Michael Angelo Batio's gear: from Dean to Sawtooth, the Manowar rig, sourced

Michael Angelo Batio (born June 12, 1956, in Chicago, Illinois) is the guitarist for Manowar, and one of the most recognizable instrumental shred guitarists of the last four decades. He is best known for two inventions that turned into a lifelong stage trademark, the twin-neck Double Guitar and the four-neck Quad Guitar, for a run of instructional videos (Speed Kills, Speed Lives) that shaped how a generation of players learned technique, and for a touring and clinic schedule that by his own account has taken him through more than 60 countries.

He studied music theory and composition at Northeastern Illinois University, started as a Chicago session player, then joined the Chicago hard rock band Holland in 1984, formed Nitro in 1988, founded his own record label in 1993, and spent most of the 2000s and 2010s as Dean Guitars' exclusive signature artist before moving to Sawtooth Guitars in 2021. He joined Manowar in September 2022 and, per his own account, is now playing the biggest stages of his career.

Sawtooth Guitars and Sawtooth Amps, exclusively, since 2021, after roughly three decades as Dean's signature artist. No public guitar-string brand is documented; his own most famous strings-adjacent invention is a device built to silence strings, not a set that plays them.

Batio started on piano at five, picked up guitar at ten, and was gigging youth clubs and church shows by twelve. After a music theory degree at Northeastern Illinois University, he broke in as a Chicago session player, then in 1984 joined Holland, a new Chicago hard rock band fronted by singer Tommy (Tom) Holland, a former Steppenwolf vocalist. Holland signed to Atlantic Records and cut one album, Little Monsters (1985), produced by hard-rock veteran Tom Werman. "If you listen to that record, that's the real me on guitar," Batio has said. "The playing is tasteful, kind of like Cheap Trick meets L.A. heavy metal."

Little Monsters didn't chart, Holland broke up, and Batio moved to Los Angeles. On the Sunset Strip he met singer Jim Gillette at a Venice Beach party, recruited bassist T.J. Racer and, soon after, drummer Bobby Rock (fresh off a stint in the Vinnie Vincent Invasion), and formed Nitro in 1988. The pitch, in Batio's own words, was "the fastest, loudest, highest sound around": Gillette's multi-octave voice (reportedly capable of shattering wine glasses on stage), Batio's speed-picked leads, and a stage show built around the Double Guitar and, later, the four-neck Quad Guitar he designed and had hand-built by Wayne Charvel. Their 1989 debut, O.F.R., reached number 140 on the Billboard 200 behind the singles "Freight Train" and "Long Way from Home," both regulars on MTV's Headbangers Ball.

The record polarized critics; Batio doesn't dispute it. "The band knew going into it that we were going to be very extreme, but we wound up going way beyond that," he told Guitar World in 2026, adding that the label pushed the mix to be deliberately abrasive. Nitro toured on short two- and three-month runs but, in Batio's words, "couldn't get on a big tour." A second album, Nitro II: H.W.D.W.S. (1992), followed before the band split in 1993. A 2016 to 2019 reunion, with Lamb of God's Chris Adler on drums and bassist Victor Wooten (Matt DeVries covered live shows), produced one single, "It Won't Die" (2017), and a run of Indian tour dates before ending after Batio stepped back to care for his mother during her final illness. Asked in 2026 whether Nitro might try again, he was direct: "No, no. I play in Manowar now, and I'm happy."

In April 1993, Batio founded his own label, M.A.C.E. Music, Inc. ("Michael Angelo Creative Enterprise"), now based in Gurnee, Illinois. It became one of the first record labels to go online, in 1996, and has since released Batio's entire solo catalog: No Boundaries (1994), Planet Gemini (1997), Tradition (2000), Hands Without Shadows (2005), and a run of albums through the 2010s, alongside instructional titles and merchandise including the MAB String Dampener. The label has also distributed material from other artists, including Batio's own side project C4 and acts like T.D. Clark and The Flyin' Ryan Brothers.

Running his own label, after two prior bands signed to Atlantic and Rhino/Rampage, gave Batio something most working musicians never get: control. "My first check, I was able to buy a house. I was never able to do that on Atlantic Records," he said in a 2015 interview, describing years of self-booked international touring funded by his own catalog sales. That independence is also what let him build a second, parallel career: alongside his own albums, Batio became one of the most in-demand guitar clinicians in the business, and released the Speed Kills and Speed Lives instructional video series through Metal Method, a partnership that has run more than 20 years.

For most of his career, Batio was Dean Guitars' exclusive electric and acoustic artist, eventually releasing more than a dozen signature models, including the graphics-heavy Armor Flame series (designed with artist Stephen Jensen of Wornstar Clothing) built around EMG 85/SA/81 pickups. At one point he was doing roughly 20 clinics a month for the brand, booked through a dedicated clinic agent, playing music stores that partnered with Dean to host his instructional performances; by his own account in a 2015 interview, he has "done probably more clinics than any guitar player out there."

That relationship ended. Per Ultimate Guitar, Batio has said he left Dean over how the company's newer ownership treated its artist roster, drawing a direct line to two other high-profile Dean departures: "Dave Mustaine left, the Dimebag thing was bad, it's not just me." (Dean's relationship with the late Dimebag Darrell's estate, and Megadeth's Dave Mustaine leaving the brand, were both widely reported separately from Batio's own exit.) He moved his signature partnership to Sawtooth Guitars in 2021.

Sawtooth Guitars announced its Michael Angelo Batio signature partnership in 2021: the 24-fret ST-M24 series (available in Satin White with a Floyd Rose, Satin Black with a hardtail bridge, and Primal Red with a Floyd Rose), plus a limited-edition, 50-piece production run of his Double-Guitar format, built from two sycamore-bodied T-style guitars, one left-handed and one right-handed, joined at the lower bouts and detachable for travel. Sawtooth's own product page calls the M24 series "the best value 24 fret guitars on the market today."

Batio's own YouTube channel description is unambiguous about where things stand now: "I exclusively use Sawtooth Guitars & Amps." It's the same shape as his Dean years, an exclusive brand relationship built around signature models and touring gear, just with a new manufacturer since 2021.

Manowar announced on September 2, 2022 that Batio would join the band for their 2023 world tour, becoming the band's touring guitarist alongside co-founder and bassist Joey DeMaio, vocalist Eric Adams, and drummer Dave Chedrick. In a February 2026 Guitar World feature, Batio described the fit in his own words: "I've been a member for four and a half years now," playing a rig "custom-made and designed by Joey DeMaio" in front of arena crowds averaging around 15,000 people, a scale well beyond anything Nitro or his solo shows reached.

The next stop is Manowar's Kings of Metal Fighting the World Tour, a 2027-dated arena run being confirmed city by city since a November 2025 announcement, with dates including Istanbul's Kucukciftlik Park on July 31, 2027. For a guitarist whose career has run through a one-album 1980s band, a polarizing glam-metal act, three decades as a solo instrumentalist and clinician, and two different signature-guitar partnerships, Manowar is, in his own words, a genuine late-career high point: "I've never been afraid to try something new or make a change when I felt it was necessary."

Batio has also kept a foot in mainstream rock outside Manowar: he's made guest appearances with Smashing Pumpkins, including a set at Chicago's Riot Fest in front of roughly 40,000 people and a show at Milwaukee's Fiserv Forum, where Billy Corgan famously caught Batio's wireless belt-pack transmitter as it fell off mid-solo.

No public string brand or gauge is documented for Batio, and we would rather say that plainly than guess. What is documented, and genuinely strings-adjacent, is his own invention: the MAB String Dampener, built to solve a real problem his own Double Guitar created on stage.

Batio's official channel, @MichaelAngeloBatioOfficial (the same channel formerly listed as youtube.com/user/MACEMusicInc), is where most of his instructional and performance content lives. In his own words, on the channel's About page: "I offer everything from play-throughs to my own renditions and tributes of songs, to beginner lessons for those of you who are new to the instrument, to some of the most advanced guitar lessons you can find." Well-known uploads include his Double Guitar and Quad Guitar performance clips and full-length lesson breakdowns of his own instructional catalog. It's also where he's posted appearances alongside other players, including a filmed shred session with DragonForce's Herman Li.