During a conversation with Ultimate Guitar's Justin Beckner, guitar legend Steve Vai talked about his new Ibanez PIA signature guitar, his relationship with the company, the decision to join Ibanez Guitars back in the '80s, and more.

UG: Your guitars have always had great marketability to them. The JEM is the longest-running, or maybe the second longest-running signature model of all time, I think I heard somewhere.

Vai: "Yeah, George Benson has the longest-running signature instrument and he started with Ibanez about a year before myself. To have a signature instrument that still sells consistently and to still be a player in the game after 35 years, boy oh boy, I can't thank the gods of good karma enough for that one."

UG: What drew you to Ibanez in the first place?

Vai: "When I had joined David Lee Roth's band (in 1985), I needed a guitar that fit my idiosyncrasies, and I made the first four prototype JEMs. I was going to use them as my main guitars, but all these companies started approaching me, wanting me to endorse their guitars. I said, 'Thank you but I have this guitar that I play.' So they all said they'd make me that guitar, so I sent out the specs to a lot of companies and they made me guitars based on my specs - but they weren't based on my specs, virtually, at all.

They thought, 'Let's use one of our guitars and put his name on it.' Like, if you have a signature Strat by somebody and it has certain frets and maybe certain pickups and things like that but it's a Strat based on the things they like in a Strat. That's all nice, but the JEM wasn't based on anything so there was no company that was giving me guitars that were actually the JEM, they were just giving me their models with a couple of little tweaks... except for Ibanez.

At first, Ibanez gave me this guitar that I didn't like, I thought it was hideous. It was just like a gift and they thought it would be something to present me as a signature guitar and it wasn't anything like I wanted. But in three weeks, they made me a JEM and it was bulletproof. It was spectacular. It was the guitar of my dreams. It was just like the prototype that I had made. So that's why I went to them - because they made the best guitar for me. Then they asked me if I wanted to have it manufactured for others as an endorsement deal. At first, I was cold-footed about endorsement deals because I didn't want to get stuck into something that I couldn't navigate around. I thought, this is so quirky, who else is going to like this - plus it has a monkey grip and it's in Day-Glo colors. They just said, 'You might be surprised,' so I said OK. The success, I could have never anticipated.

Then they wanted to make a less expensive JEM style guitar and that's where the RG came from. The RG was basically a JEM that was manufactured without the monkey grip and some of the other things that made it much more affordable. That guitar just exploded - it was just off the hook. So it's like a fairy tale story. Then the seven-string, when that hit, my god, it was like lightning struck twice. With the sales of the PIAs, it's like lightning is striking three times, it's unbelievable."

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