Following a 2 year collaboration with Rick Stewart at Vengeance Guitars here it is, the Vengeance VS1-JP ‘Sacred Serpent’, my signature guitar - released in Sept 2009.

Rick approached me in 2007 about joining his company as an endorsee and I was really impressed hearing about the technology that goes into the building of his guitars. A lot of thought is put into every element of the guitar to make it as good as it can possibly be. Everything from the design of the guitar and ergonomics to the hex head bolts used throughout the guitar is over and above even high end guitar builds. So, we decided to produce a JP series guitar.

The body is a heavy piece of maple and features a Bare Knuckles Rebel Yell pickup in bridge and a Seymour Duncan Cool Rails in neck. It also has a Floyd Rose bridge and a ‘Push-Push’ pickup selector/volume pot, which is simply genius! Push it down and it pops up; Push it down again and it stays down!

The guitar is completely hand built and has a very, very high quality finish. The paint is a temperamental mood finish that changes with heat conditions. It also features my ‘Circle of Fire’ snake logo, hand painted behind the bridge.

Vengeance Guitars use carbon fiber technology on the neck to add stability so that tuning is not affected by temperature or moisture conditions, in fact part of the quality control process is to leave the guitar out in the sun for a number of hours to check that there is no change in the tuning. VS1-JPpassed with flying colors. This was confirmed when I toured with the guitar in December 2009 for the first time. The combination of cold weather and hot gvenues usually does make for a great combination for tuning stability. But every night when i pulled the guitar out of the case it was in tune (and looking great as the temperature kept chaning the colors on the body). The carbon fiber also adds a huge amount of rigidity and strength to the neck which results in a lot of sustain. The fretboard is a stunning piece of flamed maple. It adds a little bite and lots of warmth to the tone.  Add to that ultra high and wide frets (higher and wider then Dunlop 6100) and a 1 ¾ inch nut and you have an extremely slick, fast, comfortable and playable neck. Another highlight feature of the neck are the purple fiber optic side fret markers, which are incredibly useful on stage. 

It is an amazing sounding and playing guitar. Sound clips, videos and more pictures will be on my website soon so keep checking back for updates.

Guitar Spec:

·                   Maple body

·                   Temperamental mood paint

·                   Maple neck with a 1 ¾ inch nut

·                   22 fret flamed maple fretboard

·                   Carbon fiber technology

·                   Fiber optic side fret markers

·                   Floyd Rose bridge

·                   Bare Knuckle and Seymour Duncan pickups

·                   ‘Push-Push’ volume pot/pickup selector

·                   Gotoh Tuners