Ebay is full of once high end 80's metal guitars that can be had for peanuts. I've seen loads of picks of funk players using these same guitars but they come off with a wild funk flavour in their hands. Could I get a BC Rich Mockinbird, repaint it, and use it for covering When doves cry?
With some paint, rhinestones, and feathers could a guitar like this be made useful?
Am I brave or a complete mentalist?
God damn it! Its a Zombie Apocalypse. Do I have a baseball bat nearby?
Aye, I've a recently realised love for Mockingbirds. I think I hadn't really looked at them as plausible guitars because of the shit metal BC Riches that posh kids had at my school so's they could get teh slopknuts.
Eighties metal guitars aren't usually particularly metal, rather they are excellently made, super-versatile guitars designed to be able to do everything fairly well. It's no surprise that they are good at funk, and it should be no surprise that they manage blues, jazz, rock, pop or anything else for that matter. I always think of them as working guitars for working musicians who might need to pull any tone from their setup in session work or in a covers band whose repertoire includes pretty much every song ever to enter the top forty for the last forty five years.
I've got two Mockingbirds, great guitars but a little neck heavy.
The good thing about BC Rich is they are very unfashionable so you can pick up serious high quality guitars for very little money.
Oh, that guitar Vernon Reid is holding will probably be an expensive Tom Anderson or Hamer.
I'd say the more standard shapes of Schecter, Ibanez and ESP dominate the Metal market now. BCR in particular only seems to have survived well in Death Metal.
V's and Explorers are everywhere in metal too. Also the odd Les Paul or SG. I remember talking to the guitar tech at MachineHead (I managed to get the job of helping him put away each guitar into it's case, pretty cool and a lot more glamourous than the jobs I usually get), and the guitarist had all these cool guitars including an early 60's SG. Unfortunately he'd put EMG's in all of them so they all sounded exactly the fucking same.
My friend Craig has one of those mockingbirds, a higher end one. I remember thinking what the hell is this shit when he got it, until I played it. It really is hands down one of the nicest guitars I ever played.