Tak Matsumoto of B'z (one of the greatest Japanese rock bands) visited us in L.A. and we kicked off a great collaborative relationship on several guiatrs.  In addition to his McSwain Machine Series Custom, Tak commissioned the "Dragon V" as a surprise gift for B'z singer Koshi Inaba. We began with a single chunk of mahogany and carved, and carved, and carved some more... The eyes are inlaid rubies that glow bright red when the tone knob is pulled up.  Domo Arigato Tak-san!!!! 

The Dragon V guitar was a custom piece ordered by Tak Matsumoto of the Japanese mega star band, B’z. They are phenomenal performers and have sold out the Tokyo Dome 8 nights in a row. Koshi Inaba is the lead singer for B’z, and Tak wanted to buy Koshi a surprise gift for his birthday. He wanted me to carve this traditional film style Japanese dragon into a flying V-shape to give to Koshi as a present. Tak ordered two other guitars as well. One of these was a machine custom and the other was of the ancient deity, Ashura, who was carved into the guitar with some metal flames. Both of these were very interesting guitars. Anyway, for the flying V with the dragon, I glued together some Mahogany and carved it as one piece. This guitar took over three months of carving every single day to finish it. Tak wanted some traditional tattoo colors of greens, reds, and yellows on it. After I had stained it, I showed Tak and he thought it was a little too bright, asking if I could remove the color. I built a small sand-blasting cabinet to sandblast the wood, which took about 99% of the color out, leaving a faint hue of green. Along with this, it also pitted the wood, giving the guitar an extremely weathered look. It looked as if it was nearly 100 years old which was a really happy byproduct of the sandblasting. I went back, wood-burned it, oil-finished it, and put it all together. Tak gave it to Koshi as a surprise, and Koshi still uses it. To this day I have had friends that have visited Japan and Koshi, and have actually played that guitar, really loving the way it sounds. It’s still one of my favorite guitars. I did a second one of these with all of the color and gold-leafed every single scale on the dragon, which made it a little more flashy than the original one I made for Tak.