Inside DBZ Imperial

DBZ Guitars offers an inside look at the DBZ Imperial

ANSWER: The DBZ Imperial (Imperial) is a guitar I thought about in the early 1980s. The Imperial was based on the response I was getting from the Dean ML that I designed in 1976. Players would constantly tell me that nothing sounds as good as that Dean ML. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top recorded the whole Eliminator album with a Dean ML I made for him...he told me that he had about a dozen guitars in the studio but he and the producer kept going back to the ML just cause it had the sound. As a guitar maker, I knew the ML had properties that made a guitar come alive. If you rap on a long skinny plank of wood it vibrates if you rap on a log, you get a thud! From the headstock to the butt end, the ML was a long skinny plank of wood.

I always wanted to make a “round body” guitar with these same properties. I never got around to it with Dean Guitars. However, when I was planning DBZ Guitars, the concept was at the forefront of my mind. Dean had become strictly a heavy metal guitar company. I wanted to get back to my roots of making quality instruments every artist would want to play. I had made guitars for people like Billy Gibbons, Kerry Livgren of Kansas, Elliott Easton of the Cars and John McFee of the Doobie Brothers long before I was making guitars for metal players.

I designed the Imperial with those same properties described above; i.e., a long thin plank...like strings on a piano stretched over the soundboard. I gave the guitar a nice carve and an aesthetic profile with hopes the guitar will become an instant classic. I used the ratios I had worked out for the proper maple cap on the mahogany back to give the guitar the ideal brightness and still have warm undertones I wanted the guitar to achieve. To top it off, I pulled the tailpiece back to give it more a trapeze effect and created the most rounded full range pickups to enhance the guitars natural acoustic properties. Imperial was my challenge to design an acoustically perfect electric guitar. Many have said I achieved this.

ANSWER: Yes - We are going to have more variations of the imperial at NAMM in January including a Bigsby model and Piezo pickup model. We also will be introducing a new body style in the Bolero/Imperial vein.

ANSWER: We use our own design... the bridge pickup is a high output 14.9ohm with ceramic magnet designed for full spectrum sound. The neck pickup is about 7.8 ohm with an alnico 5 magnet.