“I’m always looking for things to piss off metalheads”: Slipknot’s Jim Root on his unconventional guitar choices
While he might be one of the world’s most revered metal guitarists, Jim Root’s guitar arsenal isn’t loaded with conventionally metal guitars. While his Slipknot guitar counterpart Mick Thomson used Jackson axes for years before switching to ESP in 2023, Root has long opted for Fender models, though has more recently played Charvels, too.
And the reason he goes for unconventionally metal guitars? “I’m always looking for things to piss off metalheads!” he tells Total Guitar. “And apparently, also piss off Jazzmaster and Tele players!”
READ MORE: Jim Root nearly didn’t join Slipknot: “My buddy was like, ‘What are you, f***ing stupid?’”
But at the end of the day, he doesn’t feel certain guitar shapes should be reserved for a certain genre of music. “I mean, it’s a slab of wood with pickups and strings,” he says. “Who gives a shit about the shape of the guitar?
On how his now-legendary signature Jazzmaster came to be, Root recalls: “Fender sent me a Jazzmaster years before we talked about doing a signature model, and I really didn’t play it that often. I thought it was kind of awkward looking.”
But after picking it up and playing it a few times, his mind was changed. “It played really well,” he says. “And it sounded really good, but I didn’t think about it much. And then we were doing pre-production on something and I put one of my straps on it so I could stand up and play, and I was like, ‘Holy shit! This guitar is just so well-balanced.’
“It felt so comfortable and easy to play because it was right in the pocket. So I hit Fender back up and was like, ‘I know you sent me this Jazzmaster a while ago, and I haven’t given you any input or talked about it, but I’m using it at rehearsal, and I’m loving it. It’s kind of awesome.’ They said, ‘Cool, do you want to do a signature model?’ And I was like, ‘Yes!’”
Root went into further detail about his start with Jazzmasters in a 2020 interview with Guitar.com. “I was reluctant to really play with it,” he said. “It made me think of Dinosaur Jr, Nirvana and stuff like that, and that’s not really my vibe. I appreciate those bands – they write great songs, But that’s just not really me.
“But then when I was in Stone Sour, we were doing rehearsals and getting ready to record Audio Secrecy and I was like, ‘You know what, I’m just going to grab that guitar and play it during rehearsals, and maybe it’ll give me something different?’ When we played the first song, I was immediately blown away by how well balanced it was. I was like, ‘Man, regardless of how it looks, this guitar feels so good hanging off my shoulder’. I fell in love almost instantaneously.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
