Though John Mayer is now a loyal PRS player – and has become firmly synonymous with his best-selling PRS Silver Sky signature guitar – the modern-day guitar great first made a name for himself as a Stratocaster player.
After all, before he defected to the ranks of PRS, Mayer was a Fender player through-and-through, and over the course of his relationship with the firm there was one electric guitar in particular that defined their time together.
That, of course, was the Black One – a brutally relic’d, Custom Shop creation built by Masterbuilder John Cruz in 2004 that, as Mayer once explained during a short documentary, was designed to be his “main guitar”.
Heavily inspired by the Stevie Ray Vaughan Tribute Strat that Mayer was so fond of, the Black One was completed in late 2004, but when Mayer first received his new (ahem) pride and joy, he wasn’t completely satisfied with its tone and the way it played.
So, what did he do? Well, he didn’t send it back to the Custom Shop for further inspection or refinement: he stuck it in the freezer.
“I started playing it and it wasn't there. I was sort of heartbroken,” Mayer once recalled in a video that charted the creation of the Black One. “I started thinking to myself, ‘This guitar, I know it can be something.’ It was just going, ‘Yaank, yaank, yaank [when I played it].’
“I remember I put it in the freezer overnight, because I was so desperate to have something molecular happen to this guitar. I said, ‘Something has to molecularly change with this instrument. I will not accept that this is the way this instrument has come out.’
“I had one of those freezers where it’s the whole length of the left third of the appliance. I took everything out of the freezer and sat the guitar in overnight. I was like, ‘You just sit in there and change.’”
Mayer has always had something of a ‘think-outside-the-box’ approach to his music and guitar design, but... a freezer? It is certainly a left-field method for fixing the issue, that’s for sure.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t quite have the desired effect, as Mayer explains: “The next day, I took it out and started playing it… and it still wasn’t there. It was just cold.”
So, Mayer’s second course of action was to open up the hood of his Strat (something that would probably have been the first approach for the vast majority of players), and lo and behold – the problem revealed itself.
“I opened it up and the ground wasn’t hooked up,” Mayer added. “Something wasn't hooked up. As soon as it was hooked up, it started playing right.”
Once it started playing right, Mayer wasted no time in putting his new prized possession to work. At the time, he was beginning work on what would become Continuum – arguably his definitive body of work to date – and the Strat played a key part from day one.
The first song it made its way onto was Bold as Love – Mayer’s cover of the Jimi Hendrix classic – but it would have a hand in shaping countless other tracks, both on that album and beyond, all the way up until Mayer gave Paul Reed Smith a call.
Recently, Mayer pulled his Black One Strat out of exile when he played at Madison Square Garden in late 2023 – footage of which you can see below.
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