the problem with this one at the moment is it doesn't have the the batteries in it this one has all these different uh pickups i take it this started as a roxy as well yeah it started as as the roxy and then um the same guy that did that silver uh p90 sgd looks yeah familiar so uh it was the lucky town customs guy so he he stripped away the the color and then we tried to get like more of like a honey burst kind of thing uh with this but the the wood that's used and uh you know that wood doesn't like to take other finishes all that well but i think it actually has a pretty cool look to it yeah look cool what i really wanted to do with this was get some oddball out of phase thin weird sounds that i couldn't get with any other guitar and you can see there's two uh strat style so there's every possible weird combination this is still a humbucker i take yeah and then we have like a dan electro lipstick yeah pick up some kind of take on a diamond yeah and like a harmony gold foil yeah and so with all the switches and then 10 more varieties of switching so oh that's a rotary screw as well of course i mean you can't not have a rotary switch on your guitar so but then this is a six way all right what i wanted to be able to do was was at any time have anything on its own or combinations of and then i wanted to be able to flip the phase or make them series parallel or whatever so that's why yes and have the piezo on its own volume knob so the thing is the rotary is set up so that when you're in one position only this will change the pickups and this gives you your six-way combinations of things ones and twos and then you can have you know the series parallel stuff and then this way uh gives you the combinations of this stuff but so you're able to freely choose or you can just have like one preset preset sound and say yes well it makes sense yeah that makes sense it's like every catalog guitar pickup from the 1960s yeah all crammed into one sg body i love it yeah and it doesn't sound like an sg you know except in the bridge position you can make it sound like an sg but uh if you like sgs you're not going to see another one like it you know yeah so and if you don't like sgs you probably hate this guitar now obviously when you do zappa play zappa nailing the sounds is something you take incredibly seriously now obviously you did get to spend some time with your dad in the studio and stuff how on some of these things how do you try and go back and break down something that got recorded with that much attention to detail during the recording and try and pull it off with the gear that you have in the rig sometimes i would have had the benefit to hear the master tapes and hear okay there's four guitar tracks what's on them at one point in the 70s his rig which he called mob bell because these big towers of equipment and these patch cables and stuff there's five channels of guitar and they are all doing something different and so some of them might have more mid-range some of them might have less gain one has a lot of gain two dis might be done differently one has a lot of compression the other one might have a flanger on it and all of these things would get blended in various different ways so that you had this really three-dimensional sound and i was always wondering how is he getting that sound and it really was from the direct stuff just being mixed in just enough to give it that that detail and if he had a distorted sound it was never just straight up a lot of sustain it was one would be on very little gain mixed in with another one with the sustain so you could have a sound that would bloom in the speakers like one side might the the note might sustain more here than it does over here i ended up with learning how to use the fractal axe effects and you could do all of these things inside that unit and you could create presets that were recallable and i was able to get sounds that were actually almost identical to some of the stuff that is from the records it made it easier but it's still it's that box in itself if you want to go down the deep dive to really get to where you can make stuff sound super realistic it's it takes time that is the only guitar that i have that is what you would call a vintage stock guitar that you know it's like it's a jazz guitar which i'm not a jazz player but i was i wanted to make an sg like a 335 i remember you calling me on the phone going do you have one of those jazz guitars that has the horns like yeah i've got a couple of i think we had like three of them that day and you came out and played a bunch of them so so that is a barney kessel yes uh probably like a 63 or four if i remember right yeah it probably still has all the info in the case oh this yeah standards but yeah this one and it's got the same strings that it had that day you know this is kind of like a big sg hollow body yeah uh the big head stock that big super 400 heads it's pretty cool yeah it's a fun guitar but i mean as as we know these kind of guitars have you know there's a smell to them there's there's a whole texture love that stinger on the headstock yeah there's a whole thing to them and this it's just got a cool vibe to it there's a few different models that are based on this shape there's the two barn this is the barney kessel standard then there's the barney kessel custom which has the ebony board and the music notes up on the headstock and the bowtie inlays but this is also the the second version trini lopez yeah body so there's like the 335 style trinity lopez and then there's this style trini lopez with the with the and the uh firebird headstock on it so we use this this body shape it might be onto something with the whole big thick hollow body sg thing because this is uh it would be a super cool guitar i mean it doesn't even need to be as big as this and this is a maple top one some of the early early ones are spruce tops but this is this is definitely more of the electric guitar player version of it than the jazzer spruce top version but yeah this could get your ted you could do some serious ted and well i bet i bet there you know you could get some crazy feedback uh from the thing and uh but it's it's got a nice sound to it i mean if we plug it in and just play it on the the real direct clean sound here [Music] it's got a real mellow sound to it [Music] and that sounds like almost out of phase [Music] which quack yeah i like that of course i mean that's getting around all right on it yeah some jazzing wow very very cool [Music] love to see him again after after i uh got to play him once still still never even had a strap button on there nope this is about a stock a zappa guitar is it it's something that i would like to just have handy so i could sit and write and play and strum some things on because it would just make me play differently no very cool this is a pretty weird guitar and that's saying a lot here's here's the story on this guitar you know the song smoke on the water i'm familiar okay so in the song they say that frank zappo was yeah they were playing at the casino right some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground so everything got burned to the ground all my dad's equipment got trashed you know they had nothing to use there was some guy in switzerland at the time that met my dad and said hey i got a guitar you could borrow it if you want and it was this guitar so my dad apparently had the guitar for a few years and he did this to it which i had never even seen a picture of this guitar i'm just trying to figure out how this ended up well i guess it's this was an sg junior it used to be a single single pickup so that's why there was no holes for the studs because it was a rap tail yeah so this was the guitar that my dad finished the tour on i don't really know like i've not played this guitar much we should plug it in and see what it sounds like like on offs for each i pick up or i'm not even sure i mean now does that sound like an sg no [Music] so it seems like i don't know what this one does but these seem like on off switches for the pickup so yeah yes i got an on off for each pickup you would never hear that go that's an sg yeah oh it's wild so yeah sg junior originally all sorts of fun but it has a really interesting sound another custom strat that's fun so this one your obsession with the cut off yep that's right that's right it was uh buzzing but we'll see um whoa what was that's a uh i use these um magnetic things so that it's easier to um change guitars like if i need a straight versus a right angle oh you just pick it for the guitar and then just yeah so what's going on with these pickups because they got like this silver foil kind of yeah that's uh it's um tim mcnelly was the same guy that um in that silver sg some of his pickups again but there's something weird about this one where it really does like an almost octavia sound [Music] so that's a you know was like a happy accident like we didn't decide hey can you make this sound like an octavia girlfriend but the tuning for it for non-locking it's a it's a pretty impressive thing it's uh it when you're not using it it's it's like a hardtail so you have to actually press it into use so like the feel of it is not as wiggly as like a some tremolos can be it's almost more like a feel of a bigsby yeah you got to really engage it in the yeah but you can pull it up this one is uh it's another really custom builder ronin guitars have you ever seen yeah john shanks had a few of these when we were doing his with these big wide gold foil pickups yeah and they have like a built-in piezo style thing but it's not a battery operated one it's a passive thing and so it's got a really cool uh sound which we can we can hear but what i love about this guitar is feel how light this thing is oh that's like four of these four or five of these to get to that last ball that's great yeah cool knobs too yeah these guys pay very close attention to detail and they've got that futuristic retro thing that is so appealing yeah what are these pickups sound like you know we're hearing them basically direct right now with this kind of sound which is a good way to get an idea of what they sound like that little spank of the uh yeah and it feels alive yeah so the piezo is in the it's built into things built into the body which is why you're getting that yeah percussive thing happening yeah but it's a nice uh you know texture to be able to have and blend together and it's just such a uh a cool design like i love when when people take things to that artistic level uh and it also sounds good you know pick guard on the top yeah instead of under the strings it's above the strands and it's a nice contrast to the 14 and a half pound gold top yeah for sure so on on the uh on the last tour this was the relief you know from from that one when did you first get to meet eddie and how did that happen so it's pretty crazy because i was 12 years old i had been playing guitar for maybe seven eight nine months max i don't remember exactly but i was listening only to fair warning and van halen won that was just on a loop like we switched from one to the other ones yeah just like just going and i was listening to some uh some ozzy osbourne with randy rhodes like diver madman and stuff like that but one day out of nowhere the phone rang pick up the house line and you don't know who it is so my mom picks it up and it's some guy purporting to be edward van halen but of course i want this person to be van halen because you know that's the coolest thing ever and my dad ends up getting on the phone they talk uh for a few minutes and then 15 minutes later he's at the house wow so it was eddie van halen and he does he shows up at the house and at the bottom of the staircase there's some kind of lighting so he's backlit and he's coming up the stairs and he's carrying a guitar and it's not in a case it's just he's holding the guitar and for me it was like he was backlit with a smoke machine and like slow motion yeah and you know and mean streets is already playing you know so so he's walking up the steps and he's it turns out he's in the women and children first jumpsuit you know and he's he's got this guitar and it's a kramer guitar before he was talking about endorsing kramer so there's a piece of tape over the headstock logo and it's a purple guitar with two humbuckers in it and without even really getting into the high how are you kind of stuff like okay play eruption you know because it was it was this amazing moment of here's this guy that i've heard so much never seen up close when you see how somebody really does what they do where they play it what strings they're playing it on like that was burned into my mind there was no way i would ever forget exactly what he he played that was just the coolest experience until the next coolest experience that came you know a few weeks later check this thing out this right here this this is going to blow your mind i'm i'm guessing because uh originally it's a kramer right so 12 year old me was playing in a talent show at my school i don't know exactly how this happened because i i had nothing to do with arranging this but edward van halen came to my sound check all right i'm playing running with the devil with my 12 year old buddies right i'm not only playing one chord wrong but my guitar is not staying in tune and so ed drives home comes back with this guitar which originally was you can see this like cream color that's kind of in here it was cream-colored with an orange lightning bolt like shazam he brings zakitar back and he puts it on me he says you're playing it wrong and he stands behind me and he so the guitar is on me like it is now he stands behind me he counts it off with the kids and he does the pick slide the whole thing it was the craziest experience now this is before mtv or anything like you would have never known what rock stars look like or sounded like unless you met them in this situation you would only have pictures from magazines or what was on the album after the show the next day you know i said i called him and thanked him and said hey you know if you want to come grab the guitar oh no you can keep that guitar so i kept the guitar i painted it this was like my homage to the schwinn bicycle style painting of van halen-esque guitars and i painted it like this when i was 13. amazing with pickup this is a tom anderson pickup really yeah and i screwed it straight in straight to the bottom you got to yeah and then of course you know corporate rock still sucks sst record that was just this made sense at the time probably still makes sense now yeah yeah do you have any like really special memory since his passing that keeps coming up to you that that kind of how you remember well the the thing about ed he was the first person that called me when my dad died you know it's it's emotional because when you have i mean it doesn't matter who it is when you have friends that step up and do something for you it it matters no but it was unexpected that it would be him who would call me first at like five you know 15 in the morning and he's like hey you know what can i do he was a guy that was inspired in the moment and he would just go for something if it was if it was had to happen right then he would just do it you know but i think that's an amazing quality and that's something that i actually you know i learned from that myself as well because you know if you're inspired and you can see like you can get from point a to point b and it's like it's exactly the thing you need to do why waste time why not just do it right now moving down the row here what have we got this one is uh a shabbat it's a similar color to that fretless yeah but it's a little beat up and uh but this guy he's making some of the best guitars around really the neck i mean feel the the neck on this thing that's yeah i'm not sure what's on there it's kind of weird it's like a i think he said it's a gun oil finish but it is a really nice feeling that feels great and you know for a straight out of the box kind of strat it feels well worn and how often do you find yourself going back do you ever have like a super strat uh at all or are you kind of settled into to these guitars now and that's is that's what you do well you know i mean of course i grew up in the era where van halen was you know the biggest band in the world and at 12 years old starting to play guitar fair warning was my favorite album and i mean you can't get more super strat than a van halen eyes that's kind of the pinnacle of that tone too and and so for me i was always really into that kind of sound uh because i mean that's just what i listened to so much i love my dad's music but i knew it was really complicated and it was gonna take me some time to learn you know there will never not be a time when when i hear mean street or unchained and just be like that's the power of the tone yeah the power of rock i need to play we got more cases on the floor here you know what's in these i don't i one i do i know what's in that uh the soft bag but these other ones i don't know because i i'm really bad at marking what's what's in them so it's a surprise for both of us yeah let's just let's see i i'm guessing it's it's less polish yeah probably ah this is the one that is the cover of shut up and player guitar this is my dad's last ball it's had different pickups in it before on the cover it's got dimarzio's the cream-colored one yes but i i don't think they're carvings he did have a carbon in here at one point but is this another one that weighs in the it's about 4 000 pounds well that's of the era and i'm sure there's a couple of other yeah preamp in here yeah this one has the rotary switch and this is kind of like waw positions so it's different yeah like of the wall and then this one has uh it's got a parametric eq in it as well as a gain circuit at one point this guitar was set up to go through some synth modules which i do not have those synth modules nor do i have the cable uh so it's it's been customized a lot of different ways starting around 1980 uh this became one of his favorite guitars to play but he mostly played it sitting on a stool because i can see why that's so heavy the very first live broadcast concert ever done uh was my dad's show on mtv where they did a show at the palladium was a halloween concert and this was the guitar that he played but i always remembered it sitting around in the studio it was kind of his go-to guitar after the roxy sg this was like this was number two this was the one that he played all the time and i've got heavier strings on it right now but it was again like super he used to use these maxima gold strings and it was like eight through uh 40 or something it was really light any particular reason why he grabbed he just liked the feel of he wanted to be able to bend five or six frets uh you know five or six steps without uh you know ripping the skin off his fingers but yeah it's a really heavy guitar and i do remember you know always seeing him play it around the house and and stuff and checking the tuners uh yeah those are some special showers or something it's hard to read under the lights this is ibanez it looks like his tuners that's what it looks like does that look like it has to you yeah yeah see this one oh dude that's it's close it's a toss-up they're uh this one feels worse yeah the bixby might be giving you a couple extra ounces on this one neither one are light yeah i do know what's in this one this is an acoustic guitar i believe i'm pretty certain it's the only acoustic guitar that my dad had that he could have electrified in order to play the solo on uh peaches on regalia ooh j160e yeah is this on the uh it's a barkus berry extra contact pickup yup got the second input jack here on the side yeah did your dad play a lot of acoustic guitar there's only a couple of songs that have featured acoustic guitar one of them is uh called sleep dirt and that was on this martin that he had you know because it you have the electronic part of it he was able to do the stuff with the phaser and the the envelope filter stuff but there's probably not too many other acoustic guitar things there's some stuff on the grand wazoo that had some acoustic and there's some strummy stuff on like the early records where it's like rhythm playing but yeah but it's nice a lot of people don't know this this pickup on the j160 this is actually just a regular standard gibson p90 just in a different case the same pickup it would have been a les paul jr or a special or anything like that just in this different plastic casing to make the profile a little bit less to uh fit at the neck but you can still see the whole yeah the whole bottom plate and all that kind of stuff in there they sound killer really cool guitars yeah late 60s yeah it's a super thin uh or a small 69. small neck um but yeah at some point a heavier set of strings was put on it but when he was doing the peaches then he was able to bend this it was an electric style non-wound g-string this one i bet is marked correctly because it's probably been on the road and this is most likely the uh roxy guitar with the sustainiac in it this is the one where the headstock was broken and then it was fixed by fine folks at sweetwater it was they did a great job and then oddly enough like not even a year later my wife was playing this guitar she was learning how to play the song muffin man and she uh said it on the this little like you know uh sofa style thing in the house and when she got up it just slipped and fell and then broke again it didn't come completely off but you know the kuni had to put it back together it's got stories this one yeah this is probably the most um played guitar other than that first um walnut looking one what's cool about it though is you know the sustaniac gives you so many options for things but ultimately i played this one uh probably at 90 percent of the shows over the last six years six years that's the go-to yeah [Music] so you're gonna like this one turn it around what is this i call it a telecaster again with the chopped off guard i like the aesthetic again with the trim king yeah tell me what's going on here with the pickups and switching so it's all mcnelly pickups again uh the thing about this one is you can have either or or the combination of and it's such a i mean we just got to hear it because it's it's a really cool sound but yeah it's got a real cool uh combination of things that you can do [Music] so you can get some strat and tele combos out of it you know so very cool you got to have a little fun with design sometimes it says it's a white strat so it might be yup so this is uh like one of the jimi hendrix model yeah guitars but i sanded the head i mean the uh the neck so that it uh had a more uh you know just raw wood style finish on the back and this has a really cool vega trim now this is the vega trim is is really pretty clever like these guys from spain uh figured out a way a way to uh do something unique with the tremolo now this has this kind of great feel of a real kind of uh bouncy trim what's different about it is it looks really small and it is designed that way so that when you put it on a regular um fender tremolo you can just just you don't have to do anything to uh make any changes to your guitar modifications you just drop this right in and it it has the ability to go up or down because it's so small that it fits inside the normal cavity so they did a really clever bit of design work there [Music] but if you if you try it out the uh the feel of the tremolo is like it's one of the best feeling tremolos out there [Music] and it's really responsive to uh you know like any subtle little yeah that's smooth i've never seen that before yeah they do an amazing job i don't know if you can see how it's so thin yeah it's but look at if you watch it move in that space you can go all the way down but then you can also go all the way up with it now this is one that also probably requires batteries but another fretless guitar with the sustainiac and auto-tune auto-tune built on the guitar auto-tune built into the guitar now they made a unit an auto-tune unit that could give you any kind of tuning that you ever wanted you know so you can have like instant access press a button and have any kind of yeah like like better tuning technology yeah what i wanted to try to do with this thing was i wanted to see if i could train the auto-tune thing to reasonably make chords be in tune without having it you know too much yeah uh so i haven't played around with it enough to totally get it there but this guitar i mean you know you look at it and you're like okay uh i'm in trouble already because there's not even a fret line you know yeah that is yeah there's also a way to get power to the guitar that way so that you don't have to uh use the two batteries and the two batteries tend to not i mean look at the route on the back of this thing uh the two batteries tend to only last about 30 minutes you know it's something about what's going on in here is eating up batteries really fast so we saw the little homage to yeah oxy there it started as a roxy wow ebony board with no marker fretless yeah i don't even know this is actually ebony because you know there was that embargo and all that stuff that might be rich light yeah but i mean you know if you think about guitars that gibson has made uh this is not one you would expect that's a one of one yeah that's one of those it's a one of two because i stand correct yeah so you're always into the new technologies chasing things here in the studio new ways of mixing what else what else have you been working on that that's cool and and groundbreaking well the thing is we normally would be doing a lot of touring we would do 80 to 100 shows a year and a lot of musicians they've been used to being able to perform live it's something they do and they have that's their way of having a predictable income from what they do but with the pandemic that all went away nobody knows if it will ever come back to normal and what yeah what normal will ever yeah be again yeah right so during this downtime it became important to find a way to to help people musicians and content creators engineer producers people in the music industry that need a way to reach their audience directly and find a way for them to make that connection and understand that if they're able to find their core audience and connect with them directly and have a simple way to do that make it very artist uh forward so that an artist can get a hundred percent of every sale so there's a platform called reward music that we launched in um september on reward music you can subscribe to them directly an artist can say okay i have uh a subscription and it's thirty dollars a year or two dollars and fifty cents a month right that's less than a cup of coffee somewhere it just takes 700 people to subscribe to an artist for them to beat minimum wages millions of spins on 700 people subscribing at 2.50 a month is 16 800 so an artist can think wait a minute i could get 700 people but could i get 7 000 people yeah i probably could 7 000 people is 168 000 instead of trying to cast the widest net to say let me try to make pennies or a dollar from a million people or more create a better experience for your fans a curated experience you know so this is the whole point was to try to do something that could help people and create a turnkey business solution where they have all the the tools they need to broadcast live to host a podcast to do anything they can where they can work from home and reach people and have that direct connection let's go right to the artist yeah really it's you're just going straight to the artist that's great new patronage of the arts really rewardmusic.com rewardmusic.com check it out [Applause] oh well dude that was a lot of fun i really want to thank you no problem for opening the place up to us sure i got to work on my half fretted guitar playing me too i see you yeah yeah we'll get that the cooney yellow one out and we'll we'll do something crazy we'll do it we'll have some fun with the with the micro tones yes micro tonal music is the future it's the future dude thanks again for having us thank you guys for watching i'm mark ignacy for gibson tv we'll see you guys next time on another episode of the collection [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Gibson TV

Views: 355,443

Rating: 4.9168282 out of 5

Keywords: Gibson, Gibson 2020, Gibson TV, Dweezil Zappa, Frank Zappa, Zappa Plays Zappa, Dweezil Zappa 2021, Frank Zappa Documentary, Running with the Dweezil, Zappa, Normans Rare Guitars, Guitar of the Day, Rig Rundown, Andertons, Marty Music, Troglys, Music is Win, Paul Davids, Eddie Van Halen, Kramer Guitars, The Collection, Welcome to Nerdville, Icons Jerry Cantrell, Icons Tony Iommi, Icons Kirk Hammett, Game Stop, Game Stop Stock

Id: GDWo8blebpU

Length: 65min 54sec (3954 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jakev91489]

Dweezil is always such a joy to see interviewed. Such an open, down to earth guy.

[u/Plonsky2]

Bitchin'!

I got to see DZ last February in a smallish venue in Seattle, right before the shutdown. My brother in Indianapolis had tix for a show there in March but it got canceled. Reminds me of a game we played as kids called "Got You Last".

[u/benjaminsantiago]

Does anyone know what happened to the Jimi Hendrix guitar and the Switchmaster and Baby Snakes SG? Are they in the “vault”?