CME EXCLUSIVE Jackson Custom Shop Guitars!

Transcription:

Hey, this is Dan Albert at Chicago Music Exchange, and today I am joined by Tanner. Tanner is one of our resident Jackson and shred experts, so I am super pumped to be with him here today for this video.

Dan, before we get too deep into it, I really need you guys to subscribe to our channel here. Go ahead and hit that button; our beloved Nathaniel Murphy is on strike. He's refusing to work until we get 350,000 subscribers. Do it, just do it.

When we think about Jackson and when we think about their history, I'm going to tell you some stuff that you know, but I didn't know. I don't know anything, tell me about it, Al.

All right, so we have a gentleman named Grover Jackson, who started building guitars in 1973. Towards the late '70s, he actually started working with Wayne Charvel in Wayne's shop. Now, in 1978, things weren't going so well, so Wayne actually sold his interest in Charvel, his own last name, to Grover Jackson. Then, in 1980, guitars started to come out with the Jackson name on the headstock, and most notably, they were made for some guy named Randy Rhoads. So, in 1980, they were really a true drop shop; they were making a guitar that was a Strat shape; however, they put the body on a pin router and took a quarter inch off of the entire edge of the body. And that's actually where the name Dinky comes from, and we actually are here to talk about Dinkies.

Most specifically, we're going to do some dinking, some thies on some Dinkies, or something, are they thinky thoughts? Then, is that what we're saying?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Some Dinkies about these sinkies.

I think this just took off. That's great. I was kind of wondering how early Dinky guitars are going to be different from the ones that you see coming out of the factories today.

Sure, it's not so much that they're different, but just what they were doing back then. They learned and they grew a lot. So, those early ones would have a pretty unique, at the time, neck carve on this horn here; it was a little flatter right through around there. They all had the 22 frets, and they had like the earliest Floyd Rose design. The first Floyd Rose was actually around 1982, wasn't it, or that's around when Eddie got like the first prototype or whatnot?

Yeah, and they made some changes to that, but that early one was right around then, yeah, and that was like a... that was a top mount, right? It wasn't recessed, and they kept going with top mount for a little bit, but they started doing the recessed mount as well.

It's for extreme... for extreme B whammies, wiggle stick behavior.

Nice, can we take like a real quick break because, mainly, I got to take this jacket off. So hot.

So, having learned a little bit about the early history of the Dinky and how they made those, what did we do to kind of hot rod that to our own CM exclusive versions?

I like the emphasis that you put on hot rod because that was kind of the whole idea of this, to just pay homage to the wonderful film and also to, you know, take a guitar that was a hot rod in the early '80s and make a hot-rodded version of that hot rod for 2024, hot rod inception, if you will.

Yes, you insert the noise there and a picture of Andy Samberg.

Yes. So, one of the first things that we wanted to do is we've been trying to use Bare Knuckle pickups whenever possible; we love them. I haven't heard a set that I don't like. And in keeping with the hot rod nature of the guitars, we use the Bare Knuckle Holy Diver set in the HH models. And then in the HSS models, we actually have, at Bare Knuckle's suggestion, we have the Irish Tour set pickups in the neck and the middle, and then we do have the Holy Diver again in the bridge. And we actually do have different control configurations for each one because, obviously, they don't function the same way.

I noticed that. So, you have more of a traditional... was that a two-way or three-way...

Three-way. So, going to have your pickup selector here, your volume and your tone. Nice and easy. And this one's got the two-tone and individual pickup unlock toggles, which is cool.

And then some of the other things that we wanted to do, because obviously, the 22 fret neck is very unique to a Jackson, we really wanted to bring the neck into 2024 as well. So, these are a 12 to 16 compound radius, so super comfortable chording as well as really effortless bends.

I can tell that these are features that you support. The things that immediately... on any kind of these guitars, the things that speak to me immediately are how fast the neck is, which I know is kind of a buzzy word, but I love it because it perfectly and accurately describes what the neck does for you. It's fast, I can move from here to here without a whole lot of hiccups; it's really nice and easy. And also, am I detecting some stainless steel jumbo frets? Do they feel a little too smooth?

I love it; it's so butter jumbo stainless. It's like, for me, in a guitar like this, it's the only way to go.

Yeah, we figured that would really resonate with both today's Jackson players as well as the Jackson players of old.

Yeah, I love it. Another thing that I think is going to appeal to any Jackson fan is we kind of went with as close as you could get to that original '82 Floyd with their current model '84 style Floyd, which is that top mount, no recess. It's just slapped on there. Very hot-rodded, if I might say so.

Yeah, so really like that. Love the brass tuners. Those are just so good, and they just really pop on the guitar, which I love. That top mount is very kind of period correct for what we're kind of aiming for, which is cool.

There's one thing I really want to know about, and that's these finishes.

So, what we wanted to do with the colors, we wanted to do a lot of the classic Jackson finishes: your snow white pearl, robin's egg blue, black. I guess people like that on Jackson guitars. I've never heard of that, but what are you going to do? But then we also wanted to, in keeping with the hot rod nature, use a lot of classic as well as modern car colors. So, I have some guitars coming in Porsche Irish green, which was a vintage Porsche color. They've kind of bastardized it lately, but the original Irish green is wonderful, and we'll have that on... We do now have Carrara gray, or chalk, as it's sometimes called, which is also a Porsche color. Jackson, back in the day, would have been using polyurethane, very thick, very heavy finish, not really porous in any way. So, when you got a Jackson guitar in 1980 or 1982, or whenever, the guitar was essentially going to look like that forever unless you abused it. And that was one of the great things about polyurethane, and still is, if you don't want your guitar to ever look different, that's the best way to do it. You might have noticed we are a vintage guitar store, and, as a vintage guitar store, we really like nitrocellulose lacquer. It's much thinner; it's very difficult to work with, but when you get it right, it really kind of brings the instrument to another level, in our opinion. And, additionally, we can age it. There's a store that we are friends with that is actually the only dealer that's allowed to age Charvel Custom Shop guitars, so we figured we can't do that, but we can absolutely age Jackson, and the time was right. Right now, we have two different relic levels. I believe this one is a Nitro Relic Tour; they made new names for basically the same Fender levels of relic, so... a lot of different options. We ordered them in all sorts of different treatments and, as we were mentioning, all sorts of different colors and whatnot, so we're going to have an awesome selection. But there's so much more we can do. So, if anybody wants a Custom Shop Jackson of their own, or one of these specifically, we can make it happen.