Matthias Jabs

Matthias Jabs (born 25 October 1955) is a German guitarist and songwriter. He is a member of the hard rock band Scorpions. Before joining the Scorpions, Jabs had played for the bands Lady, Fargo and Deadlock.

Jabs joined the Scorpions after Ulrich Roth left in 1978. The first album recorded by Jabs with the Scorpions was Lovedrive. His guitar playing contributed significantly to their signature sound.

During the 1980s he had a 1963-64 black Fender Stratocaster, called his "trouble guitar", which had a Floyd Rose floating bridge and a Bill Lawrence L90 pickup, and it featured on many tracks that needed a tremolo, including "Blackout". A copy of this guitar with a black Gibson humbucker is seen on the 'Make a Difference Foundation' video filmed in Russia, with other guests including Ozzy Osbourne and Gorky Park.

Jabs favours Gibson Explorer guitars and designed a model for them, called the Explorer 90 (due to the body being 90% the size of a regular Explorer), in the late 1980s. He also has a signature Fender Stratocaster dubbed "Jabocaster". Nowadays, Jabs and the rest of the Scorpions play the German Dommenget brand of guitars, with all their signature models now made by them. His most recent signature guitar is his "Mastercaster" used mostly on stage and on their more recent album, Humanity - Hour 1. Jabs is notable for his playing of a Talk box in some songs (such as "The Zoo" on Animal Magnetism and "To Be No. 1" on Eye II Eye, "Money and Fame" (Crazy World), "Can You Feel It" (Unbreakable), and "Media Overkill" (Savage Amusement) ).

Jabs had also once replaced the Marshall amplification logo on his amplifier cabinets with his own name, in the same font style as the Marshall logo. Besides Marshall, Matthias uses Wizard cabinets, Hiwatt, Engl, Fender Prosonic and Soldano amplifiers and cabinets, kitty hawk preamps, Dunlop picks, Seymour Duncan JB pickups, back in the 80s he uses marshall JCM 800 2210 amplifiers which you can see on the world wide live DVDs, Ovation 6 and 12 string acoustics, D'addario strings, talk box from Heil.

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