The Ultimate Heavy Metal Guitar? Gary Cooper gets tough with a Hooligan!

It's a curious fact that Britain's specialist guitar makers sell a far higher proportion of basses to guitars. No-one has yet successfully explained why this should be, but my own theory is that bassists are possibly far less satisfied with what they can get out of a basic 'off the shelf' mass produced Precision, Jazz, Japanese bass or whatever than guitar players are by their old faithfuls, the Strat and the Les Paul. The changing nature of the bassist's role - especially during the past five years or so - has propelled the search for new instruments: new musical styles creating the need for new instruments, in fact. While it's true that many guitarists feel they can still use the old guard for their work, two fairly recent stylistic trends have begun to radically alter the types of guitars that people play. The popularity of the clangy fashion Pop sound has brought about a sudden flood of secondhand Gretsches, and Heavy Metal has fathered the Kahler/Floyd Rose/Kramer/Hamer/SuperStrat class. Maybe this change of styles will finally break the Strat/Les Paul stranglehold? Either way, new makes and styles of guitars are rapidly gaining popularity, and it's here that the British makers could finally find the larger market for their six-string wares. Possibly the single best equipped Brit to cater for the new breed of (so often Van Halen inspired) guitarists is Birmingham's John Diggins, whose initials make up the bass player's favourite magical rune, 'JayDee'. John has one of the longest pedigrees of any extant British maker, and although he's best known for his superlative basses (among whose owners number Mark King and Jaco Pastorius!), John's wares have been the mainstay of Black Sabbath's mighty armoury since the 1960's and his guitars have powered numerous other notable heavy stylists, including both Angus Young and John Thomas.

John's guitar for the assault and battery Rock player is the Hooligan, and safely locked inside an iron-barred cage, I walked away from the recent Guitar Weekend with one, careful to make sure its snarls and howls and incantations didn't disturb the neighbours until I was good and ready!

CONSTRUCTION & FEATURES

Some players like guitars festooned with knobs and switches, others don't; and I'm in the latter school. In fact one of the best pieces of advice every given to me by a pro player (I have to admit that it was many years ago and I forget just who said it to me) was that all you really need is a single volume control - everything you need to do can be done from that. I've since found that these words were pretty accurate. After all, how many of us ever touch tone controls on passive guitars? Most of the time, winding a tone pot down just emasculates your sound. Thus it was that the sight of the JayDee Hooligan with just the one control didn't bother me overmuch - and I'd strongly recommend you not to be bothered by it either, as I'll explain later.

Finished in a dark wine-red stain with a high gloss lustre, the Hooligan is just about as basic a guitar as you can get - and none the worse for that, believe me! The body wood had me fooled at first. I thought it might have been a kind of Mahogany, but John tells me that it is, in fact, Australian Blackwood. It's a very close grained wood and (as you'll see later when I go on to describe the guitar's sound) it offers excellent sustain qualities without seeming too physically heavy for comfort.

The body is fixed to the neck section by a four bolt joint, but before we get round to talking about the neck, the body also has a brilliantly simple extra on it - a smoothed-away contour on the top back edge which your forearm fits perfectly into, giving a playing comfort and ease which matches that of the Strat-like back cutaway to absolute perfection. It certainly makes the Hooligan one of the most caressable guitars I've handled - positively sexy in its feel! Moving back to the neck, this is fashioned from as perfect a slab of bird's eye Maple as I've come across, to which John had in the case of my sample mated an equally beautiful bird's eye Maple fingerboard. Talking to John, I gather that either Rosewood or Ebony are more common (you can specify any of the three types as you prefer), but that he'd felt there was a demand for Maple neck/fingerboard examples; hence this one with its distinctive patterning. Why an applied fingerboard, instead of the commonly encountered all-in-one Maple neck? John's experience is that applied fingerboards resist warps.

The neck itself carries a 'V' profile to the back, instead of the usual V shape found on most guitars. This idea dates back to some of the earlier Strats and is a tremendously sought-after feature among vintage Strat collectors. Originally it was developed for some Country players who were among the only guitarists then to make much use of their thumbs to barre the bottom strings. Later generations of Rock players also took to the 'V' profile and, although it can feel a bit strange at first, it makes for an amazingly comfortable feel to the Hooligan's neck - ideal, in fact, for Rock playing styles and chord shapes. The JayDee's neck is made even more suitable for fast playing by the fitment of what I can only describe as 'ultrajumbo' frets - fatter than Gibson's standard types but smoothed dead flat and enormously comfortable, especially when you're playing at high speeds. In terms of size, the neck measures 1 ⁵/₈" at the (locking) nut and 2 ¹/₁₆" at the 12th fret. In terms of profile it does have a camber to it, but not one so pronounced that I experienced any choking-off on lengthy bends.

HARDWARE

Schaller Kluson-like machines adorn the nicely sculpted headstock (with an attractive ridge carved into the front bottom edge), but even though these machines work perfectly well, Hooligan owners won't be making too much use of them because the JayDee has a locking nut system fitted to it, integral with the Floyd Rose trem mounted down at the bridge. In the recent rush to develop super-trems, Kahlers may have taken a bit of a lead in publicity terms, but it isn't just Edward Van Halen and me who prefer Floyd Rose types!

Before getting down to the bridge and trem arm sections, the nut details include three allen key bolted clamps which lock, two strings each, into absolute rigidity. Nut locks have their pros and cons (the worst of the latter being the time it takes to change strings when you have to unfasten allen screws!), but this one works far better than most and has the definite advantage of not relying on a conventional nut for intonation and accuracy, using the metal bottom section of the six slot serrated base-clamp instead. Down at the business end, the Hooligan's Floyd Rose has this type's perhaps rather awkward-looking bridge arrangement. On a Kahler Flyer your strings pass over quite Fender Strat-like height and length adjustable saddles, fitted with brass rollers on their tops. Again, on the Kahler, your strings terminate in loop-in ball end retainers, and it's these that are adjustable via their fine-tuning process. On the Floyd Rose, the strings ride across adjustable (but very much sturdier) saddles which are locked solid against the unit's baseplate via individual alien screws. To my mind this is a better arrangement, because it is both absolutely safe against unwanted saddle movement, and would seem to ensure better transmission of string vibration.

Unfortunately, string changing on the Floyd Rose isn't as easy as it is on the Kahler. Not only do you have the accursed nut lock to cope with, but at the bridge end you have to bend the string through 90 degrees, snip off the ball end, and allen key lock it into place. Once fastened, it has the advantage of providing a lock on the string at both ends, but it does mean that string changes are going to take you some time to execute. Having said that, though, the Floyd Rose works like a dream - especially when as well fitted and set-up as it was on my sample JayDee. The fine tuners are precise and accurate, but it's the action of the arm and the movement itself that is so impressive. The Floyd Rose fitted to my Hooligan, in comparison to the Kahler on this month's Explorer, for example, was considerably more precise in its action. True, it was a shade stiffer; but this (at least as far as I was concerned) just increased the accuracy with which the JayDee's trem could be used. It's hard to put a concept like 'feel' into words but, to me at any rate, the Floyd Rose felt better.

In terms of its effect, another major plus of this tremolo arm is the way in which the bridge itself is less sensitive than on most other advanced trem types - so you don't need to be quite as ultra-careful, when in mid-crash, that you don't inadvertantly trigger a pitch change. Does it work in its intended purpose - i.e., mechanical advantages aside? In my view (and notwithstanding the string changing delays that all these 'super trems' impose), yes, it does. From 'rubber bands against the fret-board' and back again to full pitch, with absolutely no de-tuning effect. Combine that with the Floyd Rose's immaculate feel and you have probably the best of the advanced trems, maybe rivalled only by the new Fender System 3 which we looked at last month.

Finishing off the hardware details, just one solitary JayDee Hooligan humbucking pickup is fitted, set as close to the bridge as possible. This has blade type magnets instead of pole pieces, which, especially on a guitar which is designed for manic string bending, is going to prevent notes choking off as they are bent between conventional pole pieces.

SOUND & PLAYABILITY

Once you've got the Hooligan strapped-up and ready to fire, the immediate impression is of this guitar's absolute purposefulness - it means business, from the angle at which it naturally hangs, through the way the top body contour so comfortably accommodates your right forearm, to the way in which the 'V' neck's profile snuggles into your left hand. Jack into an amp (preferably a good valve one), set your volumes even fairly high, strike a chord, and the effect is like stabbing at the accelerator of a V-12 Ferrari - the sheer sonic assault is fully equal to the kick in the midriff you get when a thoroughbred performance car is gunned-up. It's not so much that the JayDee has a high output (although it has, of course!); it's much more that the placement of the pickup and the construction of it makes for such an attacking, dynamite sound that even if the actual volts coming out of the twin coils aren't so much higher than from a number of other hot transducers, the sound is hotter - far hotter!

There's a secret formula in John Diggins's pickup, too. If you slacken the single volume control back, the output drops but the tone doesn't lose even one degree of its dynamism and attack. There aren't (certainly not from my experience) many guitars about which you can say this, and it makes for a superb controllability on stage. Instead of having to mess about with distortion pedals, master volumes, boost circuit footswitches and the like, all you do with the Hooligan is slacken the control back when you first set up your amp till you have the riff/chord sound that you want, and then, when you're ready to solo, just twist it up with your little finger (it's perfectly positioned for that ease of adjustment) and away you go, with exactly the same fierce, roaring sound, but at a higher volume.

From the point of view of your left hand, as I said earlier, a 'V' profiled neck does take a little getting used to, but once you have mastered it the ease with which you can wrap your hand round it and use your thumb is astonishing. Likewise, the Hooligan's massively fat and low frets allow your fingers to glide along the length of the 22 fret neck with almost unprecedented comfort and ease. Speaking purely personally, I don't happen to like glossy Maple fretboards, but I realise that many players do, and of the ones I've tried this is undoubtedly one of the slickest and most usable for high-speed Metal playing ever.

I've already said a lot about both how the Floyd Rose works, and why I rate it so highly, but the combination of such a superb trem with the sound and playability of the JayDee Hooligan combines to make this guitar among the best two or three H.M. guitars I've ever played.

CONCLUSION

The JayDee Hooligan is as dedicated to Heavy Metal as a Formula One racing car is to winning Grand Prixes. Just as you wouldn't take a Williams or Brabham down the local bypass (oh, I don't know, though...), you wouldn't use a Hooligan if you were playing Country and Western or quiet, thoughtful Jazz. There's nothing wrong with that, of course; in fact it's very much a point in this guitar's favour - it's as ideally fitted for its specific style as is, say, a Gibson Byrdland. The lack of tone controls doesn't matter in the slightest, in my opinion - no player who works in the H.M. field is going to be sacrificing his attack in favour of using top-cut tone controls anyway, and the ability to swing the single volume pot back and yet not lose the full-on tone is a remarkably useful feature, again ideal for the type of 'no compromise' playing for which this guitar is intended.

Add to that a sound like a wildcat disturbed in mid-slumber, the superb Floyd Rose, the slinky fretting, V-neck and immaculate build quality, and you end up with a guitar to shake walls with. If this sounds like your sort of no-nonsense machine, then do your best to get your hands on one. At an RRP of £583, it's unbeatable!

RRP £583 inc. VAT.

More details from JayDee Custom Guitars Ltd. (Contact Details). Distributed by Scott-Cooper Marketing Ltd., (Contact Details).