Over the span of a few short years, Grace Bowers has cemented herself at the forefront of a new generation of Gibson SG players.
Whether she’s playing at the Grammys with Coldplay’s Chris Martin, giving her own wah-laden rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner or playing alongside Peter Frampton and Trey Anastasio, the genre-blending guitarist always has an SG at hand.
“My first ever guitar was this shitty little acoustic, but my second guitar was actually a knockoff SG,” she tells Guitar Center. “It looked like if you tried to draw an SG from memory and failed. But yeah, I've always been drawn to one.
“I can't point to any SG players and be like I wanted to sound like them, or I wanted to look like them. It was never anything like that. It just felt nice and I just like the way it sounded.”
Since then, Bowers has graduated to a fair few higher-end guitars. “I was playing a legit 1961 Gibson SG for a while – beautiful guitar. I loved it,” she gushes. “But I felt like I was always fighting to play it. Old guitars have a lot of issues.”
Her go-to at the moment? “I tried out this Murphy Lab, which is in my hands right now, and it feels like an old guitar, but it plays like a new one. Also, the humbuckers versus the P-90s in my other one fit my sound better.”
And while a Grace Bowers signature is not on the cards quite yet – though it may very well be something Gibson explores in the future – the guitarist did reveal her main dream SG spec, potentially giving us an early indication of what that speculative model could one day look like.
“If I could design my own SG, honestly, I would probably take the one I already have [her Custom Murphy Lab SG], and if there is some way to make my whammy bar sound like a Floyd Rose, without it looking like a Floyd Rose, if it could look the same, but it could do that, that would be so cool.”
Other dreams specs would be “lightning bolts” custom inlays, something that was previously utilized for Angus Young's own SG signature back in the day.
“Other than that, I don't really have a whole lot of modifications I would make to it. I would keep it as it is for the most part,” she adds.
In more Bowers news, the guitarist recently revealed why she decided to distance herself from the blues – and the reason she quit YouTube.
