Justin Bieber played an obscure, cheap 80s guitar at the Grammy Awards 2026 for some reason
Justin Bieber probably isn’t the first name on your list when you think of celebrity guitar guys, but the pop star’s choice of guitar for his performance at the 2026 Grammy Awards might indicate he’s more One Of Us than you might expect.
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The majority of the attention garnered by Bieber’s performance of his nominated-song Yukon focused on the fact that it was stripped down in pretty much every way you can imagine – the one-time teen heart throb performing the song solo wearing just a pair of silk blue boxer shorts – but our well-honed guitar sense was more interested in what he had slung over his shoulder.
The Grammys are prime real estate for the big guitar brands, who no doubt bend over backwards to ensure that artists performing at the globally televised event are using their gear – remember Fender producing a custom transparent Stratocaster for H.E.R to use in the Grammys (and later the MTV Music Awards) a few years back? – but clearly nobody told Biebs.
Because for this most high-profile performance, the lefty guitarist chose to use a… purple Yamaha RGX?! Yep, this obscure relic of the pre-Pacifica days of Yamaha courting the 80s shred market somehow ended up on stage at the Grammy awards in 2026.
It’s not like it’s an expensive guitar either – while there aren’t a lot of them still in circulation, you can currently find various examples for sale in other colours in various states of disrepair for sub-$500. It’s hard to fully tell what specific RGX model it is from the performance, but the pickup and knob configuration would imply it’s a RGX 612S.
Primarily made in Taiwan in the mid-to-late 80s – though some models for the Japanese market were made in Japan – the RGX 612S has everything you’d expect a pre-grunge SuperStrat to offer. That meant a HSS configuration (with coil split bridge bucker), bulky Yamaha RM-Pro locking tremolo system, basswood body with maple neck and rosewood board, and of course that eye-catching violet finish.
Bieber has been pictured playing guitars many times of course – but it’s always previously been fairly unremarkable fare from Fender, Martin or Gibson. The RGX 612S is the sort of leftfield curio that implies that he’s at least more of a considered guitar buyer than we might have otherwise expected. Or maybe he just likes the colour, who can say.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
More evidence for Bieber’s guitar interest can also be found on the floor for the performance. In what is probably overkill for a performance where he loops a single 20-second guitar part, he’s got the big boy Boss RC-600 Loop Station – with its ability to playback six simultaneous stereo phrase tracks – holding things down. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’s got it all running into a first-generation Neural DSP Quad Cortex – did you not have time to upgrade to the QC Mini before the show, Justin?!
While playing a random and rare Yamaha guitar from the 80s by no means confirms Bieber as a Guitar Guy of course – but it certainly makes us wonder about it a lot more than we did before the performance. The colour is perhaps the most notable part of it – violet-finished RGX guitars from this era don’t appear very often, and there aren’t currently any for sale on Reverb. We did notice that one sold 10 years ago though that was in SSS configuration – has Bieber been keeping it in the stash all that time and routed it out for a full-sized humbucker?! We just don’t know.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
