Dream Studios has unveiled details of its new limited-edition Alain Johannes Signature Model guitar. From the company:
Do you ever have that day where you go, “Holy crap, is this real or is this a dream?” Well, that happened to us about nine months ago when the amazing artist Alain Johannes started following us on Instagram.
Now, normally getting an musician follower isn’t a huge deal, right? Well, it is if you have been a fan of Alain’s music going back to Anthym, What is This, Eleven, Chris Cornell, Queens of the Stone Age and the Desert Sessions—not to mention his amazing work as a one of Dave Grohl’s Sound City Players.
So a conversation started, and Alain told us he wanted to buy a few guitars when he got back from tour with PJ Harvey. We asked him what he liked, how he wanted it to sound, etc. He gave us his parameters, and we whipped up this little beauty. Well, Alain loved it. We let him know that if he ever wanted to do a Signature model, we would be honored to do it. He said yes—so guess what. We are making this guitar available to you!
We don’t have a formal name for the guitar yet, so we are calling it the Maverick 2 Alain Johnnes Signature model, as we started with it being based off our Maverick Model.
Alain’s signature model starts out as a solid piece of 42mm-thick alder and is carved into a double-cutaway chambered body with a classic shape. It features a nice alder top cap with F hole, a belly cut and forearm contour, with a nicely rounded body.
From there, a 25.5” scale Hard Maple Neck is bolted to the Alder body, with five bolts to make sure the neck is secure and ready to play. On the hard maple neck is a 21f bound rosewood fretboard with the “Double 11” design inlays.
For the pickups, Alain is a Seymour Duncan fan, and we worked with Derek Duncan and M.J. at the custom shop to build Alain a custom set of wax-potted Seth Lovers to make sure that Alain got the tone he wanted out of the chambered semi-hollow alder body. And boy, do they sound great. We did a typical single-volume, single-tone pot set up, a three-way switch and added coil-tapping sliders to each pickup to let players go between humbucker and single coil on the fly.
For the hardware, we used a set of Kluson Vintage 18:1 tuners, a Jazzmaster-style vibrato and a shielded bridge, a nice set of D’Adarrio EXL115 Nickel Wound strings. You can see this one was built with love and care to let you showcase your style and tone.
The Maverick 2 Alain Johnnes Signature model MSRP is $1,299.95.
For more information, visit your local Dream Studios Guitar dealer or go to dreamstudioguitars.com.
