THE DEAN FROM HELL

Dimebag Darrell was one in a billion. A true metal iconoclast who took a little from EVH, a little from Billy Gibbons, a bit of Hetfield, and twisted it around until it was pure Dime. Everything about the dude was custom: for his signature tone he used a graphic EQ and heavy noise gating to get the most out of the Randall half-stack he won in a guitar playing contest. And his main guitar was a heavily customised Dean ML (he actually scratched ‘The Dean From Hell’ into the headstock) which featured new pickups, a Floyd Rose bridge (which required serious routing considering the guitar originally had a tune-o-matic bridge and thru-body stringing) and a custom paint job and further tweaks by legendary luthier Buddy Blaze.

The story of the Dean from Hell is one of those great guitar legends that gets mangled in the telling over the years. Here’s the true story: Dimebag Darrell won the guitar – a Dean ML – in one of quite a few guitar playing contests he won over the years. In fact, he won so many of these contests that eventually he was made a competition judge because nobody could ever top him. He won the guitar that would become the Dean from Hell in a contest called the Arnold & Morgan Guitar Contest at the Ritz in Dallas, Texas in 1982, ripping out some classic Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen solos before blasting into some of his own licks. His prize was a maroon Dean ML with a fixed bridge.

Dime loved the guitar but he also needed a ride, so he looked around for someone to buy the ML so that he could apply the money to a Firebird – the car, not the Gibson guitar. One person he tried to sell it to was Texas luthier Buddy Blaze, but Buddy didn’t feel right about buying the axe, as much as he himself loved MLs. He felt that as a prize, it should stay with its owner. So, unbeknownst to Buddy, Dime went off and sold the guitar to Buddy’s bandmate. “I just remember being at band practice and my lead singer came in with a guitar case shaped like a Dean ML,” Blaze told Premier Guitar. “I knew once he opened the case and I saw Darrell’s Dean ML that he wasn’t leaving practice with that guitar.” Buddy swapped the guitar for his brand new Kramer Pacer. Eventually Buddy decided to customise the ML, stripping its original maroon finish and replacing it with a blue and black lightning bolt design. Buddy also reshaped the neck into a more pronounced V profile, installed a Floyd Rose vibrato bridge, ground the bridge saddles to more accurately follow the radius of the fretboard, put a Seymour Duncan pickup in the bridge position, moved the stock DiMarzio to the neck slot and made a few other tweaks.

Dime loved that guitar – not knowing that it was his own axe. “I remember the first time Darrell put on the guitar and started playing it,” Buddy told Premier Guitar. “I realised right there and then that all the modifications I did for myself on the guitar were for nothing because it wasn’t even my guitar.”

With Pantera starting to take off and Buddy landing a job in New Jersey with Kramer (where he and Vivian Campbell refined their ‘Shredder’ design to become the Kramer Nightswan model), Buddy felt the time was right to leave the guitar with Dime – initially planning to let Dime borrow it until Buddy could make the guitarist a copy of his own. But Dime fell hard for this modified Dean, and eventually Buddy decided to tell Darrell the truth: that the blue guitar he loved so much was his own guitar all along. Dime further modified the guitar over the years with different pickups, stickers and modified knobs with grip burned into them with a soldering iron tip. But the overriding story of this guitar is one of a special bond between two friends that started over three decades ago in Texas and went on to change metal guitar forever.