Is there a new Polyphia signature guitar on the way from Ibanez? Last week, Scott LePage took to YouTube for a playthrough performance of the Bloodbath guitar solo. Nothing unusual in that. He linked to the tablature, individual song tabs are available for four bucks a pop from the Polyphia website.
But the video served a dual purpose, as a little teaser of forthcoming attractions, because the electric guitar LePage is playing looks very much like a forthcoming signature model from Ibanez. And it’s a doozie.
Longtime fans of Ibanez’s lineup of metal guitars will recognise what LePage is holding in the video. It looks like a modern update on the Xiphos, an X-shaped electric often listed under the X Series, with the super-clean aesthetic that you might associate with one of progressive metal guitar’s most modernistic players.
A 7-string guitar, with a bevelled body that looks more like a 2007-2008 style Xyphos body [see the Ibanez Wiki for a comparison], LePage’s new model is all white, with white hardware, white bobbins on what is surely his signature Fishman Fluence Custom Series humbucker pairing.
There is a pickup selector switch and another toggle switch to select the different voicings of the pickups, and a single knurled metal dial that is most definitely a master volume control.
What else can we see in this video? Well, that vine inlay on the fingerboard is pretty gnarly. We like the painted hardware. It gives this a 2001: A Space Odyssey vibe. And we definitely like the two-point vibrato. It is refreshing to see a 7-string built for metal that foregoes the temptation to go with the double-locking Floyd Rose. What you lose in divebombing you gain in more fuss-free setups.
LePage similarly went with a Gotoh T1502 vibrato on his KRYS10 signature model. Like the KRYS10, this looks like it has an ebony ‘board and you better believe those are 24 jumbo stainless steel frets.
Maybe it was only a matter of time before LePage got a signature Xiphos. You can see him playing one – albeit with a reverse headstock – alongside Steve Vai in the video for Ego Death.
Bloodbath? Well, you’d need something venomous for that, or more to the point unconventional. That’s the track from Remember You Will Die that welcomes Chino Moreno from the Deftones to the party, an arrangement that found LePage totally rewriting the track after Moreno had done his thing. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2022, LePage admitted that little was left once he was finished with it.
“Actually, it’s quite a funny story,” said LePage. “We had something for Chino and we sent him something, he wrote stuff to it, and then, once we finished up the session in the studio, I took that one home and changed everything, all the guitars, except for one of Tim’s parts and a couple of my parts here and there.
“I restructured the whole thing. I rewrote the chord progression. I changed fucking everything about the song just because I felt like our stuff no longer did his stuff justice. Yeah, a lot of these songs go through three, four, five different versions until we are finally happy with it, and some of the songs didn’t make it to the record. God! We probably have like 20 ideas that just didn’t make it, which we are either going to come back to one day or they’ll just be buried.”
You can watch LePage put this prototype signature Xiphos through its paces in the video above. We will bring you more news when Ibanez makes it official.
