SLIPKNOT guitarist MICK THOMSON singled out his Ibanez MTM Stormtrooper as the No. 1 guitar in his arsenal, explaining to Music Radar:
“This is my Stormtrooper guitar that I tracked all of [2014’s] ‘.5: The Gray Chapter’ with; I got it around 2005.
“When Ibanez send you a custom guitar, they send you the date it was completed on. The moment I got it, this thing immediately became my favorite guitar.
“Guitars are made of wood; it doesn’t matter if there’s an ebony fingerboard, eastern hard-rock maple neck-throughs or three-piece babinga or sometimes rosewood. There’s a three-piece laminate neck and then mahogany sides.
“Every bit of those trees will be different to any other tree – they will all sound unique. You can have 20 guitars of the same spec and they’ll all sound different. This one just sounds magical – it’s big but not too boomy. It’s tight but still really open.
“A lot of guitars sound great when you’re playing through a loud cabinet or whatever, or with the band where there’s all the reflection in the room and the cymbals are eating your ears up – but when you get in the studio, with microphones right up on that cabinet, it’s under a microscope.
“Guitars that sound great can suddenly become a bit, ‘Meh, not so much!’ This motherf*cker sounds absolutely perfect for what I’m doing.
“I got it just after [2004’s] ‘Vol. 3,’ so it didn’t end up on that, but [2008’s] ‘All Hope Is Gone’ got tracked with it along with a lot of the rhythms on the latest record, especially songs in B.
“The songs in A I played those giant pointy-glazed guitars that are 50 pounds of mahogany. They’re a chore to play live, but sound so good in the studio and the sustain is ridiculous. They’re great for songs in A because they have so much resonance.
“Currently the white has different pickups in it: they’re Fishman Fluences which got sent over about a year ago. My tech threw them in just to experiment and I thought they sounded really good in that guitar. You can never have too many sounds!”
