JIVA-FORCE
In Hinduism, a jiva is a living being – and Nita’s Ibanez JIVA signature model is certainly a life force to be reckoned with
1
“I’ve been an Ibanez artist for 10 years, since 2008 and this year in 2018 I became the first female Ibanez signature artist. I could say that a 1,000 times and still not get tired of saying it. This is a guitar that came out at the NAMM show in January 2018.”
2
“The JIVA is an S Series body; it’s got that beautiful thinness. A mahogany body, quilted maple top and ebony [fingerboard]. I love the balance of the S Series – if you put your palm at the neck joint and hold it, you can see it’s got this amazing balance.”
3
“It has the Edge Zero II bridge. I love the Edge Zero series of bridges because I really like the screw-in bar: it’s stable. I do a lot of whammy tricks and crazy stuff and you don’t want the bar to just pop out in your hand, so it’s amazing it’s got that on it.”
4
“Another feature I love is the fretboard – we call the inlay ‘the beaten path’; it’s basically the heartbeat of the guitar and the spikes on the EPG correspond to the normal fretmarkers on the guitar: 3, 5, 7, 9, 12 and so forth. But, as you notice, as the heartbeat goes up the guitar where the shredding happens, the heartbeat gets faster. It’s a happy accident… I couldn’t have designed it any better myself… wait a second… I did design it! But it does correspond to the normal fretmarkers so it’s very easy to follow. Unlike a lot of the custom inlays that are tough to follow and you don’t really know where you’re at to find your octave or your normal placement, this one is super easy.”
5
“There’s a three-piece neck; maple and purple heart. I love that the purple heart goes all the way up through the headstock and you can even see it on the side. It always kind of throws me off when guitars don’t have the same overall look all around, so you’ll see the purple heart carries all the way, and the headstock and body do match. It makes the guitar feel like a whole complete thought and not that the neck and the headstock were added later.”
6
“These are my signature Dimarzio Pandemonium pickups. There’s a Dimarzio True Velvet in the middle single-coil – a lot of people ask why I didn’t do a full signature set and Dimarzio did offer me one but truthfully I think that the True Velvet is a perfect single coil and I didn’t want to change anything about it. So I said, ‘Make me my humbuckers and put the True Velvet in the middle.’”
7
“I used this guitar exclusively on Controlled Chaos. All of the parts except the acoustics were recorded on the JIVA and I really did it like that to test the guitar, put it through its paces and make sure it could do all the different sounds. It does beautiful cleans, really screaming high leads, nice crunchy rhythms and everything in-between.”