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Product Ref: 102752
John Petrucci has been working with Music Man for many years now, with a large array of signature models based on his high demands and playing specifications. The Ball Family Reserve John Petrucci 6 with Koa top is a re-imagination of the current JP6, designed for richer tones. It comes from the Ball Family Reserve series; a range of models produced in limited quantities with the finest quality tonewoods and finishes to produce some truly custom-shop standard instruments.
The Ball Family Reserve pride themselves on crafting limited run guitars with top quality woods and finishes. The Music Man JP6 BFR is no different and is crafted from mahogany with a stunning koa top. It is paired with a mahogany neck and provides a wonderfully warm and richly nuanced tone with great sustain and acoustic resonance. The ebony fingerboard assists with low-end articulation and provides a smooth playing surface for the left hand. This guitar was designed to be more tonally rich than the original JP6, and it is in part due to these tonewoods that it is able to achieve that goal.
The JP6 features a very flat 15'' radius with a comparatively short 25-1/2'' string-length. When combined with 24 high-profile wide frets, this gives an incredibly slick playing feel with easy bends and vibrato. The deep double cutaway and 5-bolt sculpted neck joint means high fret access is simply no problem whatsoever. As you'd expect from a guitarist like John Petrucci, playing the 24th fret is no more taxing then playing the 1st.
With such high quality tonewoods, the John Petrucci 6 BFR needs versatile and nuanced pickups to live up to the tonal qualities that the woods possess; enter DiMarzio. The John Petrucci set of DiMarzio Crunch Lab and LiquiFire humbuckers have been used by the man himself on countless recordings and live tours. They are designed to provide a perfect balance of power and naunced tone. Unlike a typical rock/metal humbucker, these pickups allow your playing dynamics to come through and they show off the tonal quality of the wood they are mounted to. They are open sounding yet equally capable of high-gain saturation and liquid smooth lead tones.
The JP6 BFR features a non-locking floating tremolo of Music Man's own design. When combined with the Schaller M6-IND locking machine heads, they give absolute tuning stability and an accurate return-to-pitch. All of the hardware is gold-finished which gives a very classy-aesthetic, off-setting the sunburst koa top perfectly. This makes the JP6 a particularly versatile tone machine.
Anyone who has seen Dream Theater live will have noticed John Petrucci's effortless ability to create acoustic guitar tones from his electric instruments. The JP6 BFR features that same capability, and its second 3-way toggle switch lets you use the traditional magnetic pickups and piezo individually, or blended together for a crisp and articulate clean tone.
John Petrucci is best known as the guitarist, producer, lyricist and founding member of the successful progressive metal band Dream Theater as well as the guitarist and founding member of Liquid Tension Experiment. More recently, John has been involved in the research and development of numerous signature guitars with Music Man, including this JP6. Petrucci himself is a long-time user of Music Man which makes the connection with his signature guitars so strong.