St Vincent (Annie Clark) has debuted the design for her signature Ernie Ball Music Man guitar. This makes her the fourth musician set to release a signature guitar with the company this coming March, joining Albert Lee, Steven Morse and John Petrucci. Given full control over the design of the instrument, Clark says that it has been designed to accommodate breasts and sit comfortably at the waist, design features she has struggled with due to the lack thereof in the past. The guitar, which was announced last year, took about a week in total to create from the initial design concept and a finished prototype and will be available for purchase next month.
Speaking to Guitar World, she discussed the considerations she made during the design process and the reasoning behind the features of the guitar, including its weight. The instrument comes in at just over seven pounds (around 3.5kgs), making it pretty light – and with good reason. “For me a guitar that is not too heavy is really important because I’m not a very big person. I can’t even play a Sixties Strat or Seventies Les Paul. I would need to travel with a chiropractor on tour in order to play those guitars. It’s not that those aren’t great guitars, but they render themselves impractical and unfunctional for a person like me because of their weight… They’re prohibitive, so this is a very light guitar and the weight is redistributed so that it has a thin waist.”
She added that when she got the finished guitar in her hands, that it was a dream come true. “You superimpose your feelings onto every guitar… It’s just so magic and it never gets old to me, so the idea that I have the guitar especially designed for my needs, but that my needs are transferrable and other people will get to enjoy it and have the same kind of connection with it that I do…”