The first in a series of Dream Studio Signature Guitars with Alain Johannes. The Sparkler!!
Do you ever have that day where you go holy crap, is this real or is this a dream?? Well that happened to us about 9 months ago when the amazing artist Alain Johannes started following us on Instagram.
Now normally getting an musician follower isn’t a huge deal, right? Well it is if you have been a fan of Alain’s music going back to Anthym, What is This, Eleven, Chris Cornell, QOTSA, and the Desert Sessions, not to mention his amazing work as a one of Dave Ghrol’s Sound City Players.
So the conversation started that Alain wanted to buy a few of his guitars when he got back from tour with PJ Harvey, so we asked him what he liked, how he wanted it to sound, etc…. He gave us his parameters, and we whipped up this little beauty. Well Alain loved it and we asked him that if he ever wanted to do a Signature model, we would be honored to do it, and he said yes, so guess what. We are making this available to you!!!
The Sparkler – Alain Johannes Signature model as we started with it being based off of our Maverick Model. Alain’s signature model starts out as a solid piece of 42mm thick Alder and is carved into a double-cutaway chambered body with a classic shape. Then we add back on a nice Alder top cap with F Hole and add the belly cut as well as forearm contour with a nicely rounded body.
From there a 25.5” scale, Hard Maple Neck is bolted to the Alder body with 5 bolts to make sure the neck is secure and ready to play. On the Hard maple neck is a 21f bound Rosewood Fretboard with the “Double 11” design inlays. For the pickups, Alain is a Seymour Duncan fan, and we worked with Derek Duncan and MJ at the custom shop to build Alain a custom set of wax potted Seth Lovers to make sure that Alain got the tone he wanted out of this chambered semi hollow Alder body. And boy do they sound great. We did a typical single volume, single tone pot set up, a three way switch and added coil tapping sliders to each pick up to let you go between Humbucker and single coil on the fly.
For the hardware we used a set of Kluson Vintage 18:1 tuners, a Jazzmaster style Vibrato and a Shielded Bridge , a nice set of Diadarrio EXL115 Nickel Wound strings and you can see this one was built with love and care to let you showcase your perfect style and tone.
Body – 43mm Chambered Alder w/ Alder top Cap
Neck – Hard Maple w/ Rosewood Skunk Stripe Classic C Shape – 21.1mm at first fret, 24.64mm at 12th fret
Truss Rod – Double Expanding with exposed Wheel adjustment at heel
25.5” Scale 21 fret
Rosewood Fretboard w/ 7.25” Radius
Custom Alain Johannes “11” inlays
42mm Bone Nut
Seymour Duncan Jazz SH-55n in the Neck with matching Seymour Duncan SH-55b in the Bridge both with custom shop wax potting.
500k Pots
Coil Tap Sliders above Each Pick Up
3 way Toggle – Position 1 Bridge, Position 2 – Bridge/Neck , Position 3 – Neck
Roller String Trees
18:1 Vintage Kluson type tuners
Vintage Jazzmaster Style Vibrato
Vintage Mustang Style Bridge
And be on the lookout for a few more versions of this guitar we built for Alain.