George Lynch: two interviews for the price of one!


George Lynch :
It does, yeah. I'm going on 55. And I still wanna be sexy when I'm out there and have the energy to do all these things I want to do. Build guitars, do artwork, do the dojo. Keep three bands going on at the same time...the travel. I work with alot of other musicians writing songs for them. So yeah, it takes alot of time and energy. Plus in my free time I hit the road on my motorcycle and hike, so if I don't get my gym time, I'm lacking in reserves. And you know, you gotta look good. You're in the entertainment business after all.
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George Lynch:
I actually just came from a photo shoot earlier today and part of the photo shoot was capturing some of these creations I've been building. Yeah I have my own shop and spray booth at ESP, and I customize my signature ESP's and we also do stuff from the ground up. I surround myself with more proficient tradesman than myself, luthiers and metalworking people, and painters and stuff. I learn from them, but I do all the work myself. The last two guitars I've got on the table, I call them the Headhunters, one is a V, one is a Strat and I basically take the black sections of the tiger, I draw a different kind of tiger graphic on the body, and I want to get it back down to raw wood, and then I take a router and I just start routing between the stripes and once I get it routed out I start using Dremel tools and hand tools and I get it all just how I want it, and then I set the whole thing on fire. (laughs) I burn out all these cavities, and then I start painting on it, and then I've been collecting, I've collected thousands of bones, bones from all over the place, big ones, little ones, everything. I Go to a taxidermist actually and I learned a lot about the processes of hides and snakeskin and bones and I apply all these kinds of elements to the guitar. So I route out cavities and I create kind of a rib and vertebrae effect on the guitar. And then as far as hardware I'll stress all the hardware with different chemical processes. One process I use is I take some of the snakeskin and I wrap the hardware and sometimes the bodies in the snakeskin and bury it in a graveyard for a little while until it does this kind of... all the little animals do their thing on it and it creates this pitted, very organic effect on the surface of whatever it is that I'm treating and then I blowtorch it, acids, use different solutions to sand it and so forth to get it to look 100 years old, and rust it out and everything. Then I wind my own pickups, and then I etch different things into the pickup covers, usually the name of the guitar, so the Headhunter guitar will have "Headhunter" in a Bone font etched on to the pickup cover. And you know, create the necks to my specific dimensions, quarter sawn wide, flat maple necks. For instance this one I have on the table right now I'm putting an old '87 custom wound Seymour Duncan Distortion pickup, taking it out of one of my guitars from my I think Aerosmith tour, and I'm putting that in the guitar and then I have a couple of old, very original Floyd Rose's, the ones that he used to make in his shop, that he had built for Randy Hansen, there all high grade steel machined in his garage, got no fine tuners on them, they're very rare and they sound great, it's amazing. They're not finished very well, but that's the beauty of them, when he first started making them. Very unique, so I carve my name into them down in the pickup cavity and I name them, and all the specs are written in the neck heel. And they come with a letter of authenticity, that also looks100 years old, and I burn and soak it in tobacco juice and do all this Mexican Day of the Dead stampwork on it. Very, very cool. And then it also comes with a DVD of me making the pickups, winding the pickups and making the guitar, sometimes playing it if I play it out live. A labor of love.


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