Jackson USA Custom Shop Demon

Jackson only released a few of these, and most were custom shop models. I think you can still get these through the custom shop, but I'm not entirely sure. They're very bizarre looking, and they somewhat resemble the old school Ibanez 540s. The guitar features an alder body with a maple neck-thru neck, ebony fingerboard with 24 extra jumbo frets, sharkfin inlays, an original floyd rose bridge, two EMG humbuckers, one volume and a three way switch.

UTILIZATION

The Demon is a huge pain to sit down with and play. In fact, it's a bit of a pain to play overall with the bizarre shape. Some people really dig this, but I'm not a huge fan of the way it looks overall. I tried to get used to it, but I just couldn't. That said, the guitar itself had great build quality. Given that it was used, there was some fretwear going on, but a quick level and crown could fix that without much of an issue. The inlays didn't have much filler, and it was a very solid guitar overall.

SOUNDS

The guitar had an EMG 81 in the bridge and an EMG 85 in the neck. The EMG 81 is great for that very bitey and strong cutting tone. It'll cut through the densest mix with ease. That's one of the things I like about EMGs, especially for recording. The problem is that it sucks for cleans and is a bit one dimensional. It can't do lower gain stuff that nice. The EMG 85 delivers average cleans, slightly mediocre low gain tones but amazing lead tones. It's super fat, and you can pull off crazy legato licks with absolute ease thanks to it being very powerful and warm.

OVERALL OPINION

If you enjoy this shape, I recommend trying to find one of these. However, they're pretty expensive as they're not made anymore. On top of that, they're hard to find. I just couldn't get used to the bizarre shape, and that lower horn really annoyed me when I went to solo up on the neck.