Some of you may remember that a few weeks ago I wrote a post about one of my favorite YouTube channels, Custom Spray Mods. After the post went up, CSM main man, Dave commented, making an offer to use a guitar from the Daft Paragon collection in a future video.
Pictured: Professional Dave look-a-like Dominic Purcell. I loved “John Doe.”
Thinking that CSM has a fairly massive following and also thinking how much it costs to get a custom guitar painted. Jay and I conferenced in the Super Secret Daft Pagaron Bunker 1 to decide who was sending what guitar to New South Wales, Australia to get painted.
It’ll dry lighter…
If anyone is wondering, I beat Jay in a best 9 out of 11 arm wrestling challenge to earn the right to get my guitar refinished.2
So, the guitar. This is an original Desert Sun Yellow Ibanez RG550. I know you may be confused as it is not yellow. I’ve written briefly about it before, but for those of you who ignore me. This guitar originally belonged to Daft Paragon contributor Kevan J. Geier, who sold it to a friend, who sold it to me for $300 in 20003. By the time I got it it had already been painted blue, with a brush, then stripped back to bare wood and re-finished with furniture varnish.
I stripped it again, took a grill lighter to the body and stained it blue. A much, much too dark blue4.
I was going for this…
Top Tip: The proper color for Ibanez Jem Burnt Stained Blue guitars is Minwax Hunter Green. This seems totally illogical, I know. But, my buddy, Todd, was selling his and removed Mike Keneally’s signature5 and the Minwax was a perfect match to repair the spot.
So, anyway, my original plan was to grab a $150 Squire from my local Music-Go-Round and ship that to Dave and tell him to go nuts. That being said, never go into a Music-Go-Round with a poorly defined plan and money in your pocket6. After that didn’t work out (in the most awesome way possible). I decided that of all my many guitars this one was in most need of a re-fin and I was least likely to miss if something went wrong7. It’s also the guitar that makes the most sense to get an internet enabled paint job (except for the pickguard, all the pieces were from people I met first on the interwebz).
As crazy as it may seem, it will cost me about the same to ship a guitar from Atlanta to Australia and back to Atlanta as it would for me to get a guitar professionally re-finished in the US. So, from a cost perspective, there really isn’t a downside. As far as the refinish goes, I’m planning to re-use the pickguard and pickups8 (although I guess changing the pickguard is easy enough) so I’d prefer something that goes with blue and white9. Other than that, the sky’s the limit. Maybe ghosted skulls.
mmmmmmmm, skulls.
So there you go, the tear down and shipping happens this week. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.
- Located, conveniently, between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Atlanta, Georgia ↩
- Not really. It was 11 out of 13 ↩
- I remember it arrived at my apartment during an ice storm when most of the city of Atlanta was without power. It was that January that I learned that gas heat with an electric pilot light is the same as electric heat ↩
- Leading Kevan to utter the words in the caption. 13 years later, and I’m still waiting for it to. ↩
- Why?!?!?!?!?!?! ↩
- More on this later. ↩
- Because, let’s be honest for a second, Daft Paragonians. I am shipping a guitar halfway around the world to a guy I don’t know to paint for the internet. There are several parts of that sentence that would give any normal person pause. ↩
- The hated Dimarzio Evolutions. I’ve read that I need a different, lower resistance, tone pot to kill some of the way too many highs those things put out ↩
- specifically not red ↩