Ernie Ball Music Man

I DON’T LIKE being wrong, but I do like being pleasantly surprised. I proclaimed loudly and often during the Steve Vai Passion and Warfare years — an era that also gave us the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit— that the seven-string fad would prove to be exactly that: a fad. I was partly right. Those bands didn’t age quite as gracefully as their initial success might have foretold, and Vai went back to the six-string for much of his Vai-style awesomeness.

But the seven-string guitar did not go away. In