“I bought my ’54 Strat from the biggest dealer in Sweden – he was crying when I walked away with the guitar”: Brian May, Steve Vai and Neal Schon have all given Yngwie Malmsteen guitars – but nothing compares to his Fender Strats
Malmsteen descends from shred mountain to dispense wisdom on all matters gear, how to buy it, single coils vs humbuckers and to reminisce about some of his best gear purchases
(Image credit: Future / Jesse Wild)
This month’s guest on Bought & Sold needs no introduction but we’re gonna give him one anyway, because his name is Yngwie Malmsteen and there is no-one quite like him.
In his own way, he is a renaissance man who loves Ritchie Blackmore and Niccolò Paganini alike. But ultimately the neoclassical shred icon is a man of simple tastes. Fender Stratocasters. Marshall amps. Seymour Duncan electric guitar pickups. Ferraris. He finally realised a long-held ambition to fire a gun in the studio as a drum trigger when he recorded 2021 studio album Parabellum.
Little wonder he makes for such a great conversation…
What’s the first serious guitar that you bought with your own money?
“Well, if you want to be serious but it involves no money, the first guitar that I actually got was on my fifth birthday. When I turned five years old, I got a guitar and that guitar was the one [on which] to learn how to play. And this was a piece of shit, you know? And then my older brother, he also plays guitar, too.
“I started getting better, and he said, ‘The kid’s getting better. I’ve got to show him up.’ Anyway, my brother’s electric guitar was around, and I would play it all the time because he was never there. He was running around with girls and stuff.”
“After seeing him playing the guitar, I got an exact copy Strat. I was nine or around that age, and it really wasn’t very good; it was bad. And then, I got my first real Fender when I was around 12 years old.”
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What was the last guitar you bought and why?
“You know, that’s a funny thing because I actually haven’t bought a guitar for years. I used to all the time, though. There was a place in Sweden that I’d go to when I went home to visit; I’d always walk away with some expensive guitars. I used to go into some really good vintage stores here in Miami, too. But I really can’t remember the last time I did.”
What’s the most incredible find or bargain you’ve ever had when buying guitars?
“Quite a few, actually. When I was on tour in 1985, I got a Strat from a kid who basically had this ’56 Strat and he didn’t like it; he thought it was shit. So I bought it from him for, like, nothing. And then I guess the ’54 Strat is one I can’t put a price tag on – the guy I bought it from is the biggest dealer in Sweden and he was kind of crying when I walked away with the guitar. He really didn’t want to sell it.”
(Image credit: Future / Jesse Wild)
“But I collect other things. I collect watches, cars, guns, you know? I have a lot of shit that I’m collecting. I still have some amazing guitars… I mean, I’m looking at this ’68, I wish you could see it, it’s so fucking nice. It’s blonde with a maple neck. It’s incredible. That was my main guitar for a long time.
“Oh, and then there was the guitar I came to America with when I was 18. I came to America with a guitar and a toothbrush. That guitar is on the cover of my Rising Force album. But now it’s all beat up. It’s called the ‘Duck’ or the ‘Play Loud’ guitar. Fender made hundreds of exact replicas of it.”
What’s the strongest case of buyer’s remorse you’ve ever had after buying gear?
My best tip is to go straight to the store and get a white YJM Fender Stratocaster – you want a Fender Stratocaster Yngwie Malmsteen signature model. That would be the end-all-be-all guitar you can go to war with and always win
“Well, if that happened way back when I’d just go back and get rid of it. So it was never like I was stuck with it or something. And I’ve had some really interesting guitars: I’ve got a guitar that Brian May gave me, one of [Ritchie] Blackmore’s guitars, Steve Vai gave me one of his guitars, so did Neal Schon, and Uli Jon Roth gave me one, too. I’ve got a lot of cool ones.”
Have you ever sold a guitar that you now intensely regret letting go?
“No, not really. If I let it go, it was probably meant to be let go. It probably would have gone to a better home. I mean, if it’s just sitting in a big pile, there’s no point.”
What’s your best guitar-buying tip?
“My best tip is to go straight to the store and get a white YJM Fender Stratocaster – you want a Fender Stratocaster Yngwie Malmsteen signature model. That would be the end-all-be-all guitar you can go to war with and always win.”
If forced to make a choice, would you rather buy a really good guitar and a cheap amp, or a cheap guitar and a top-notch amp?
“You know, I really wouldn’t want to have any of these combinations [laughs]. But you can make a shitty guitar work, actually; you can do that. Because you can always overcome the physical crappiness of a guitar.
“But if the guitar is good, a bad amp is not gonna make it worthwhile because it’s not going to produce anything; it won’t work. It’s kind of a strange hypothetical, though, because I would never allow that to happen. But there you go.”
When was the last time you stopped and looked in a guitar shop window or browsed online and what were you looking at?
“It’s funny because I have my own studio now and I buy studio gear. I have some pretty sick stuff – all the tube compressors, Neve [console], recording stuff, some very expensive microphones.
“That’s kind of cool because the best converters for the Pro Tools and all this stuff… that’s really what I’ve been looking at. But the amps and guitars are a no-brainer for me. I’ve got the best; that’s it. They never make bad ones. That’s it. They don’t get better for me.”
If you could only use humbuckers or single coils for the rest of your career, which would it be and why?
“See, when I came to America it was different. There’s 60-cycle electric here in America, but in Sweden and Europe, it was 50-cycle, so it hums less with a single coil. I was using these single-coil pickups that were kind of a little hotter, but I came to America and they sounded like shit.
“So I spoke to somebody DiMarzio and they said, ‘Oh, no worries. We’ll send you a PAF now.’ And I said, ‘I’m not using a PAF.’ Everybody and their grandmother would put a PAF in their Strat, right? Not me. So, I said, ‘Hey, why don’t you take the coils and put them on top of each other instead of side by side? You can stack the humbuckers and make them look like a single coil.’”
(Image credit: Future / Jesse Wild)
“So that’s what they did. And now, of course, the best pickup money can buy is the Seymour Duncan Yngwie J Malmsteen [YJM] Fury pickup. It’s perfection, really – because when I first did the stacked single-coil-looking humbucker back in the ’80s, it was only to kill the noise.
Those Gibson [PAF] pickups sound great, are really cool, and people like Van Halen did amazing stuff with them. But, for me, it’s not preferable because it’s less of an attack sound
“They never really got the tone right. They didn’t have the capacity or something. But Seymour Duncan did it for me about 15 years ago and it’s unbelievable.
“I think that those Gibson [PAF] pickups sound great, are really cool, and people like Van Halen did amazing stuff with them. But, for me, it’s not preferable because it’s less of an attack sound. It’s mellower, softer and tends not to be as cutting. That’s not what I want.
“Having said that, I actually have a 1968 [Gibson] Flying V here with Strat pickups in it. It’s kind of crazy… Anyway, for me, the Stratocaster pickup layout is the way to go. But the original pickups are not what I want. I have the Seymour Duncan ones that look exactly the same, but the sound is perfect.”
Malmsteen plays Yokohama, Japan, on December 20. See Yngwie Malmsteen for more details.
Andrew Daly is an iced-coffee-addicted, oddball Telecaster-playing, alfredo pasta-loving journalist from Long Island, NY, who, in addition to being a contributing writer for Guitar World, scribes for Bass Player, Guitar Player, Guitarist, and Music Radar. Andrew has interviewed favorites like Ace Frehley, Johnny Marr, Vito Bratta, Bruce Kulick, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Morello, Rich Robinson, and Paul Stanley, while his all-time favorite (rhythm player), Keith Richards, continues to elude him.
