Andy Timmons

AT10P original neck with Premium Fret Edge Treatment. The AT-1™ bridge pickup was specially designed and wound by DiMarzio® for Andy Timmons. Andy Timmons' Signature AT10P boasts a Wilkinson®-WV6-SB bridge.

At :25s, Andy plays us his AT100 which he claims is his main guitar. His main guitar is a prototype AT100, which was built in 1994. Used on the album "Electric Truth". Source:

Yeah, the centrepiece of almost everything I do is the old Ibanez AT100. This is the prototype from 1994 that I’m still playing. This was particularly on solos like on Shuggy or Apocryphal, or the entire track of Take Me With You. [...] Well, prior to Ibanez, I was a Kramer endorsee. It was when I was with Danger Danger, and at that point, we were getting a lot of MTV video play so we were getting a pretty high profile. We were in all the teen glam metal magazines and all that. Strangely, in 1991, Kramer went out of business, after being on top of the heap with Eddie VanHalen and all of these great players. So, I was in a spot where I needed a company to work with and I was in a good position with a high profile band getting lots of exposure, so most companies at that point wanna work with you, regardless of your band or how you play, it’s about that exposure! For me, I knew I was headed towards where Vai and Satriani were. Ibanez was a likely choice, just because so many of my heroes and eventual friends were already there. The Ibanez A&R guy said, ‘We love you but we don’t like your band. Our program’s kinda full but I’ll see what I can do’. He came back and said they’d like to have me on, so that began a process. This was the first time in my life that somebody said to me, ‘We want to build you your ultimate guitar. What is it?’ And I went, ‘Six strings….I dunno! (laughs) I was always fortunate to have a guitar, and that’s not hyperbole. But to have a company ask that, I was like, I dunno, because I really didn’t know what that is. I’d owned so few guitars and really hadn’t experimented much, so they really went through the process with me, sending me all of their higher end guitars, like the US Custom line, which were really beautiful guitars with 24 frets and Floyds. Those were cool, and we did a Custom RG, a Black guitar with purple pickups, but I remembered a Strat copy that Kramer had put together for me. That was my favourite neck, so I sent that to them and said ‘make it look like Eric Johnson’s ‘54 ‘Virginia’ Strat, I thought that was the most beautiful classic look. Some might think it’s boring because it’s not hot pink or cracked mirror or whatever! Those are all cool guitars but I’m very fond of vintage and classic like that. So that neck and the RG was essentially what it was all about, It was the feel. We kept it with little to no finish on the neck, so it already felt like a guitar you’d played for years. Everything was kinda based on that.

In this video, Andy Timmons talks about his signature Ibanez AT10P.

In the image, you can see Andy has a George Benson signature Ibanez.

Seen on Andy Timmons website http://andytimmons.com/gear/

As I started writing tunes I was inspired by seeing Josh playing his old vintage Teles and Strats, so I was writing a few tunes on a lovely old ‘68 maple neck Telecaster. Most notably, you can really hear that on the opening track EWF: it’s got that middle position funky tone. That’s a live take with the band, so that’s the ‘68 Tele on the entire track. There’s a little bit of it on the main melody of Apocryphal, too.

Johnny T, the following tune, that's an early 90s Les Paul Standard. It’s tuned down a whole step with 13s on it. That song didn’t start out that way. That’s one tune that Josh wrote specifically for that record. I’d heard him and his band play this groove on a jam track he'd done for Truefire, and I said, ‘Man, give me a tune like that: I love that feel!’ He was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a Johnny Taylor groove!’ Okay, whatever, I like that! So he wrote that tune and played it in the key of D. We kept his track but I wasn't happy with how I was playing the song in general, so when I got back to my studio to work on it, I started to detune. It felt kinda swampy so I figured I’d tune the whole guitar down and get away with really heavy strings. So, with the 13s on the Les Paul tuned down to D, it was very manageable but had a nice fat tone. It worked well! I think John Forgerty tuned his Les Paul a whole step down sometimes. There’s quite a few Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes where that guitar is tuned down a whole step, and it’s got a vibe to it, you know?

That’s why I put the tremolo on the very beginning of the song! It’s almost like CCR meets Billy Gibbons, cuz I got the Les Paul and the rock tone. I was a Les Paul guy growing up: one of my first guitars was an Electra Les Paul copy. That guitar got stolen sadly when I was 16 but the band I was in has an insurance policy, so when it got stolen I got to replace it with a Gibson Les Paul. So all through my early years, I was playing a Les Paul, until I got a Squier Strat in 1983 and started morphing over to the Strat style.