On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
"Bones," JEM Series prototype (serial no. SV 30)
Not on view
Steve Vai ordered this guitar and three others—“Little Annie Fanny,” “Playboy,” and “Cowgirl”—from the Performance Guitar custom shop in the late 1980s. “Bones” has a sharpened Stratocaster-style body, humbucking pickups, and a locking vibrato system, solidifying the “Superstrat” style of instrument that began with Eddie Van Halen’s “Frankenstein” guitar. Vai introduced a pronounced cutaway that allows access to all twenty-four frets on the fingerboard and a floating vibrato design that could bend the strings up to around six semitones sharp. Vai later worked with Japanese guitar maker Ibanez to refine elements of the design, including a signature “monkey grip” cutout in the body for the long-running JEM series.
Technical Description:
Alder body with cutout, maple neck, rosewood fingerboard; 25½ in. scale; custom skateboard sticker artwork; bolt-on neck with dot inlays; “banana” headstock with skate decals, maker stamp rubbed off; two humbucking pickups and one single-coil, five-way selector switch, one master volume control; black Floyd Rose locking vibrato bridge and nut, white plastic knob
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