When it comes to Dweezil Zappa, the apple didn’t fall far from his father’s peculiar tree. The younger Zappa he has a back catalog of material and a gear collection full of rare instruments to back that up.
And now he’s taken to YouTube to shine a light on what he calls “one of the coolest guitars that I own — and it’s also super unique”: a heavily modded, fretless, and MIDI-bolstered Gibson SG.
It’s a model to make Gibson purists feel itchy, but his 2015 LP, Via Zammafeatures the guitar extensively and shows that all the hacking and bastardizing of the once purebred instrument was worth the effort.
As the lovably oddball guitarist explains, the guitar was originally a Gibson Frank Zappa Signature “Roxy” SG, the limited-edition guitar released in 2013 as a tribute to Frank’s iconic “Roxy” SG. Among its original features are a Vibrola-style tailpiece, a chunky whammy bar, and a mismatched Narrow Open Book headstock.
But Dweezil had another fate in store for the instrument, and what came out the other end of the Zappa workshop was vastly different.
“It obviously has some weird kind of electronics in it,” he says as he shows the rear of the guitar, which has a greatly extended control cavity and two slots for nine-volt batteries.
“But look,” he adds with a smile, “it’s fretless! It started its life as a Roxy SG, but we put a different fretboard on it – this is one of those mock ebony-style fretboards, and it has a Sustainiac (neck pickup) built into it.”
The true quirkiness, though, comes via the MIDI pickup, which can be found nestling beneath the bridge humbucker which by comparison looks relatively normal. That infusion of MIDI brings a whole host of envelope-pushing features to the fore, much like the Parker Fly Adrian Belew has been using as his main guitar during the recent Beat tours.
“This allows this guitar to have built-in autotune,” Zappa details, “which means if I was going to play it fretless, I could tighten up the tuning if I wanted, or instead of it glissing, it could go fully chromatic, and it would hit every pitch as I went up.”
Rotary switches allow for the storing of preset tunings, alongside the usual list of on-body controls, making it a versatile guitar for on-the-fly performances. And it’s proven a valuable tool in the studio too.
“This guitar was played for probably at least four or five songs on the Via Zamma record,” Zappa continues. “Anything you hear (that’s) fretless, like the song ‘Truth’ or the ‘Hummin’’ guitar solo, it’s all this guitar!”
A new signature guitar, built by Shabat Guitars was added to his collection last year, and besides its wacky visage, it too has some impressive tricks up its sleeve.
Another story-rich guitar from his collection is his hand-painted Kramer, gifted by Eddie Van Halen, which he used at a school talent show to cover “Runnin’ with the Devil” after Eddie showed up with it.
The Zappa and Van Halen connection runs deep. The guitarist showed up at the Zappa family house when he was just starting out playing guitarand he would later give Eddie some useful guitar lessons when Frank Zappa’s riffs proved too hot for the guitar ace to handle.
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