Musikmesse 2015 in pictures: 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…

Official specs are yet to be confirmed, but this will be the first Iommi model to feature the great man’s iconic cross inlays all the way down the fretboard – on Tony’s last signature, they finished at the 12th fret

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.”

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.”