Epiphone Ltd Ed Tony Iommi Signature
MUSIKMESSE 2015: In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a new Tony Iommi signature model on the way from Epiphone – but the finished article won’t quite be ready until July.
Fortunately, with a bit of cajoling, we managed to persuade the Gibson gang to let us take a few covert snaps of the Black Sabbath man’s latest signature – here’s what we found out…
Epiphone Ltd Ed Tony Iommi Signature
Iommi’s Gibson USA humbuckers fill the cavities here – and yes, you can definitely get this model in left-handed configurations!
As Tony told us back in 2011: “I insisted they put my signature pickups on it – which were expensive really to go on that but I didn’t want them to just put my name on the guitar and say, ‘That’s it’. I wanted it to be at least something that I’d use.”
Epiphone Ltd Ed Tony Iommi Signature
Finally, Uncle Tone’s signature appears on the back of the headstock – we’ll let him have the last word on why he plays SGs to this day:
“I like the shape, I like the size of it and I like the fact that you can get up to the top frets. With Les Pauls and stuff – I’ve got some Les Pauls – for me they’re not… especially as I took the ends of my fingers off, I can’t reach the top notes very easily. So the SG was ideal for me, as was the Strat because you could get up there. That was a good guitar the Strat but it just didn’t have the balls that I wanted. My early one did, I worked on it myself. I had that for years and had it in pieces at least once a week trying to do something to it. Potting the pickups and doing this and that. That was great and I used it on the first album, on one track [Wicked World] and then the pickup went, it broke. I said, ‘Bloody hell that’s typical’. Then I had this SG that I’d had as a spare, I’d never used it and bloody hell, I had to do the whole [first] album with it! Once I’d done it, that was it – I just stuck to that.”
