181-240617 ZFB Firebird – Zachary Handcrafted Guitars | Bass| Pedals | Strings

Inspiration

I built a Z-bird (firebird) before but this time I was watching Joe Bonamassa and he mentioned that a fan gave him a vintage Firebird. It inspired me to build a guitar which would be a lot better than what Joe had. I had this vision of red-pilling Joe after he played this Z-bird. I just may do that one day. I want to see the look on his face.

I always through it was pathetic how uninspiring Joe's Gibson signature guitars are and wondered who the heck buys them and why. I know he mentioned that he sold 1000 of his Les Paul signatures over a 10 year period. All they are is a stock mass-produced Les Paul, like any other, with dissimilar knobs on it and they call it Joe's signature model because they put his signature on it. The guitar industry sure attracts every idiot out there who had bought over 1000 of these. Joe, had the chance to introduce a little innovation at least. Or maybe they did not allow him to do so. Its a good thing they did not put robotic tuners on it.

So, I wanted to create a Firebird, which takes this model to the next level and is made for high performance contemporary playing.
I set the neck further into the body to address the neck-heavy problem of the Gibson Firebird and make it more ergonomic to play. I lengthened the neck to 26 frets and this gave it a larger neck joint area, since my Z-bird is not a neck-through but with a spiked joint. Did you notice how cleverly I made it look like its a neck-through, as the vintage Firebird?

I moved the volume knob as close as possible to the picking hand for easy volume swells. I gave it a split coil option, so you can get single coil sounds also, as well as full power humbucker tones. I also gave it a one piece rosewood neck.

I remember in the late 90s PRS was offering a limited-run of production guitars but with rosewood necks and they were charging $14,000 each, just because they had Rosewood necks. Talk about bull shit. Some idiots must have bought up all 100 of them at that price. You may have been one of these idiots. These otherwise ordinary PRS were supposed to be unique from a mass production factory. If you want a little individualism and character from a mass production manufacturer, you need to pay big money for it. For 14 thousand dollars you can claim that only 99 other people have the identical guitar you have. Not bad for the price. LOL

Well, here you go a fabulous Rosewood neck for only $100 extra and as you know every Zachary is unique and completely hand made, never possible to duplicate exactly ever again. In a perfect world guitar players would be looking for quality in a guitar, not image, brand name and hype. That world does not exist. What do you think Joe?

A first for me here is to use Stainless Steel frets. There is no need to make the whole neck with Stainless frets because only the first four frets are susceptible to wear. So this guitar has 3 types of frets on it, the first 4 being Super Jumbo Stainless, followed by Jumbo Nickel and from the 16-th fret on, Medium Nickel, to give you more room high up on the neck. It is a perfect fret job, like no other with the action at 1 mm above the 12-th fret. Try that on your current guitar. Fingers just fly over this neck.