Multi-necked guitars are nothing new of course, examples of note include the Reversed Slide Neck from Luca Stricagnoli, Rick Nielsen's five-neck Hamer beast, and the beautifully bizarre Manzer Pikasso. The Hydra follows a similar path, but does so with monstrous style.
Five years in development and set to debut on Vai's upcoming Inviolate album, the Hydra's single body is home to a 12-string guitar with a part fretted, part fretless neck, a seven-string guitar with whammy bar and coil tap and a four-string short-scale bass guitar featuring a funky headless neck that's unfretted along the whole of the upper part and fretted below. Oh, and there's also 13-string sympathetic harp at the back.
The bonkers instrument employs a mix of single-coil, humbucking, piezo, MIDI and sustainer pickups, features both floating and hardtail bridges, and boasts phase splitters too.
The whole thing has an otherworldly steampunk vibe to it, rocking three vacuum tubes, an onboard VU sample meter, lighted buttons and between-pickup tubes, dials, sliders and switches, cogs and bolts, aged metal plates, exposed cables and wires, metal tubes and mounts, as well as numerous decorative attachments. There's even an Ethernet port, as well as other features that are named but not yet detailed, such as the Seducer and Dragonizer.
Yes, this is an over-the-top show piece that brilliantly matches the flamboyant athletic style of the supremely talented Vai himself, but as you can hear from the backing track accompanying the announcement video below, it's also been built for playing.
Source: Ibanez