Ibanez unveiled the guitar—the JIVA10—at the 2018 Winter NAMM Show. The ax, which is based on the company’s S Series, sports a slew of eye- and ear-catching features, including a blonde-to-black burst and Strauss’ new signature DiMarzio Pandemonium pickups (with a DiMarzio True Velvet Single Coil in the middle position).
“There are a couple of things about the guitar that I think people didn’t expect, and one of them is the burst,” Strauss says. “My manager and I were having lunch with Larry DiMarzio, talking about the guitar’s specs—and it just hit us at the table. Larry said, ‘Look at you—you’re blonde and you’re wearing all black!’ A lot of people said they thought it was gonna be pink or purple, but when have you guys ever seen me play a pink guitar? I don’t even own one! I spent a long time designing the pickups with DiMarzio. They sound amazing with the combination of woods.”
The perfectly balanced, seven-pound JIVA10 has a mahogany body, a quilted maple top and a bolt-on maple Wizard neck with an ebony fretboard. Other features include an Edge-Zero2 tremolo with a screw-in bar, Luminlay fret-position markers and Beaten Path inlays, which Strauss calls the heartbeat of the guitar.
“It’s like an EKG line, and the ‘spikes’ correspond to the dots on the fretboard,” she says. “The heartbeat gets faster as you get up toward the higher part of the neck, which is where the magic happens.”
Maybe the most unexpected thing of all is the guitar’s name. Even Strauss was surprised. “I’ve been designing my signature guitar since I started playing, drawing pictures of it in my middle school notebook—and it was always called the Hurricane,” says Strauss, referring to her longtime nickname and social media handle. “Ibanez was all set to go, but in November, they said they couldn’t use the name since it had already been trademarked. This was in November for a January release! So I started thinking about it—then ‘jiva’ popped into my head. It was as if divine intervention said, ‘I have something for you.’ My dad’s band was called Jiva in the Seventies. [In Hinduism] your jiva is your life force, your creative essence. Any time you’re creating something, that’s your jiva manifesting itself. I thought, what name is more fitting for a guitar that’s the biggest manifestation of my creativity?”
The JIVA10’s street price is $1,499. For more information, check out ibanez.com.
Damian is Editor-in-Chief of Guitar World magazine. In past lives, he was GW’s managing editor and online managing editor. He's written liner notes for major-label releases, including Stevie Ray Vaughan's 'The Complete Epic Recordings Collection' (Sony Legacy) and has interviewed everyone from Yngwie Malmsteen to Kevin Bacon (with a few memorable Eric Clapton chats thrown into the mix). Damian, a former member of Brooklyn's The Gas House Gorillas, was the sole guitarist in Mister Neutron, a trio that toured the U.S. and released three albums. He now plays in two NYC-area bands.
