(guitars riffing)
- What's the B melody?
You're gonna, what's the B melody?
'Cause I could do an octave of you.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Does anyone have a tuner?
(guitars riffing)
- What was it?
- No, I'm asking you.
- I think it's...
(guitar riff)
- Yeah
(guitars riffing)
- Ready?
- Yup.
- Okay, one, two, three, four, five, six.
("Game of Thrones Main Theme" by Ramin Djawadi)
- [Man] Oh yeah, go time.
(intriguing music)
- Guitars have always been such a big part of my life
and such a centerpiece to my free time whenever I had it,
and I think on this show, they were sometimes
the thing that would keep you sane at the end of the day.
The one thing that was my thing from the beginning
was how great it would be to have guitars
that were inspired by the show.
One day we happened to be talking to Andy Mooney,
CEO of Fender, I was almost afraid to mention it,
'cause I didn't want him to say no,
but I said, "Well, what do you think, what would you think
"about doing Game of Thrones guitar?"
So initially the discussion with Fender
was whether to do something more mass produced
or whether to do something more custom
and be more of a one of a kind item.
Once we hit on the idea of doing three guitars,
one for each of the major houses in the show,
Stark, Lannister, and Targaryen, then we realized
that it had to be something that was special,
and the guys at the customer shop, Ron, the owner,
especially, really swung for the fences
and made something truly unique.
- I'm Ron Thorn, a Principal Master Builder
at the Fender Custom Shop.
When I came into the meeting, there was already
some renderings, maybe five or six of each house,
and they all looked fabulous.
There was some changes along the way,
but for the most part, they've stayed
fairly true to the initial renderings.
Just tweaking it in a way that can be achieved,
done, built here in the shop.
(intriguing music)
- The Telecaster is the instrument that the good guy plays.
It's the instrument the sheriff plays,
and the Stark's really seem to embody that.
They have that integrity.
They have that no-nonsense approach
that seems perfect for a Telecaster.
- The House Stark Telecaster has a maple neck
with an ebony fretboard, they all do.
They all feature a first fret Sigil inlay,
and these, we're calling them
the Game of Thrones O in coral.
That is shared on all three instruments.
A two-piece swamp ash body.
Has sterling silver purfling on the front and back,
with a weathered inside the sterling.
Control plate and the pickguard with
the embossed Direwolf are out of nickel silver.
A raw steel TeleⓇ bridge plate.
Sterling silver Direwolf first fret inlay.
Hand engraved volume and tone knobs.
And a hand engraved neck plate
and all slotted head screws throughout.
And these are the hand-wound
Josefina Blackguard '50-'51 pickups.
- It feels like if people in Winterfell made guitars,
they would look like a Stark Telecaster.
- This is the House Lannister Jaguar.
Features a two-piece alder body with 24k gold leaf
top and back, gold plated control plates and pickguard
with the lion engraved on the pickguard also.
Features the same gold leafing on the headstock.
Brass first fret hand cut and hand engraved inlay
and brass position markers.
The pickups are Josefina hand-wound
Fat '50 Stratocaster pickups under these
nice lipstick covers to match the rest of it.
This is actually a middle position in the neck
and a bridge in the bridge of course.
A hand engraved control knobs with the lion
and also the neck plate is a hand engraved
neck plate along with slotted head screws used throughout.
- The Lannister Jaguar has a fancier feel.
I remember as a kid, that the Jaguar was the Fender
that had the most ornamentation and embellishment on it,
and I feel like the Lannister's
are a very gold plated house.
- When it was sort of a larger Celtic design,
I figured, oh, I'll just hand carve that,
but then as it got more intricate and a lot
of filigree and sheridan, it was very intense
by the time it was finalized.
We opted to laser etch it through
the gold leaf and that was a first.
We did some test pieces and it came out great,
so once it lasered through the gold leafing into the wood,
we then backfilled it with red, Dakota Red paint
that looks extremely rich and opulent.
This is the House Targaryen Stratocaster.
Features an alder body with
dragon scale carvings front and back.
This is a hand tooled leather pickguard
with the Targaryen three-headed dragon.
Sterling silver dragon first fret.
The pickups are Josefina hand-wound Texas Specials.
All black hardware with a vintage trem.
- If you're gonna have a Dragon guitar,
I think you're gonna need to have a tremolo.
You're gonna need to be able to swoop and whoosh
and dive bomb and make sound effects
and some special effects.
- A traditional Stratocaster body, approximately
20 minutes front and back.
That's the run time on the CNC.
The Targaryen Strat, 19 hours approximately
for just the scale work.
11 hours to machine the scales on the back
and eight hours to machine the scales on the top.
The most difficult instrument I've ever work on.
Just countless hours of redo and reworking
and dialing those scales, just to get 'em
to look as realistic as possible.
("Game of Thrones Main Theme" by Ramin Djawadi)
It's difficult.
There a few more things I could do,
but I think it's enough now, where it's not overkill.
It's still a guitar and there's still some elements
that are pure Fender guitar.
The tuners, we didn't mess with the tuners at all.
We could've put dragon heads on each button
or what have you, and I was like, oh, is that too much?
I think that's too much.
So it was just finding the line of art and still a guitar.
- Walking into Ron's shop, seeing him working
on that guitar, it really was almost like a flashback
to walking into our costume department
and seeing Giampaolo, the armor maker,
working on a helmet or a piece of armor,
and just the level of fine grain detail
that he put into it, it was very reminiscent of that.
- Studying the armor and the clothing,
the costumes on the show, that was very important,
to try to get remotely close to the amount of detail,
it's amazing, so trying to get the guitars
to look like they would fit on set, it was inspirational.
- Yeah!
- There you go, there you go.
(applause)
- [Man] All right, let's do an album.
- [Man] Let's go.
(laughing)