Wes Borland has been playing King Vs onstage for years but today the Limp Bizkit guitarist officially joins the Jackson artist roster, making his debut with a signature guitar that offers a quietly radical take on one of the high-performance brand’s most iconic shapes.
Silhouetted against the light, the Pro Series Wes Borland King V KV looks regular enough.
In contrast to the Jackson Rhoads, this has that more symmetrical V shaped body, and we have a reverse headstock, too – always a welcome sight on a metal guitar. But look closely at that headstock. The Jackson logo is upside down.
This feels like the kind of subversion of the typical metal design that we could firmly get behind, and it’s subtle enough that it won’t alienate the wider metal community.
Limp Bizkit and nu-metal, all that jazz divides opinion but in the cold light of day Borland’s King V, with its white bevels on black finish reminiscent of the recently released Christian Andreu Rhoads EverTune, the stripped-down single-pickup platform, and the highly respectable Floyd Rose 1500 Series double-locking vibrato unit, this is an electric guitar with everything you need for any style of metal – and, for that matter, nothing that you don’t.
That, says Borland, was the idea.
“It’s taking me a long time to figure out what I need as a guitar player. For me, you just need volume, pickups, locking tremolo system and 24 frets, that’s it,” says Borland. “Live, it just needs to be as bulletproof as possible. You know, I’ve been very rough with guitars over the years. I’ve come to realise that the more streamlined our guitars are, the less problems we have on stage.”
And this is stripped-down. We have a single Seymour Duncan SH-8 Invader, a bona-fide haymaker and as hot a passive humbucker as you could find, and a single volume control. It’s the pragmatist’s shred machine, even if it was built to an exhibitionist’s specifications.
“ You know Jackson is fun, the over the top, shred-a-copter shapes and my outrageous stage costumes pushing the boundaries, this fits in more with that,” says Borland. “The way people dress, it affects how you behave, and I think it also changes how I play guitar.”
As per the King V’s style, you’ve got a neck-through build. A lot of tonewood real estate. It takes a while to get used to playing them seated, wedged on your leg. But it’ll be a ripper.
The only question we have is what’s going on with the headstock? This, as it turns out, is kind of a weird accident.
“When our artist rep Mike Tempesta introduced Wes to some Jackson Custom Shop guitars, he picked a left-handed King V and modded it for his right-hand playing, which left the headstock logo upside down,” says Peter Wichers, product development manager, Jackson Guitars. “He loved it, so we kept it. That happy accident became one of the most iconic details of the whole build.”
You can see all the details of this build over at Jackson. The Pro Series Wes Borland King V is available now, priced £1,199/$1,299.
