Steve Vai Unveils Insane Guitar-Bass-Harp Hybrid Instrument "The Hydra" | Revolver

Steve Vai Unveils Insane Guitar-Bass-Harp Hybrid Instrument "The Hydra"

Ibanez took five years to create one-of-a-kind musical beast

Guitar virtuoso Steve Vai has teamed with Ibanez to create a one-of-a-kind hybrid instrument that looks like some kind of sci-fi weapon. Dubbed the Hydra, the creation that took five years to materialize is a hulking beast that's part electric guitar, part bass, part harp and then some.

Essentially, it's a guitar nerd's wet dream. It boasts three necks, two headstocks, elaborate pickups — single-coil, humbucking, piezo, MIDI and sustainer — phase splitters, two tremolo bridges — floating and hard-tail — half-fretless necks, 13 fucking harp strings and a completely alien-like design with flashy lights, fleshy colors and monstrous curves.

It's so packed with features that you might think it's unplayable, but of course Vai himself wrote a song with it called "Teeth of the Hydra" that will appear on his forthcoming solo album, Inviolate. It seems like the musician is understandably keeping the only copy of the Hydra in his own collection, but he let director Garson Yu film a high-quality video of the magnificent apparatus that shows off all of its many attributes in exquisite detail. Vai is auctioning off an NFT version of the video on January 28th, but you can watch it above now via YouTube.