Worship Musician May 2018 | Page 19

[Lincoln] It’s humbling, and it still feels surreal. I feel like it could only be God, when you look at the relatively short list of names of people who have gotten to do that. It could only be God sorting it out and allowing it to happen. I’m thrilled! We worked really hard on the guitar, and I’m really proud of it. About halfway through the process I realized that there were some other options available. Fender, as a company, has changed since we started working on this project. It changed some of the possibilities, and I’m a possibilities guy! One of the guys at Fender, Joey, said, “Okay, forget everything we’ve done. What do you really want?” And I said, “I want the guitar to be where I could walk into any store where they have one, grab it, and go play a gig and not have to do anything to it.” He said, “Awesome! What’s that look like? That will be the guitar that’s available!” So, we went over every single spec and nuance with a fine-tooth comb. I’m actually playing the prototype now, and it is killer! I absolutely love it! It feels great and plays great. Anyone who has ever played the original Eric Johnson signature model Strat will understand when I say that it’s that kind of caliber. All nitro-cellulose, quarter-sawn neck, ash body (Eric’s was alder). I wanted to go with ash, even though it’s a little more expensive. That’s what I’ve used for years and I really like it. We did the DiMarzio pickups that I’ve always used and really, really love. I couldn’t find anything that I thought sounded as good. Again, that makes it a little more expensive, but doing what I do: fingerpicking and talking while I’m leading, the noise cancelling feature is a big deal so that I don’t have to deal with a bunch of hum from the guitar as I’m trying to lead worship. To me, the DiMarzio’s are the For overall functionality while playing live, the get a great sound out of it – if you know how Kemper is great for that. It’s a really great box, to get a great sound. If you don’t, it’s probably and has a lot of spillover features where effects not going to rescue you. But there are some carry over through patch changes, which is presets in all of them that you can fire up and very nice. I really like the Helix floor box as well. immediately sound great. a long-standing relationship with Steve Blucher things that I wish they did better. My advice to [WM] You are working with Fender on a to continue that. someone is to go demo the box and see which signature guitar. From the perspective of a one you like using the most, whether that is a worship artist, what does this mean to you? May 2018 sounding like the real deal, so Fender said, “Great! Let’s go with the DiMarzio’s.” I’ve had and the guys at DiMarzio, so it’s nice to be able Every box has strong points, and they all have Kemper profiler, or a Helix, or a Fractal, you’ll best noise-cancelling single coils, as far as We put a two-post, floating tremolo on it, which I wasn’t going to do originally, but it’s a WorshipMusician.com 19