“I was amazed that you can actually make a guitar that’s perfect— perfect intonation, perfect tension on the neck, perfect sound. And it’s beautiful. I was just floored.”
-Slash
The grammy award-winning, rock and roll hall-of-fame inductee of Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver, commissioned a custom built guitar from JOI Guitars. This guitar features some of the world’s most expensive and exotic woods.
The Slash Model acoustic guitar is a small Jumbo with 25.4″ scale. It features “The Tree ” back and sides, paired with an amazing and rare, Ancient Sitka Spruce top. This wood dates back to 1000 BCE. The guitar has sitka/carbon fibre bracing, dual laminated sides for strength, carbon fibre reinforced quilted Honduras mahogany neck with dual action truss rod, 1¾″ nut width, 2¼″ string spacing, a custom JOI Guitars pinless Ebony bridge, Ebony binding with pure and sterling silver borders, Ebony fretboard, sterling silver encased marble for fret markers, and 1:21 gear ratio’d Gotoh tuners with petrified whale vertebrae buttons.
The guitar was further customized with a beveled arm rest, a shallow heel for Slash to comfortably get to the 19th+ frets without having a cutaway (he chose not to have one), and a neck custom tailored in width and thickness for the man himself. An additional offset personalization was done for Slash to do his string stretching as he plays. A made-to-measure K & K pure mini and under-saddle pickup, and custom Hoffee guitar case were added to complete the package.
The inspiration for the rosette came to me much like all my best thinking… while on an ocean-side walk. I found this rusty old electrical part sitting amongst the rocks and the way the sun was shining on it, it reminded me of the interior workings of an electric guitar volume dial. That was it!
I brought it home and shined up some of the rusty aluminum wires which I then inlayed into the Ebony around the rosette. I positioned the pieces in a circular manner with simple ‘humps’, or ‘rises and falls’ of the wire to create the feeling of energy, like in a heartbeat monitor. I then outlined the Ebony rosette with Fine Pure Silver.
