Periphery founder Misha Mansoor's keen eye for detail shows on his Jackson Juggernaut signature electric guitar...
Ocean Burst
“This is the Jackson Pro Series HT7FM in Ocean Burst - it looks like the ocean, right? A beautiful top. The FM is for flame maple. This guitar is very deliberately what I wanted it to be. I wanted to be able to offer a more affordable option of my guitar that still had all the features that are very important to me.”
Tuners
“We’ve got wonderful locking tuners here. Essential because I pick very, very hard so that is an absolute necessity for me.”
Bridge
A nice little secret on the side is what look like regular dots, but they’re actually Luminlay dots. So they glow in the dark
“We’ve got a nice hardtail bridge. This style I find is very balanced sounding. A lot of people don’t realise that the bridge style, material and quality can make a difference in the sound. And I wanted something that has a lot of attack but will also sound very full.”
Neck
“The neck on this is thin but I like them to have a bit of a C shape. If they’re too flat on the back I get hand cramps. This guitar is available in a six-string too, but with this being a seven-string, I don’t like it when the neck feels like a baseball bat... Closer string spacing makes it accessible.”
Luminlay dots
“A nice little secret on the side is what look like regular dots, but they’re actually Luminlay dots. So they glow in the dark. They don’t emit light so it’s not going to be lighting up your face on a dark stage, but what it will do is show you exactly where the frets are when you’re playing a show. And that for me is absolutely fantastic because sometimes I don’t have all the light that I would like onstage.”
Truss-rod wheel
“Another feature that I wish every guitar had, and I make sure all of mine have, is having the truss rod wheel right here. It’s super-easy to adjust. It’s something you can even do on the fly - in fact, I have done it on the fly.”
Pickups
I need pickups that can tackle everything very well without any issues and no compromise
“These are the Jackson MM1s, the seven-string variant. They’re very balanced pickups and they are supposed to be able to tackle any sound. With my band, Periphery, we’re doing everything from very heavy rhythm tones to smooth leads on the bridge pickup - it can’t be ice-picky - to cleans and mid gains. I need pickups that can tackle everything very well without any issues and no compromise, and I think these do a fantastic job.”
Coil-splits
“The pickups are wired to a five-way split so we have split inner coils on the second setting. It’s fantastic on cleans or on mid gains. We’ve got split outer coils; I think of it as more of a Guthrie kind of thing. I hear him using that kind of sound, I don’t know if he actually does but it’s kind of a different split-coil sound. It’s a little more chimey. Other than that [the positions are] pretty traditional: bridge, both pickups and neck.”
Controls
“They look like standard controls with volume and tone, except this tone isn’t activated until you pull it up; when it’s down, it’s out of the circuit. It makes the guitar brighter. Pull it up and introduce the tone circuit and you can hear it take a little of the top-end off.”
Periphery's new album Periphery IV: Hail Stan is out now via the band’s own 3DOT Recordings.
