My Babies!!!

RJ Raven PDC Custom
This guitar has served as my main guitar for the past 2 years. The neck is made from a wood I brought home from Mindanao called "magkono". It's very dense and hard and I heard that the RJ Guitar Shop snapped two saws while trying to shape this neck :-) This guitar is a little top-heavy, due to the neck's weight. The pickups are from an old Japanese Les Paul copy. A friend of mine gave them to me and they were lying around the house until I got this guitar. I also have a GK-2a synth pickup screwed on the top of the body, as opposed to just being glued-on with those two-sided tape. This allows me to fine-tune the pickup's height without resorting to shims and more tape.

This is a fat-sounding guitar with a little sheen of treble hinting whether distorted, overdriven or clean. The low-output pickups love signal processing so I usually run this guitar through my Zoom GFX8 or my effect pedal setup.

This is my new RJ Raven PDC Custom II, also dubbed as "Night and Day" because of the fretboard. I got this idea from looking at old Hit Parader magazines and I came across this picture of a guy playing a double neck guitar with fretboards similar to this one. I don't know if it affects the tone but it certainly looks very cool, at least to me.

It's got Sperzel Locking Tuners, a Hipshot Trem setter, a Wilkinson VS-100 bridge. The pickups are of the RJ Tech team's own design. Those are hand wound P90 style pickups, think of them as oversized single-coils. They sound really great, with a very fat yet twangy tone. This guitar doesn't like signal processing that much, though, so I normally plug it straight to an amp. I'm saving up to get the RMC Pickup saddles for this guitar so that I can use my guitar synth with it as well.

PDC Custom Hardwood
This guitar was my main axe before I got the RJ guitars. This was custom made for me by my friend Onie dela Cruz. He was living in the Isabela province, which was abundant in hardwoods particularly in people's old homes. Chances are that the wood for this guitar was a stair step or a dining table. *LOL*

The body, which is really, really HEAVY, is a laminate, IPIL body and neck with NARRA top. IPIL is a very dense and dark wood used for cabinets and such while NARRA is a favorite among furniture manufacturers. The fretboard is KAMAGONG, the local version of ebony. It has a neck-through desing and the body shape is taken from my first Mightek PDC Custom.

The pickups are DiMarzios. An HS-2 in the neck position and a Steve's Special in the bridge. There's no fancy wiring, just a volume knob and a 3 way switch. The bridge is a Gotoh Floyd Rose copy and the tuners are Gotohs as well.

You can hear this guitar's sound on the Triaxis "Who We Are" album, since a lot of the leads are played on this guitar. I particularly like the tone I got with this guitar run through a bi-amp setup: one is a Fender Blues Deluxe distorted by a Boss Dual Overdrive and the other is a Marshall 9000 preamp and power amp setup through a Peavey Classic 4x10 cabinet. You can hear this tone on the song "Rock n' Roll TV", available for download at the Triaxis Lycos page.

This is my ever faithful Japanese, candy apple red Fender '62 Reissue Stratocaster a.k.a "Voodoo Jones".
I traded my BC Rich Warlock for this guitar. The kid wanted a guitar with a Floyd Rose and I was looking for a less radical-looking guitar, so I guess the trade was worth it. It's been on every album I've played on, Rivermaya onwards. I've also used it as my primary guitar on several blues gigs and sessions.

I've changed the pickups to EMG Alnico Classics to go back to the "Strat" tone without the hum. It used to have a Seymour Duncan JB Jr. in the bridge spot with the stock Fenders in the neck and middle. A friend of mine paid off part of a debt with the EMGs so I had those put in.

People think of EMGs as sterile and undynamic, but then I guess they haven't heard these pickups! The tone is reminiscent of a hot Strat but with more refined bite. The tone also cleans up nicely when you back off the volume, something that the EMGs of old could never do.

I got into a Ritchie Kotzen trip in a very big way so I scoured every store for a Telecaster. I tried the newer American Standard Fenders but those didn't make me fall in love with them. I found this rare rosewood Boogie-bodied Tele (like George Harrison's) in a repair shop but the owner was an AFP (Army) Captain and he wouldn't part with it. Alas, my search was in vain.

A few months after that G.A.S (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome) attack, I saw this maple-finished Tokai Telecaster copy at a music store. I picked it up and I fell in love with it. It used to belong to Francis Reyes, who is a damn good guitar player of the Dawn fame. I immediately bought it before someone else beat me to it, and it's been with me ever since.

It used to have a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails pickup in the bridge position but luck intervened again because another friend of mine has an American Standard Tele that he wants to put a Hot rail pickup on. I arranged a trade and my Tele is now truly a Telecaster, with the American Standard bridge pickup. The only other mod to this guitar is the addition of Fender's TBX tone circuit.

This guitar is splattered all over both Triaxis albums, doing rhythms and a few leads. I alternate between this and my Strat for the blues gigs that may come along.

I also got into a heavy Steve Vai trip, which is the reason why I got this 7 string Ibanez Universe. Now this was way before Korn was in vogue. In fact, I think I was one of the few who had 7-strings during that time. A friend of mine has the white one and he got his a few months before I got mine.

This guitar is relatively untouched, having lived under my bed ever since I went back to playing six-strings. I started using it regularly again a couple of years ago and its great tone is featured on the Triaxis "Who We Are" album, paritcularly on the solo of "Mukha" and the instrumental "I Need Sleep". Once in a while I bring it along for some live work, but sometimes it sounds too "metal" for my taste. But I really dig having it around.

This beauty is an 80's Yamaha Semi-Hollowbody. I don't know the model number so if any of you guys know this info, just email me and I'll correct myself.

I haven't had this guitar for long but it did get into one of my productions. Check out the song "angel" from Marc Velasco's debut album. Marc comped the chords and I overdubbed the quasi-jazzy solos and fills on the song. I tried so hard to be in a George Benson frame of mind and this guitar certainly helped me fake my way through it. *LOL*

I also use this guitar for tamer blues gigs, such as "unplugged" club shows and low-volume sets. I *could* take this baby to the jazz jams happening around town but I'm too scared to do so. That would be like diving into the middle of the ocean without knowing how to swim. :-) Oh well,....maybe someday....