By his own admission, Joe Satriani can often let his imagination get the better of him. Thankfully, he’s surrounded by some incredibly talented people to help make his wild ideas slightly less wild realities.
The custom-built 1999 Crystal Planet take on his Ibanez JS signature guitar is a rather transparent example of that, and it has just sold for $10,000. The guitar was the centerpiece of a collection of gear owned and played by Satch that is listed on Bananas at Large and it’s a thing to be marveled at.
As the millennium beckoned, Satriani was readying his seventh solo album, Crystal Planetand a celebratory build to promote the album seemed the perfect tonic. A fully see-through guitar — even the pickup bobbins are glass-like — was a great idea on paper. In reality, it was littered with problems that Juniji Hotta had to solve in the Ibanez Custom Shop in 1999.
“We had to make decisions with stuff that normally you would hide,” Satriani tells Bananas at Large, his eyes fixed on the wires nestling beneath its controls.
“Then the weight is really substantial. It feels like a ’73 Les Paul, or something like that! But when I saw it, I couldn’t believe how cool it was.
“I love the clear knobs, you never see pickups like that. And I have to point out that there are earplugs that are squished into the corner here,” he says, pointing to the pickups. As it happens, the plugs offered a simple solution to a rather noisy problem.
“This has to do with the way I used to set up the guitars and the amps,” he explains. “I’d be using a Boss DS-1 into a Marshall 6100. That’s a ton of low-end and a ton of gain, and very often these pickups would pick up on those frequencies and they start vibrating.
“Waxing wasn’t enough, so we would stuff foam or earplugs in there to stop them from vibrating. It allowed me to keep the gain up and still play melodies that sounded sweet. The earplugs are still in there.”
As is to be expected, the one-of-a-kind prototype, it is well-kitted out. It boasts 22 frets, two DiMarzio humbuckers — a DiMarzio FRED in the bridge position, and a DiMarzio PAF Pro in the neck slot — a Lo-Pro edge tremolo and a rosewood fingerboard.
A short production run of the guitar launched Satch’s Y2K range of signature guitars, but this is the only custom-built model.
Impressively too, despite its acrylic nature, Satriani says “it sounds like a JS.”
“It really is a thing of beauty,” he says. “You’d think some of these different body products would really change the sound,” and Hotta is to thank for that.
“I actually got some notes from Junji about his time with it, and it’s such an unusual thing because he usually just oversees, it’s rare to have him actually build (the guitar).”
Discussing the guitar on his YouTube channel in 2021, Satriani admitted the project was wildly ambitious and called it “a good example of how, as artists, you have to blindly move forward with crazy ideas”.
The guitar was listed for a tidy $10,000 and has since sold. However, the rest of the collection is still listed at the time of writing. That includes a 2016 Fender Custom Shop Telecaster with an SSH pickup setup and a relic finish.
There are also two 100-watt EVH 5150III tube amps, built to the same exacting specs as Eddie Van Halen’s latter-year touring rigs.
Meanwhile, Satriani has explained how he nearly had Jeff Beck agree to a G3 tour, only to pull out with a strange replacement suggestion at the last minute, and has reflected on the hardest Van Halen song he had to tackle on the Best of All Worlds tour.
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