Merzbow

A Greco Super Sounds can be seen in this recording photo posted to Merzbow's Twitter. Only the headstock, neck, and part of the body can be seen, so the exact model or year can't be determined.

A Sepia Crue Mini Acoustic Guitar can be seen in this recording photo posted to Merzbow's Twitter.

“The GR-500 is the analog synth part, used with the GS-500 guitar-shaped controller, and mine also came with a foot controller. It could function as a guitar on its own, but the controller also had a bass section where each of the six strings could be assigned individually, for example, making the 5th and 6th strings bass and the others guitar.

You could also apply percussion, attack, decay, and envelope generators, which let it produce a funky auto-wah bass. There were also poly ensemble and solo melody sections for the main synth sounds. The tone itself was fat and heavy, but since I was running it through heavy distortion, I couldn’t really make use of it as a guitar synth.

More recently, I saw Steve Vai on YouTube talking about the guitar synth Robert Fripp used—probably the GR-300—and that reminded me of the GR-500. So, I pulled it out of storage and have been trying it in the studio to get more guitar-synth-like tones out of it.”