The Explorer

My guitar is my weapon against silence. My guitar is my baby, my prize, my outlet. It therefore makes sense that I have myself the best axe I can get my hands on.



Meet my guitar, a 2010 Gibson Explorer. The weapon of choice for the hard rock and metal players of the last thirty years, the Explorer is the iconic instrument of James Hetfield of Metallica. C.C. DeVille of Poison, Def Leppard's Phil Collen, and Claudio Sanchez, frontman of Coheed and Cambria all bring an Explorer to the stage.

The Explorer has been around in its current incarnation since the mid-70's, originally a late-50's attempt, dubbed the 'Futura' to cash in on the retro futuristic fad-du-jour of the time. And it does look like something that you'd find in the trunk of one of those old Jestons bubble-dome nuclear powered cars of the future. During its original market run, the Futura and its sister model, the Flying V, both tanked with impressive speed, leading to the product lines being mothballed so quickly, that nobody even bothered to make a record of how many instruments were produced. Consequently, a Futura or Flying V from this era surface now and then at auctions to sell for bewilderingly high prices.

This is no junker, my guitar. This is a professional-grade instrument, and it blows all of my other guitars out of the water. The body is almost ten pounds of solid mahogany, as is the neck. The bridge and strings sit entirely above the body; no holes have been drilled into it which would dampen the resonance of the body. In fact, nothing's been drilled into the body, save for the pickups. The neck is set-in, perfectly seamlessly melded to the body, as opposed to bolt-in, which uses (unsurprisingly) four to six massive bolts to keep the neck set and level against the tension of the strings. Sound carries very well through this instrument.

A rosewood fretboard, to minimize wear on the strings, frets barely a centimeter high, and the action (average distance the string has to travel to touch the fretboard) has been lowered, by me, from low to about the width of an atom. This is a very fast instrument.

Beyond being just an instrument, it's also a showpiece. The whole thing is nearly four and a half feet long, and the size of the body makes it weigh about twice as much as the average electric guitar. This isn't a garage band junker, this is my polished, precise vehicle of sonic conquest. It's so flamboyant, so attention-demanding that, in the same way you expect the guy driving the Ferrari to know how to handle the extreme power of his car, you expect the person wielding it on the stage has the skills to back up the audacity it takes to use such a tool.