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2011 Jackson Showcase: Ellefson & Bello Interview Each Other

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Jeff Owens
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Megadeth’s David Ellefson crossed paths with Anthrax bassist Frank Bello at the Jackson booth during the 2011 Showcase in Anaheim, Calif. Watch below as the pair revisit last year’s epic Big 4 concerts, and compare signature models.

New Jackson Custom Shop Signature Model for Megadeth’s Broderick

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Jeff Owens
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Broderick, and a tantalizing glimpse of just the headstock of his new signature Soloist model.

Megadeth fans will be excited to learn that the Jackson Custom Shop is introducing its new Chris Broderick signature guitar model in January 2011. Broderick himself worked closely with Custom Shop master craftsmen to create a distinctive guitar based on a classic Jackson design.

That guitar, the Jackson Chris Broderick Soloist™, brings his long and exacting search for instrumental excellence to a most satisfying conclusion.

“After an exhaustive search for the highest-quality instrument, I’ve found it at Jackson,” Broderick said. “I’ve been looking for a guitar this incredible for quite a while, and the guys at the Custom Shop really understood what I was after and where I was coming from. I have spent countless hours ensuring that this guitar is playable and stylish.”

Broderick’s Soloist model boasts an unusual new touch in the form of a slightly offset carved-top body design for which the guitarist collaborated with longtime Jackson Custom Shop Master Builder Mike Shannon. Other features include dual DiMarzio® humbucking pickups and a 24-fret 12”-radius fingerboard. Further, the guitar will be available in six- and seven-string models.

The Colorado-bred Broderick is not only a formidable shred guitarist, but also an extraordinary musician in a much wider sense. He started playing at age 10, studying guitar, voice, violin and piano, and eagerly devoured a wealth of diverse musical influences extending well beyond rock into classical, jazz, blues and country forms. He earned a degree in classical guitar performance from the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music, and he himself has taught guitar for more than a dozen years.

Broderick joined Megadeth in early 2008. His molten guitar work has contributed to the band’s current revitalization, including 2009 album Endgame, the American Carnage and Rust in Peace 20th Anniversary tours, and the summer 2010 Sonisphere Festival shows in Europe that featured several metallically historic Big Four shows.

Jackson’s unveiling of Broderick’s new signature model comes closely on the heels of the guitar maker’s announcement of its partnership with Megadeth bassist David Ellefson, who received his own new signature bass model in early 2011 and who will be collaborating with Jackson on the development of other new bass models.

Big 4 DVD Goes U.S. Double Platinum

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Jeff Owens
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More than 200,000 sold. And that's just in the United States.

The Big 4 Live from Sofia, Bulgaria, the DVD release documenting a metallically historic summer 2010 European show featuring Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax—the “big four” of U.S. thrash metal—has now gone double platinum in the United States.

Released in fall 2010, The Big 4 Live presents footage from the June 22, 2010, Sonisphere festival show in the Bulgarian capital that featured all four bands on the same stage for only the second time ever (the first Big Four show took place one week earlier in Poland). On that date, the concert was transmitted live to hundreds of theaters in North America, Europe and Latin America, with delayed showings in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

The DVD set presents more than five hours of material, encompassing each band’s entire set that evening at Vasil Levski National Stadium. It includes a finale late in Metallica’s set that saw members from all four bands onstage together for a rendition of 1980 Diamond Head metal classic “Am I Evil?”

“Double platinum” status denotes sales in excess of 200,000 copies as certified by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Jackson Partners with Megadeth’s Ellefson For New Signature Bass

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Jeff Owens
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Ellefson with his signature basses.

Jackson is supremely thrilled to announce its new partnership with Megadeth co-founder and monster bassist David Ellefson.

In addition to the introduction of a new limited-edition Ellefson signature model in January 2011, the pairing will see the fleet-fingered and always-eloquent bassist collaborating with Jackson’s R&D department on new Jackson bass models. To this, Ellefson brings unrivaled game based on decades of sold-out world tours and groundbreaking metal albums.

His new signature bass is a monster, too. The U.S.A. Custom Shop David Ellefson Signature Model Jackson Concert™ Bass is based on the Jackson Concert Bass with which Ellefson recorded Megadeth’s landmark 1990 metal magnum opus, Rust in Peace. Further, it’s a spot-on replica of the instrument he played during Megadeth’s triumphant Rust in Peace 20th Anniversary Tour in 2010 (as seen in the Megadeth Rust in Peace Live DVD/CD and The Big 4 Live from Sofia, Bulgaria DVD).

The bass features an alder body, quartersawn maple neck with compound-radius ebony fingerboard and jumbo frets, pearl shark fin inlays, EMG® 35CS neck pickup and EMG® 35DC bridge pickup, EMG® BQS electronics, Badass™ bridge, Hipshot tuners, limited-edition burned-in fallout logo and Rust in Peace-themed case. Sixty of the basses will be made, comprising four- and five-string models in both black and quicksilver finishes.

Ellefson himself is just as delighted as Jackson is, telling Jackson News, “When Megadeth set out to replicate the Rust in Peace tour, there was only one clear choice of bass guitar—my original Jackson Concert Bass. The instrument is based on the Jackson I played on the album and is exactly like the one I’m playing today. This bass truly takes no prisoners.”

Hear more from about the basses from Ellefson himself in this exclusive Jackson News Alert video:

Trivium Readies New Album

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Jeff Owens
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Beaulieu onstage.

Orlando, Fla.-based metallurgists Trivium will ensconce themselves in a Florida recording studio in mid-January to start cranking out the as yet untitled follow-up to 2008 album Shogun. Guitarist/vocalist Matt Heafy reports that 17 songs have been written for a new disc tentatively slated for a late-spring/early-summer 2011 release.

Jackson-wielding Trivium guitarist Corey Beaulieu had noted earlier that forthcoming new Trivium material would be deliberately conceived to not sound like the songs on Shogun.

“We’ve been concentrating more on more to-the-point, catchier songs without going off too much,” Beaulieu said in a summer 2010 radio interview. “There are no seven- or eight-minute songs on this one. There are a lot of really cool riffs and a lot of really cool parts and, obviously, there are guitar solos all over the place.”

While new songs won’t echo the sound of the 2008 album, Beaulieu was quick to emphasize that the band still sounds unmistakably like itself.

“It doesn’t sound like Shogun, but it sounds like Trivium,” he said “It’s got a different feel than Shogun—a lot more in your face and heavier and faster. It kind of balances out everything—we’ve got four or five songs that are all screaming; we’ve got a couple of songs that are all singing; and huge songs that are kind of a mix—a kind of Ascendancy (2005) vocal style, with both screaming and singing, so there’s a good variety, which makes it really interesting to listen to because each song has its own thing going on, so they all stand out really well and fit together, too. It’s got a good balance of everything, but the energy and the intensity are just a lot more up there. I guess if you compare it to anything as far as being aggressive, it’s probably more towards Ascendancy than anything else.”

Metal Mike 2011 Halford/Solo Album Update

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Jeff Owens
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Metal Mike onstage with Halford during the current tour with Ozzy Osbourne. Photo courtesy Metal Mike.

Jackson was delighted recently to hear from an old friend who’s no stranger to Jackson fans, Mike “Metal Mike” Chlasciak, who checked in with an update on his most recent goings on, namely, his tour with Rob Halford opening for Ozzy Osbourne. That particular metal fest, billed as “The Metal God on Tour With the Prince of Darkness,” wrapped up in mid-December.

As for ringing in the new year, a new Halford album featuring Metal Mike is slated for 2011 release, as is a new solo effort titled The Metalworker. Further, don’t miss Chlasciak’s new column in Guitar World magazine, called “Metal For Life.”

But why are we telling you? We’d much rather let Metal Mike himself do the talking:

“Hey metal heads and Jackson fanatics! It’s Metal Mike saying hello from a heavy metal land, where two metal gods share the stage nightly. Yep, I am talking about the Metal God—Rob Halford—and the Prince of Darkness—Ozzy Osbourne. As many of you know, we’re on the North American arena tour playing to many, many people every night. It feels great! And as you guessed, my Randy Rhoads models are with me once again, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.


I’ll be back with a quick report right after. If you dig reading Guitar World, check out my ‘In Deep’ column with Andy Aledort, called ‘10 Metal Riffs You Must Know.’”

Keep it Metal,
Metal Mike

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