I’ve been holding off for a week of so on this one to see if any more details would emerge, well I did manage to find this great close up photo on the official Experience Hendrix tour site there are a few more on the site so make sure you head over and check it out. So what is this guitar? Well obviously it is an Ibanez JS Series with many people speculating it is a new option for the JS2400, well as you can see this clearly is not a JS2400 as it only has 22 frets but it sees quite a departure from the usual JS Series guitars as it features 3 single coil pickups and a Maple neck. Joe said in his recent blog over at MusicRadar.com that this is indeed a prototype guitar so it may or may not go into production. The single coil pickups are no doubt DiMarzio and could be a number of different models but seeing as Joe has already plumped for the Pro Track on the JS2400 I would imagine he has at least one of those in the neck and probably the middle position.

The guitar features what appears to be 2 tone controls as per Leo Fender’s original Strat design and a 5 way switch like most modern Strats, Joe was obviously trying to recreate Strat tones to play Jimi’s music without upsetting Ibanez. I wonder if Joe ever gets sick of playing the same guitar and wishes he could bust out a charred sunburst Strat for some real Hendrix tone?

Update: When I refer to Single Coil pickups I actually mean Single Coil sized, obviously these are DiMarzio single coil sized Humbuckers which is entirely different to standard Single Coil pickups.