I had visited the Carvin outlet store on Sunset Blvd many times and always loved the way their guitars felt and played. Carvin guitars are of high quality, an excellent bang for the buck and I have yet to play one I didn't like. This particular guitar immediately caught my eye since it had my favorite guitar layout, namely one humbucker, tremolo and a single volume, and more importantly, she was on sale for $450. I told my buddy Dave "Homer" that I should buy her and add a cool graphic a la EVH. I always wanted to try and paint or relic a guitar and thought how hard could it be? For the record, most of my attempts to paint graphics have resulted in the guitars being so messed up that I have had to send them to GMW to be stripped of my horrible attempts and then refinished professionally. True to form, my relic attempts faired no better and to date my efforts have resulted in two broken necks and three stitches to my hand. The moral of the story is that it is harder than it looks and please leave the refinishing and relicing of guitars to the pros!

After arriving back home, I immediately added some masking tape to resemble the stripe pattern similar to those found on EVH's guitars and spray painted her red. The resulting striped pattern surprisingly came out decently especially since it was my first attempt. Note, I spray painted the guitar in my driveway where I also painted my left front tire of my truck red! Once again see my note above about leaving it to the professionals! In any event, I was proud of the way it turned out but tired of the striped pattern after completing my EVH Franken strat. I did not want two guitars with a similar graphic so I had another brilliant idea, why not strip the finish and redo it with a different design, hell I still had some red spray paint left!

I removed the striped pattern on the front (I was too lazy to take it off the back of the guitar) by using nail polish remover. I then cut squares out of TAC paper and proceeded to stick them on the face of the guitar one at a time. Needless to say, it took longer than I imagined and I would not want to do it that way again. Once all the squares were secured, I painted the face of the body and headstock red. After drying overnight I removed the squares one at a time to get the checkerboard white/red graphic. While it is not factory quality it came out pretty well and I have left it on the guitar for many years now mostly to remind myself to stop doing stupid things to guitars.

The guitar itself screams and I am very impressed with the stock M22 Carvin pickup. The coil splitting option allows one to cover a variety of sounds by simply splitting the pickup and manipulating the volume. I am really impressed with how versatile this guitar is. The neck is a round C shape and feels fast. Carvin guitars are known for having super low action and although I prefer high action, I was impressed with the factory set up. The Wilkson tremolo and locking sperzel tuner combination quickly became one of my favorites and I was amazed at how well this guitar stayed in tune. This guitar is a great player and I am always amazed at the quality, this was the best $450 I ever spent not counting the $7 for the can of red spray paint!