As a drummer, I don't know much about guitars, but I do know that the Gibson Flying V is up there with some of the most unusually shaped musical instruments ever designed, and let's be honest, most musical instruments are pretty weird looking. I mean, the tuba is mental; it's like a robotic snail or something. The French horn is pretty much the same thing but wearing steampunk body armour and the triangle is, well, a triangle. But taken out of content, even that is pretty strange; telling someone your job is to 'play a triangle' is almost as odd a notion as telling someone that yesterday you had 'optimism for dinner'.
Who knows, maybe one day in the future, that will be entirely possible. The future according to Gibson however, was that rock stars would be playing guitars of a more angular persuasion, lead by the Flying V. The uptake on sales after the instrument's launch was slow for some reason, but after Hendrix got his hands on one, the Flying V started flying off the shelves.
Taking the revival of the guitar further, London based design studio Masato has created their own version which adorns the T-shirt for Day 245 of my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE challenge. The tee is a current sample from the Masato line and features a full-length rendition of the Flying V guitar made entirely from highly polished studded gold. Where as Gibson aimed to make their guitar lighter by experimenting with how it's mahogany body was sculpted, Masato has gone the other way and made the thing so damn heavy that only the most worthy rock legends can lift it, sort of like a more bling rendition of The Sword In The Stone. But, owing to all that gold, you can't fault the guitar for its resistance to corrosion and ability to transmit low current audio. Beauty.
See more from Masato via their Twitter account.
