“This guitar represents a whole year of my life”: This insane Jaws guitar was made using thousands of tiny pieces of paper from Guitar World magazines – now it’s going up for auction

Trey Xavier is parting ways with his insane, custom-finished Jaws electric guitar, which the YouTuber assembled using “thousands of tiny pieces of paper cut from the pages of Guitar World”.

Back in 2013, Xavier unveiled perhaps one of the most intricately crafted one-off custom guitars to ever grace the pages of GW. It was ironic, really, because the guitar itself was actually made from the pages of Guitar World.

As Xavier explained to us more than 10 years ago, what started out life as a stock Ibanez RG5EX1 soon became the foundation for what would later become a one-of-a-kind piece of playable art that paid tribute to Steven Spielberg’s iconic creature feature from 1975.

The project marked a full-circle moment for Xavier, who, as a fan of both the film and the magazine, put the two together for a decoupaged guitar like no other. The attention to detail was exquisite. Even the pickups are covered.

Now, Xavier has announced he’ll be auctioning off the guitar to fund the promotion of his band In Virtue’s new album, Age of Legends, which lands this week.

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Explaining his decision in a new YouTube video, Xavier looks back on the origin of the Jaws guitar concept, remembering, “This guitar represents a whole year of my life. I spent a year of my life turning a stock Ibanez RG into a one-of-a-kind piece of movie memorabilia art.”

The Jaws guitar came out of a particularly sensitive time for Xavier. At the time, he says, he was living in the parking lot of a bar. Feeling disillusioned with his prospects as a private guitar tutor, and dismayed by the state of In Virtue in 2013, he began to “freak the fuck out”.

He turned to a new hobby to get himself out of the rut. That hobby was decoupage – the art of sticking tiny pieces of paper to objects to create patterns. He directed that new focus towards a Guitar Center-exclusive Ibanez metal guitar, recreated the iconic Jaws movie poster using snippets of Guitar World, then had it finished by a local luthier to protect his hard work.

The Jaws guitar is also notable for its ‘Inside Out Standard’ tuning, which bears some similarities to inverted tuning by swapping the gauge and octaves of each of the strings.

“The biggest challenge is the sheer amount of time and patience it takes,” Xavier told Guitar World back in 2013. “I’d watch an entire season of a TV show in the time it took to cover five square inches. But it’s entirely worth the effort. The texture it creates can’t be replicated by any other means.”

Xavier’s plans to turn his newfound passion for decoupage into a profitable business didn’t quite work out, but the guitar did get featured in Guitar World, and it preceded a huge turnaround in his personal and professional life, after which he began gigging again and creating content fulltime.

“It’s not going to be cheap,” Xavier says of the auction. “This is a one-of-a-kind piece of art, done by hand. It will be hard for me to let go. It represents a very important time in my life. But moving forward always means letting go.”

Head over to eBay to bid on the Jaws guitar.