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(Image credit: Signal/YouTube)
In the annals of bands known for brandishing outlandish and strange instruments, few hold a candle to the Little Ol’ Band From Texas, ZZ Top.
After all, you’re talking about a trio that used custom-made “spinning fur” guitars in one of their most famous music videos, and whose bassist made headlines last year for wielding a 17-string (!) bass guitar at a concert in Huntsville, Alabama.
Now, you can add one more unorthodox instrument to that list.
Recently, ZZ Top’s bearded electric guitar hero, Mr. Billy F Gibbons, was invited by one-time Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum – who played on the guitarist’s two most recent solo albums, 2018’s The Big Bad Blues and 2021’s Hardware – to Goodnoise Studio in Palm Springs, California to play a Stratocaster made almost entirely out of cardboard.
Gibbons, of course, picks it right up, and was even inspired to write and record a song in tribute to the ultra-lightweight six-string, titled Cuttin’ Up Paper.
The appropriately-named tune contains everything you’d want and need from a Billy Gibbons song – gravelly vocals, biting, blues-y leads, and the thickest, grooviest riffage west of the Mississippi.
Cardboard Sessions has been around for a few years now, first coming about when Signal Snowboards and Ernest Packaging teamed up to find new, unconventional uses for cardboard.
Eventually, in 2015, the two firms joined forces with the Fender Custom Shop, creating a cardboard Stratocaster with standard Strat parts.
Gibbons seems right at home, even with the odd body material, exclaiming at the video’s end, “Man, I like this thing!“
The ZZ Top man isn’t the first prominent guitarist to take a cardboard Strat for a spin, either. Earlier this year, alt-rock guitar legend J Mascis dropped his usual Jazzmasters and Telecasters in favor of a cardboard Strat of his own.
For more Cardboard Sessions videos, visit Signal Snowboards’ YouTube channel.
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Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.
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