narad
Progressive metal and politics
So a couple years ago I wound up finding this custom order ESP M-II:
Admittedly, it looks pretty awesome there! It's going to make the reveal anticlimactic, so you have to take my word that it didn't look this nice in real life. The camera does weird things with these old ESP finishes. So this was originally trans-black, but it became a sort of greenish/brown weird color over time. In the room it wasn't anything to write home about and it had big scuffs in the clearcoat along all the edges, down to the bare wood. I knew I wanted to refinish it, and did some photoshops in various colors, until basically landing on this pretty unanimously between my own opinion and people I asked:
Overall this was too cool. I was trying to match the color of ESP trans black cherry, which I always thought looked really nice on some of the highend ESP singlecut quilt tops. So printed this out, and some other ESPs with that color stock and headed over to ESP. They require printouts, you can't send them photos or paint codes or anything. It's a bit annoying because I can look at the printout and see how the inks were just not good enough to capture the image, so in essence, they want you to print it for reproducibility that monitor variances might affect, but the whole process of printing ruins it by an even greater margin. Anyway it is what is.
The cool thing about this guitar is the top is ridiculously thick. I thought we'd highlight that by making the back a darker color, and eventually settled on black for the non-maple areas, and red for all the maple areas. That would mean that in painting the back of the neck (to cover a bunch of weird discoloration that was there) it should contrast well with the headstock veneer. But the whole idea gave me a ton of apprehension and basically second guessed it every few weeks while it was gone.
So after I think about two years with no updates (except the time we had to physically come in just to clarify that "trans black cherry" is the same as "see through black cherry" that is in the JP color codes), it's done. When the guy walked around the corner with it I flipped out.
Not my best photos, the light was really harsh this morning. The finish is super glossy and it already got dusty sitting around overnight. But anyway, it's not exactly what I wanted here -- a bit more "blood red" than the originally which had some "plum" in it, but it is what it is and I think it's pretty killer in its own right, and in the end I really liked the black/red contrast on the sides.
A bonus was that the tech guy at BigBoss, who we have now had sooo many interactions with, thought it was a bit sad to put on the old rusty hardware so he replaced the screws and stuff with new ones as a service. I was going to do that anyway so much appreciated. I've spent a ludicrous amount of money there and it hasn't gotten me a discount, but I appreciate we did get some perk
So this marks the first time in 4 years I haven't been waiting for any guitars to finish up at BigBoss... time to think of the next thing?
Admittedly, it looks pretty awesome there! It's going to make the reveal anticlimactic, so you have to take my word that it didn't look this nice in real life. The camera does weird things with these old ESP finishes. So this was originally trans-black, but it became a sort of greenish/brown weird color over time. In the room it wasn't anything to write home about and it had big scuffs in the clearcoat along all the edges, down to the bare wood. I knew I wanted to refinish it, and did some photoshops in various colors, until basically landing on this pretty unanimously between my own opinion and people I asked:
Overall this was too cool. I was trying to match the color of ESP trans black cherry, which I always thought looked really nice on some of the highend ESP singlecut quilt tops. So printed this out, and some other ESPs with that color stock and headed over to ESP. They require printouts, you can't send them photos or paint codes or anything. It's a bit annoying because I can look at the printout and see how the inks were just not good enough to capture the image, so in essence, they want you to print it for reproducibility that monitor variances might affect, but the whole process of printing ruins it by an even greater margin. Anyway it is what is.
The cool thing about this guitar is the top is ridiculously thick. I thought we'd highlight that by making the back a darker color, and eventually settled on black for the non-maple areas, and red for all the maple areas. That would mean that in painting the back of the neck (to cover a bunch of weird discoloration that was there) it should contrast well with the headstock veneer. But the whole idea gave me a ton of apprehension and basically second guessed it every few weeks while it was gone.
So after I think about two years with no updates (except the time we had to physically come in just to clarify that "trans black cherry" is the same as "see through black cherry" that is in the JP color codes), it's done. When the guy walked around the corner with it I flipped out.
Not my best photos, the light was really harsh this morning. The finish is super glossy and it already got dusty sitting around overnight. But anyway, it's not exactly what I wanted here -- a bit more "blood red" than the originally which had some "plum" in it, but it is what it is and I think it's pretty killer in its own right, and in the end I really liked the black/red contrast on the sides.
A bonus was that the tech guy at BigBoss, who we have now had sooo many interactions with, thought it was a bit sad to put on the old rusty hardware so he replaced the screws and stuff with new ones as a service. I was going to do that anyway so much appreciated. I've spent a ludicrous amount of money there and it hasn't gotten me a discount, but I appreciate we did get some perk
So this marks the first time in 4 years I haven't been waiting for any guitars to finish up at BigBoss... time to think of the next thing?
