Hello.
I am Jon Gomm and this is my Artist Toolkit.
I'm going to tell you all about my Ibanez JGM signature model.
This is a JGM10 I've had for about 18 months now.
As you can see, I've already
broken it in a little bit.
I made it mine.
And he's called Marvin, by the way.
So it's really important to me that you know his name.
So when Ibanez came to me and asked me about doing the signature model,
the thing that made me desperate to do it was that it was a blank sheet of paper,
and I was able to be a part of designing a guitar completely from scratch,
which is incredibly exciting.
And we spent three years developing and making
endless prototypes and stuff, and this is what we ended up with.
I'm going to tell you about some of the different bits of it.
So the first thing to know is it's a jumbo guitar.
It's a big beast.
But you might
notice the body shape is a bit weird.
It's asymmetrical, so it's slimmer here and fatter here.
And the waist is not aligned.
It goes kind of like this, and it's kind of shallower here and a bit tighter here.
And all of that is to make the guitar more ergonomic to play.
So with it being a big guitar, it bulges up here.
It can be very hard to play the guitar like this, but hopefully
if you're not like a long armed Gibbon-ey freak
like me, you'll still be able to handle it.
The neck is very slightly longer, which gives you more
on the
on the fundamental and you won't notice.
It's not a long necked guitar and certainly not a baritone guitar,
but just having that extra bit of length gives you a little bit better,
very low frequency, so that the sub stuff on the strings
has taller frets than you might usually expect on the made of stainless steel,
which is something you don't usually see so much on acoustic guitar.
But when people ask me, How do you get
tapping stuff loud and clear and
get your harmonics coming out
so brightly and loud and aggressive when you're just slapping them?
The answer is the frets as much as anything.
I mean technique a little bit as well.
But, you know, the frets are so, so important and harder
frets, louder and taller frets are louder too.
So it just makes it much easier to do that.
The woods, we have a thermo aged spruce top, which means that it's
been cooked at a frighteningly high
temperature that you would not want to.
You know, you don't go inside the ovens when the cooking, the guitar's in there,
you don't come out again.
That makes the wood act and sound
as if it's kind of 20 or 30 years old, takes out the moisture in it.
It's lighter, actually stronger as well.
So it's perfect for me if I'm, you know, hitting it really violently.
And it's it's grateful for that.
It's not going to it's less likely to, you know, to break.
And then on the on the back and sides, we have a nice hard, solid
bit of pau ferro, which is a beautiful wood
from Central America and sometimes can be really pretty on the back as well.
Let's see what we've got here. And that one's nice.
I won't show you mine all strapped in.
This is actually a JGM5.
So this is the cheaper model, but that's a nice stripy bit
and they're all different.
Some of them have blond stripes and some don't. And
yeah, that was woods.
We spent ages trying different woods.
And this was just the one that came out with the deepest, richest bass
and a kind of throaty, low mid range that I really loved.
And then the pickup system.
I need to tell you all about the pickup system.
This was the tricky bit where it really went down to the wire
and I was getting pretty stressed trying to find pickups
that were going to do exactly what I wanted them to do.
Because most pro modern fingerstyle players
will tend to use a mishmash of different, different brands of pickups.
They might have one make of a magnetic pickup
another make of microphone inside the guitar,
another make of transducer under the bridge or whatever.
And it can be really complicated
and you end up with three batteries in there and loads of wires dangling.
I really didn't want that to happen.
I really wanted it to be like a coherent system that we could
just make work
so what we have is
the Fishman Rare Earth Mic Blend, which is my favorite
acoustic guitar pickup I've used for ever, which is a really nice humbucker
here, and a little condenser microphone inside
there as well, which you can probably hear me tapping on.
And then
a new pickup from Fishman called the Power Tap, which is a bridge plate transducer.
So that means it's a thing that you stick on the bridge plate,
which is the wood inside the guitar under the bridge, and
it just takes on there and picks up the vibrations.
And I'm going to show you what those pickups sound.
I mean, you can hear what they sound like together.
Have a little bit of reverb.
Let me show you what they sound like
separately, those
three pickups so I can control my mix from my phone.
But what happens is we have two outputs.
One is kind of the main output and one is the the secondary output.
If you don't have to use now, if you use both outputs and you use a mono
cable and a stereo cable, you can get all three of those pickups,
the humbucker, the microphone and the transducer
all coming out separately from the guitar.
So I can have three channels on my mixer here
and mix the three pickups however I want.
If you just want to use one regular
mono guitar cable in this main output, you get all three pickups
going down the mono cable automatically and there's a little blend control
there's two blend controls in here for the pickups, to mix the
the sounds together inside the guitar so you can make it
simple or complicated depending on your needs and what you have.
So I'm going to turn off the pickups
except for the magnetic pickup.
And you can hear now
you can hear what that sounds like.
It's a nice, rich, warm sound.
What it won't give you
any percussion that you can hear right now.
It's coming from my little tie mic.
Like there's nothing coming through the pickups because some wood
which I'm hitting now, it's not magnetic.
So it won't come out through magnetic pickups.
And that's really handy.
It means that I can, if I want to not only mix but actually
add different effects to this this magnetic pickup.
But I wouldn't want on the microphone because it would feedback.
And, you know, we don't generally put loads of overdrive on microphones.
So let me turn the magnetic off and just put on the aforementioned microphone.
So so now we have a more natural kind of acoustic.
You sound quite trebly and it's great
for hearing
the, the guitar really, really clearly
from every place imaginable.
And it gives you that kind of acoustic realness.
It gives you the percussion.
The only thing it doesn't do is give you much in the way of
bass.
And I have tried
microphones in the past which give you loads of bass
and it
sounds okay until you try and plug it in somewhere.
And then it's Feedback City
because having a load of bass on a microphone inside a wooden box,
turns out that's a really bad idea from a physics perspective.
So now I'm going to turn on the
transducer on its own.
So that's the power tapping, the power tap pick up on the here and now.
You can hear
all that big deep sub
and all three of these pickups
will pick up stuff from the guitar strings as well,
but all different stuff.
So when I mix them together,
I'll have this kind of multidimensional, rich sound.
So I'll do that.
Now, just to remind you of the three pickups together
they are.
So that's the kind of overall sound.
And to me, having this combination of pickups inside
a guitar that you can buy off the peg is it's like
I've just pulled Excalibur
out of a flipping rock.
I mean, just to finally have that after a quarter of a century
of experimenting with pickups endlessly, it's just amazing to have that
and the live sound that I'm getting now is like so happy with it.
And the guitar in general just plays amazingly.
It's so easy to play. The neck is
just try it.
It's really lovely. Play so easy.
So yeah, that's all about my JGM
signature model Ibanez guitar.
Really proud of it.
Thanks for listening to me
waffle on about my guitar.
cheers.
See ya!