Keyan - Jackson American Series Soloist SL2MG 'Super Sleek, Super Fast'

No doubt thanks to the roaring success of the Virtuoso and Soloist SL3 models, Jackson Guitars have blessed six-string aficionados everywhere with an immense addition to their red-hot American Series with the Soloist SL2MG and Soloist SL2MG HT. The Corona-based Jackson factory has quickly established itself as one of the finest exponents of off-the-product-line guitars, truly feeling like 'next level' pieces of equipment.

Boasting five model variations with three colours to choose from, the SL2MG comes in both Floyd Rose and Hipshot-equipped hardtail varieties. Throw in stainless steel frets, maple neck, rolled ebony fretboard, Gotoh locking tuners, and the classic pairing of EMG 81/85 pickups and you’ve got a top-notch guitar that is ready to destroy straight out of the case.

With a weapon of an instrument due to be unveiled, it’s only fitting that one of the guitar world’s quickest-rising figures is a part of the campaign. Adelaide-based Keyan Houshmand has built a rapid online following thanks to his deep knowledge across all aspects of modern playing, with the young riffer working with established brands such as Bareknuckle Pickups and Neural DSP.

Wall of Sound was fortunate enough to chat with Keyan all about the new line of Jackson Soloists, geek out about dream specs, future innovations to the instruments - as well as all about his plans for the upcoming year and beyond.

The Soloist Series of Jacksons have always been renowned for their extreme playability, but even Keyan was immediately impressed with how the neck felt on the American Series Soloist when he got his hands on one;

When I was there filming and I picked it up; I couldn’t get over how fast the neck was. Everything from the neck profile to the satin neck. And then on the top of that, the rounded edges; it felt very familiar. Even though that's a thing that I'm not used to, it was almost instantaneous to get used to it. I just play it faster because I feel like I had the ability to do that kind of thing with that kind of neck profile and stuff. But I really enjoyed the feeling of the rolled edges - it feels natural to the hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQrFO8T34Ik

Comfort is king when it comes to hardware on guitars - something the Hipshot bridge in the Soloist SL2MG HT offers in spades;

I've got a couple of Jacksons with a Hipshot on there, and I’ve also got a couple with Evertunes, so I'm very much like a hardtail guy. I don't think there really is a more comfortable bridge in the Hipshot. And I know it might be a bit cheesy to say, but I think it looks the best as well, especially on this new line (of Jacksons), that army green with the black Hipshot bridge. It just looks so clean, and it's super comfortable to play. I'm a massive fan of those Hipshot bridges in particular, for sure. It's like it's not even there, you know what I mean? It's like the perfect height to kind of get good action when you're picking and stuff like that.

As the two previous American Soloist models pack Seymour Duncan pickups, the SL2MG houses the classic metal combo of an EMG 81 and 85. As a player who’s had experience with essentially every pickup brand under the sun, Keyan agrees that there’s some iconic about the sound of the EMGs - especially for heavier music;

At the moment - I say that at the moment because guitarists, we can never make up our minds - but at the moment, I'm a big fan of passives. I love my passive pickups, but I do have a soft spot for actives because for the longest time on previous lines of guitars, all from the age of five and up, I was playing active pickups and EMGs. So if anything, I have a soft spot for EMGs. You know what you're getting; super compressed, super metal. And I think even though this new Jackson has so many new modern features, it still kind of keeps that tradition in a way where it has the shark fin inlays and the EMG pickups, it's paying homage to what came before it, despite having these really modern features. So I can get around the active pickups for sure. I think they sound great, especially for the stuff that you would typically play on this guitar.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C5I31sLSaJ9/?img_index=1

His yet-to-be-released piece ‘Solus’ serves as the soundtrack to the trailer for the SL2MG HT in striking army green. While there are no concrete plans for the track to officially drop, it still may feature in Keyan’s plans to come;

There will definitely be different riffs, and different elements from that track that will be in an upcoming release later in the year. I can't say too much more than that, but those ideas, the way that you hear them, they might be 95% the same. The meat and potatoes are there and made, it’s just like adding the little spices for the final edits. And it might not be in C# (tuning), it might be a bit lower and on a seven string Jackson instead. But the ideas within that track are definitely there for sure.

With guitar innovations seemingly at an all-time high, Keyan’s in awe of what’s been invented in recent years;

I think we're kind of at the point where everything is almost as good as it can be. Between Evertunes and roasted necks and all this other stuff, I think there's not really much more that we can do to the instruments. Maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe in another two years, something will come out; “how wrong was I?” But I think, at least for my case, I don't think I could want anything more, especially with the stuff that Jackson's putting out. In the past five years, post COVID-19, like every guitar that's coming, I'm just absolutely in love with.

But he certainly has some great ideas that could/should be looked into, with a focus on reducing the stress and difficulty of one of the most daunting guitar repair jobs;

One thing I’d love to see in guitar technology sometime soon is the ability to swap pickups way easier, instead of having to get the soldering iron out. I know some people have tried to do that, but understandably it's a little bit more in-depth than most people are willing to do. I don't know whether it’s like a magnetic plate or something. I think that would be cool because we've got Evertune bridges. We've got sturdy maple carbon reinforced necks. Everything that can possibly make a guitar be as streamlined and as playable as possible. I feel like we've already figured it out, so now it's more artistic, expression-y type of things, like pickups and other stuff. If that was a mainstream thing where all manufacturers adopted this new way of being able to swap pickups or something. That would be brilliant. Or even - and I've talked about this with my techs and stuff like that - having a way to kind of flip the pickup switch without needing to physically flick it with your hands. Like having it be controlled by something else. So it's kind of like the same idea of midi changes live, but just having that on your pickup selector or something, I think that'd be really cool.

WoS can’t help but pick Keyan’s brain, and we invite him to play designer for a moment and tell us what his own American Soloist Series would entail - Jackson guitars green-light this idea!

How much time do you have? (Laughs) I like my seven strings. I'm a big seven string guy, so I would love to see a seven string variation. And it's kind of hard to say because I feel like the modern kind of models that Jackson have been putting now, whether they be import or USA, they've kind of been hitting the mark and everything I'd already want in the guitar. I'm a big fan of the Misha (Mansoor) models, like the Juggernaut shape. Purely because I'm a sucker for double cut Super-Strat. It feels like in the past couple of years, a lot of people have been like “oh, this design is so overplayed, so over it”. I'll never be over it, I think! I think it's so classic, but having that pointy shape, and I love the playability of that guitar. And the necks feel very similar and stuff to the line that just came out. Again, a lot of the features are shared, like the Luminlay side dots and the speedy necks and all that stuff. Where it would get personal for me is in the string configuration, being a seven string, and I'd like to have a little bit. I'd love to have a longer scale length, maybe like 28 inches or something like that. With the idea being that I'd able to be able to put it in something like drop f natively without feeling the need to use a pitch shifter or something like that. Having the Evertune, having all the things that are already on all of these guitars, but just making it a little bit longer and a seven string, that would be pretty much my dream guitar, to be completely honest.

As Keyan points out, low tuning and extended range is not an uncommon thing in the modern rock and metal world - it’s essentially the norm in 2024, so having instruments that can handle these lower tunings is a must;

It is not a gimmick. People will spend the money and people are looking for these guitars. And I feel that Jackson, of all brands especially, are very much up to that because with the past couple years that the guitars have been releasing, they've all got longer scale lengths. They've all got seven string, eight strings, fan frets and stuff. People want these guitars, people have a need for these guitars. With the bands that are getting popular these days in that space, like Sleep Token and Spiritbox - they’ve had a massive rise in the past year or so and you got a lot of new guitarists on the market. A lot of people wanting to play these songs, and they’re going to have a rude shock when they try to play it on a standard scale guitar.

This leads us to touch on the importance - or lack of - of tonal flexibility in a guitar. Is it better to have an instrument that can handle almost everything you can throw at it; or a fantastic one-trick pony?

I think for me, it's kind of a middle ground of both; I like having a guitar that can kind of do it all. Everything from super, super heavy stuff to the sparkly sort of cleans. Would I rather have one guitar that does everything for me? I don't think that's possible, because if I want to play in standard E, I can use a normal guitar. But if I want to do something dumb in double drop C, then I will need a specific scale length to do that. But on that guitar, even if it is 30 inches long and I have the thickest strings, I would still like to have that Swiss-Army capability of being able to do split-coils and stuff like that. So maybe at the end of the day, I guess I'm just greedy and I want everything. I think it's good to have a guitar that does a little bit of everything, but at the end of the day, I think you'd still be limited to the physics aspect of the guitar.

Chatting about the man himself for a moment, we got to ask Keyan about his plans for the rest of 2024, with the guitarist excited for his upcoming tour with progressive metallers Caligula’s Horse at the end of April;

Next month it's Caligula's Horse in Melbourne on the 25th of April, Sydney on the 26th and then Brisbane on the 27th. So three dates just on the East Coast; should be good fun, decent sized rooms; I'm really excited to play like the Triffid (in Brisbane). Super keen to play those shows. We've got a couple of new unreleased songs that we're playing live as well. It's a 30 minutes set but we've squeezed in six songs, so we're really pushing it.

Speaking of new material, the Adelaide six-stringer has plenty in the works for the next few weeks and months;

There's an EP that I'm working on with a gentleman named Connor Kaminski, based in the UK, another social media guitarist/personality. He writes absolutely amazing music. I approached him, said “hey, let's just do a split EP”. And he said “absolutely". We've got two of three songs done at the moment. We're calling up every week, despite the time zone differences of him being in the UK and us being over here - we're getting it done, we're on the last song and then looking to have another single after that before the end of the year, which is going to have vocals on it. So I'm going to commission someone to do vocals and it's going to be my first track with vocals. So that's a whole different process. I find myself having a little bit more care with how I'm writing the song. I don't feel the need to kind of pull out all the bells and whistles and do all this crazy stuff on the guitar because I need to keep room for the vocals, which has been an interesting process to kind of go through.

With the prospect of vocals being featured in his new music, Keyan needs to go down a whole new rabbit with writing lyrics;

So I think for now I'll be writing lyrics, but we'll see what happens. I'm in touch with someone at the moment - who for now shall remain unnamed - about putting vocals on. As I was trying to do it, I found that I can't really write lyrics unless I already have a melody. So then it's me, like, “okay, now I need to make a melody first, and then I need to make lyrics that fit this melody and all the kind of like inflections of the human voice and blah, blah, blah”. Because I know what I wanted to sound like in my head. But finding the words, both literally and figuratively, to fit that is a little bit challenging, but we're getting there. I think rhythmically, I always have a sense of what I want to do, but then melodically comes after that, but then fitting words with enough syllables that kind of say the same thing to fit both of those things is tough. But I think, for me, anyway, that is the best approach, being predominantly just a guitar player.

Wrapping up our chat with the very affable Keyan, he’s only happy to indulge us one last time in fawning over the new line of Jackson Soloists;

The new guitars that Jackson are putting out are super sleek, super fast, and they sound absolutely phenomenal. I couldn't be happier representing them and doing the video from that awesome experience.

Interview by Andrew Kapper

Take a closer look at the Jackson American Series Soloist here

Features:

• Alder body
• Through-body three-piece maple neck with graphite reinforcement
• 12"-16" compound radius rolled ebony fingerboard with 24 jumbo stainless-steel frets and inverse mother of pearl sharkfin inlays
• EMG® 81/85 pickups
• Three-way blade pickup switch, single volume control and single tone control
• Hipshot® hardtail bridge or Floyd Rose® 1500 Series double-locking tremolo bridge system
• Luminlay® side dots
• Heel-mount truss rod adjustment wheel
• Dunlop® dual-locking strap buttons
• Gotoh® MG-T locking tuners
• Jackson Foam-Core case included