Living In Paradise
Steve Vai on his new Ibanez PIA signature
It’s been over three decades since Ibanez launched Steve Vai’s JEM signature, one of the most iconic artist models of all time. So it was quite a surprise to see a brand-new guitar launched at NAMM in January: PIA (Paradise In Art) was unveiled with a press conference where Vai noted how “peculiar” the JEM was when it first surfaced back when he was 25 years old.“We nailed it 35 years ago when we introduced the JEM,” noted Vai, joking that “I may not be able to have a hit record but I can have a hit guitar – and that’s really nice.”
As Vai pointed out, Ibanez’s hugely popular RG evolved as a sister model to the JEM, while his own signature was refined over the years. The PIA has arrived to reflect Steve Vai now.“The first thing we changed is the grip,” he said, referencing the petal-shaped cutouts, the most immediate PIA talking point. “It will never be a grip as practical as the monkey grip on the JEM… but this was more for the aesthetic.
“The PIA started to take on a more artistic shape than a badass metal shape,” Vai added, “and there were a couple of little things like moving the volume pot down, because after 35 years I just kept hitting it a little bit. And I had this great device on my personal JEMs – it’s a high-pass/low-cut filter. Because when you bring the volume down the bottom-end has a tendency to saturate the tone when you want a nice clean tone… [this] just cleans up the tone beautifully.
“We decided to change the sound of the [DiMarzio] Evolution pickup and we made the UtoPIA… a little smoother in the top-end, a little tighter bottom-end, and just a tad more output”, while other tweaks included a magnetic backplate and bevelled body edges: “I didn’t realise it was going to feel so nice – I would have done it 35 years ago!” www.ibanez.com