Custom Guitar Spotlight - Ibanez Custom Shop Jet King 2
The Jet King™ is the first Ibanez® production guitar totally conceived and developed in Ibanez’ R&D Center in North Hollywood, California. This beauty is a Jet King 2, which is currently owned and on tour with Al Schnier of the jam band, moe. Two of the differences between Al’s custom shop Jet King 2 and the production version is that the body on his is light ash and the bridge is a Bigsby B5 horseshoe tremolo; while the production version is made from mahogany and the bridge is a fixed string-through-body design. Al’s choice of a transparent orange finish with a white “mother of toilet seat” pickguard really give the guitar a classic look befitting one of jam-rock’s hottest guitarists.
The guitar also sports a three-piece maple neck with 22 medium frets, rosewood Fretboard, graphite nut, vintage Kluson-type tuners, and is strung with light-top-heavy-bottom .010 to .052 gauge strings. The guitar as pictured has a pair of our STK-P1 P-90 Stack humbuckers. However, Al recently changed out the P-90 Stacks for a duo of Seymourized mini-humbuckers.
Here's Al describing the guitar, and explaining why he changed from P-90s to mini-humbuckers. "The Jet King 2 is really a great guitar, especially for the money. It combines some great attributes of a lot of the vintage guitars I love, yet has the reliability of a brand new, well-made instrument. While mine is a custom shop model and includes a Bigsby® and mini humbuckers, I must say the stock production model is also a fine guitar."
"I've always been a fan of the mini-humbucker sound and nearly all my guitars have Bigsby tremolos, but that's just a matter of personal taste. In my opinion, the minis really offer the best of both worlds between single coils and humbuckers. They have the bite and punch of a big single coil like the Jazzmaster® or soapbar pickups, with the added warm mids from the humbuckers. The SM-3 Seymourized mini humbuckers have a bigger sound than their vintage counterparts, but are not so hot that they lose definition. The guitar originally had Duncan STK-P1 Stack® soapbars, which I love, but found they tended to have a bit too much of that mid range bark that soapbars are known for. That sound works great in certain scenarios and every guitarist needs a good soapbar guitar for the studio at the very least. However, I found that it just wasn't entirely compatible with the wide variety of sounds I was trying to get from my live rig."
While savvy players have long retrofitted Seymour Duncan pickups into Ibanez guitars, this year marks the first time Ibanez will install them as original equipment. Their SZ series of solid bodies will now feature a pair of specially voiced "Duncan-Ibanez" humbuckers. And the Premium SZ models will be fitted with USA-made "Seymour Duncan-ibz" pickups. Now, how cool is that?
