John Sykes

Seen standing with his Les Paul Custom model during the tail end of his Blue Murder era.

Above is John's 1959 Les Paul Sunburst. This Les Paul is pictured on the cover of the "Loveland" CD. It was also used for most of that recording. For those who are interested in Les Pauls, it doesn't get much better than this guitar! This model and year of guitar is about the most collectible guitar there is and this is a fine example. It doesn't have the most extremely figured maple top but it plays and sounds fantastic. John used this guitar for several shows a few years ago. However, he started wondering about the sense of subjecting a guitar of such value to the rigors of the road and switched back to his main black Les Paul Custom.

John Sykes has used a Gibson Les Paul Custom Electric Guitar since 1978. Initially, it featured Gibson Dirty Fingers pickups in the '80s, which were later replaced with Gibson Classic 57 pickups in the '90s. This setup is illustrated in a user-uploaded photo on Gstatic.

John often uses this guitar for recording clean guitar sounds. For example, he used it for the much of the Whitesnae recording of "Is This Love".

Another new addition is this Joe Satriani Model Ibanez. What makes this special is that it was given to John by Joe after Joe had used it for a tour.

John has acquired some new guitars over the last year or two and we'll get some pictures of them up soon. Out of the new additions, this one is his favorite--an EVH Frankenstein.