Vigier spent 5 months building this guitar by hand, truly a masterpiece.  Incredible detail on the guitar, down to the toenails.  When you bend down the vibrato bar, wings pop out of the sides.  They gave me this guitar at the NAMM convention in Los Angeles, January 1998.  Plays and sounds the best of all my guitars - it's my main guitar. It has one push/pull volume knob that switches the humbuckers into single-coils, and a 3-way toggle switch to select pickups.  DiMarzio pickups - Tone Zone at the bridge, Chopper at the neck. This guitar gets some funny reactions.  At...

On my first French tour in February '97, the people at Vigier guitars came to a show and gave me a guitar to try.  I did the show with the guitar and it played wonderfully.  When I returned to France in May, I met with the founder, Patrice Vigier, we had dinner and threw ideas around.  I told him how I had always built my own guitars, it was an artistic expression I didn't want to give up - we talked about making a unique Vigier guitar to replace my current Swiss Cheese guitar as my main guitar.  We signed...

I bought this guitar in 1991.  I brought the guitar to the school I taught at and it would constantly get knocked to the ground.  Eventually the headstock split in half.  I glued it back together, and used it on my early albums 'The Adventures Of Bumblefoot', 'Hermit', and 'Hands'.  Then one day a friend bumped into it in the studio and it hit the ground and snapped in the same place.  I didn't bother fixing it. It was going to be immortalized in the artwork for the 'Guitars Suck' album, but that didn't happen when the CD became '9.11'...

Won this guitar in a guitar contest in April '89.  It's the main guitar I used on tour with Guns N' Roses in 2006.

A friend named Tom Cannalonga built guitars and had a business called "Custom Ax". I gave him some guitar equipment and in exchange, he did the building of this guitar. I traced my hand on grid paper to use as a guide and we expanded the scale to the size of the guitar body. Tom made a neck extension going up to the 37th fret using thin mandolin frets. He pinned a moth under glass - still can't figure out why the thing hasn't turned into dust yet. When my little cousin Valerie asked me if she could paint the fingernails...

I started working at age 12 painting album covers on the backs of dungaree jackets for $20 each (most people asked for Iron Maiden's first album or Killers...)  Ibanez just came out with the Roadstar series of guitars, Stratocaster style, floating bridge.  By age 14, I had saved up enough money to get one selling at the store I took lessons at - the wood was cracked, it was last year's model, it was $180. It was a 1983 Ibanez Roadstar RS135BK (bought it July 3rd, 1984)  First thing I did when I brought it home was pry the paint off it...