One of the most well known and long term endorsees of ESP guitars is the ubiquitous Arizona residing hard rock guitarist George Lynch. His fluid technique and solid songwriting ultimately assisted in catapulting the legendarily dysfunctional Dokken into the stratosphere commercially back in the eighties. Branching out into solo excursions for close to twenty years and no longer tempted by ill-fated record company driven reunions, George has maintained his rage to remain a well respected player in hard rock and metal circles. In Australia for an ESP guitars promotional jaunt and given that Dokken never toured here, Australian Guitar’s Paul Southwell took the opportunity to have a quick natter with the shredder that matters.
AG: Can you tell me about the ESP range of guitars that you’re promoting?
GL: I’ve been with ESP for twenty three years and have eleven signature models with them but obviously not all that are in production at this point. The latest model that I have is a Super V which is a hybrid version of a V with a mahogany body. It’s got an interesting pickup that I designed with Seymour Duncan, like the ‘Screamin’ Demon’ pickup but it’s a ‘Seth Lever’[?] meets ‘Pearly Gates’ I guess. I designed the ‘Demon’ pickup years ago and that’s done very well for them. But I found that the name was a bit of a misnomer, it implies a high output pickup which it really is not. It works best in heavy guitars, not on the lighter guitars. But, I’ve used Seymour Duncans for as long as I can remember. There’s some great boutique builders out there and Seymour is passionate about what he does. He loves winding pick-ups and he loves playing guitars and is a tone monster. The guy used to be Jeff Beck’s roadie so he understands the importance of touch, air and is ultimately a great player.
AG: ESP has a pretty impressive roster of endorsees.
GL: It’s got a whole list of metal guys but my favourite is Alexei Laiho from Children of Bodom. So it’s good to see all that happen.
AG: With a custom guitar or signature model do you have a final say on what you want in you specifications? Some manufacturers might take ideas and then go for a cheaper production option.
GL: Well, I was a student of mechanical drafting so I had that set up at home where I could design stuff from the ground up. I worked with a luthier whom I worked with for years [inaudible – John Viessen?] and the guy builds anything with old world craftsmanship but yet he can go on with CAD systems [software] and work with the software as well. So, the best of the best and I could sit at this guys feet and learn from him. He lives right down the street from me so we’re very hands-on. He’s a great player as well so he understands what you’re asking for when you’re trying to translate technology with playability. I very heavily involved with the design and the wood selection, the pickups, the hardware and beyond that, obviously just to market it. It’s not like I just rubber stamp it and say, call up and go, ‘oh yeah, I put a camo-flauge paintjob on it’ and call that a signature model. (laughs).
AG: Some signature models can have minimal difference from standard models.
GL: Yeah, it’s hard to come up with something new because basically you’re improving on a Strat or a Les Paul. Trying to think outside the box is where it gets difficult. That’s why I did the Super V because it is kind of a classic design [the generic flying V shape] but I’ve been able to work around trademark issues. For the last couple of years there’s been a lot of V players out there.
AG: How far can you take it though? The design does have an increased body curvature.
GL: The main thing that differentiates it is…well, newer Vs don’t play like older Vs so what we tried to do was go back to the older Vs. That’s why it’s got the input jack on the pick-guard and it’s got a wider neck. The ones I play have the largest frets available, the 6000s and we use really high quality woods which underpins everything. It’s all in the finishing too. For the pickup we spent a lot of time on the design and going through a lot of prototypes and that has a lot to do with the way the guitar sounds. It’s also the frets, neck width, quality of workmanship and the quality of the wood. Other than that, [the sound is] based on the palms of guitarists.
AG: Way back in the early eighties, did you have the same sense of design power?
GL: Yeah, with Kamikaze it was the same thing. I sat with the engineers in Japan and looked at the different options with micrometers and the little white lab coats on. We did that until it was right and we were happy with it.
AG: So do you construct your own guitars from parts like you would a kit guitar?
GL: I used to do assembly of parts as I would sell guitars to my students. Sort of supplementing my income at the time. I wasn’t building guitars, I was just slapping necks on bodies with one pickup, one volume knob and some paint jobs on it. At five bucks an hour teaching guitar I figured that wasn’t going to work. So selling guitars to my students helped and I think I was doing them a favour because it was really high quality. For bits of guitars I’d buy parts from Charvel and Ibanez and then it’d be a matter of assembling them.
AG: Now Fender own Charvel and Jackson.
GL: Yeah, this was back when Charvel were in San Demas. This was before they were a huge company and they were just working out of a little shop. There was sawdust all over the floor and work into the middle of the night. Grab a plate of spaghetti and then go back and try to work on try different things. You know, say a different neck radius or a change in a routing and stuff like that. It was cool.
AG: How about with your amplifiers? [mesa triple x?]
GL: Same deal. It was a great learning experience for me working with engineers to design stuff from the ground up.
AG: Do you still find yourself putting heaps of cabinets alongside each other for testing?
GL: Well, you know, in my career I’ve been through so much gear that I have the advantage in having a certain knowledge and experience of being able to try virtually everything and then sort of cataloguing what I like and what I don’t like. I don’t then have to go back and plan it so much. We start with the basic premise of, ‘what is it that we’re trying to emulate and improve upon?’. That’s what we did with the Vintage Vox. We got the world’s best Marshalls, best Boogies from the 500 series and the Rectifiers. In terms of circuitry we looked at the old British class A [power amp classification] amps, you know, the AC30s and more equipment on top. We had some great old Blackface Fenders and to move along we used those as a benchmark. So, considering we were trying to put all those elements into one amplifier it was pretty challenging because of their modular design.
AG: How is the support of gear you’ve designed for touring worldwide? How many heads do you need to take out with you?
GL: It depends on the tour. For a club tour it’s maybe two but I’ll take extra modules with me. For a large tour, maybe three amp heads. There’s a practical side to touring these days. I was actually talking to Billy Gibbons [ZZ Top] about that. That guy is just known for tone but what is he playing though? A Marshall JMP-1 pre-amp [rack mounted gear]. He has no cabinets on stage and likes to go light. I’m thinking, you know, this is the guy with truckloads of Rio Grande amps which were basically just 200 watt Marshall majors that were modified. So, I don’t like sacrificing and will not sacrifice my tone so I’d rather take out [on the road] less gear that is high quality than more gear. Back in the eighties I’d tour with fifteen cabinets, maybe of which only four had actual speakers in them and then I was only using two (laughs). Sometimes I’d have another little amplifier running back behind it so I wasn’t using any of the stage cabinets (laughs).
AG: Wouldn’t that piss off the road crew?
GL Ah, they’re getting paid, you know, getting paid well and in those days when you toured arenas it wasn’t the crew handling the gear, the union [local venue crew] did. Just sort of say, ‘hey, put that there’. (laughs)
AG: How much gear can you test once you’re on the road? Meaning that if it falls over out there you’ve got time to get to the next gig but not repair amps.
GL: Stuff breaking on the road sucks. It really does because you depend on this stuff and you don’t have that much of it. The other day we were playing this corporate gig in Melbourne and my guitar that I’ve had forever, the ESP guitar from the ‘Wicked Sensation’ album cover [Lycnh Wob 1990] failed. It’s a great guitar and I’ve never done anything to it. It plays and sounds wonderful but you know, it developed a short during the show and I’m just beating the sh*t out of it to try to keep it going. [CMI rep comments: ‘Yeah but it looked good’] Yeah, I should try to incorporate that into the show. The next night after I fixed that the knob kept falling off as I was playing. I mean sh*t happens but for that guitar it doesn’t. I really like just having minimal equipment and not being all over the map having to change guitars after every song. I really like to, all night, just stay on one instrument. I’m not into complicated switching systems. It’s just pedals on the floor, no pedal-board, just straight into the amp, nothing in the effects loop and no rack stuff.
AG: That’s kind of ironic given your most notable era of the eighties hard rock scene when there were excessive amounts of processors and what not. Do you look back on that era with fondness of think some of it was stupid to have so much gear?
GL: No, it wasn’t stupid. It looked great and it’s all about entertainment. I wasn’t a purist or anything but essentially what I was using then is what I am using now. I mean, I never used more than two amplifier heads with two or four cabinets. That’s what I use now, just two cabinets except now I don’t have all the other fake ones around it (laughs). We did that in Lynch Mob for our first tour. Sometimes the equipment semi trailer was bigger than the place we were playing. We came with staging, our own PA system, our own monitoring system and our production where we had heaps of skulls, statues and flying sh*t from the ceiling.
AG: Obviously you’re fit. Are there certain weights exercises that impact on dexterity?
GL: Well, for a while when I was really getting into working out with weights it did impinge on my playing in that I would get up on stage and do a solo but for anything over ninety seconds I would get static contractions in my forearm. So I had to use towels and then shake it off. But it would sort of cramp.
AG: You’d think it’d be fitter.
GL: Don’t really need strength to play guitar.
AG: No, true. But you can hear it in your playing with the aggressive attack. If you’re unfit then that level of endurance would be difficult.
GL Working out for me when I was doing it was really done for just mental fitness more than anything.
AG: Coping with Dokken (laughs)
GL: Well and maybe replacing a lot of bad habits with less bad habits. It’s a routine thing that kind of helped me to focus and got my brain chemistry balanced. It wasn’t so much the physical aspect, it was to do something simple that was repetitive that was easily understandable. You push the weights up then put them down (laughs). You challenge yourself as in a complex world it’s nice to do simple things and it makes sense at times.
AG: So can we expect to see an Australian tour soon?
GL: I’m working on trying to put together a project band for Asia and Australia with Billy Sheehan [bassist Vai/DLR/Mr Big] and Tommy Aldridge [drummer Ozzy/Whitesnake] depending on these guys schedules. If they’re compatible then we can take it out there. In one form or another I would imagine that I’ve laid the groundwork here on this current promotional trip. So, I can come back on the heels of a new record.
I’d like to mention my guitar school online; Dojo, which is just up through my official site [georgelynch.com]
AG: Ah, the quick plug. That’s cool. We have to wrap it up so thanks for your time.
GL: No problem.