Michael Angelo Batio's Manowar comeback: inside the Kings of Metal Fighting the World Tour

Manowar is heading back out. The band has started confirming dates for its next arena run, Kings of Metal Fighting the World Tour, a 2027-dated run that has been adding cities on a rolling basis since its November 2025 announcement rather than arriving as a single all-at-once schedule. One confirmed date: Istanbul's Kucukciftlik Park on July 31, 2027, with tickets on sale from May 25, 2026 (Manowar). Expect more cities to land on the schedule as 2027 approaches.

The guitarist behind Joey DeMaio and Eric Adams for this run is Michael Angelo Batio, and if that name rings a bell from a completely different corner of the guitar world, it should. He is the instrumental shred pioneer who invented the twin-neck Double Guitar and the four-neck Quad Guitar in the 1980s, sold a generation of players on his Speed Kills instructional videos, and spent three decades as Dean Guitars' signature artist before a very public parting of ways. Manowar is not a comeback in the sense of a hiatus. It is a second act, on a bigger stage than anything in his own solo catalog.

Batio joined Manowar in September 2022, announced for the band's 2023 world tour, and by his own account has settled into the role. "I've been a member for four and a half years now," he told Guitar World in February 2026, describing arena crowds "like, 15,000 people" and a rig "custom-made and designed by Joey DeMaio." That is a different scale than anything Batio built on his own: Nitro topped out around number 140 on the Billboard 200, and his solo shows, while genuinely global (he has toured more than 60 countries by his own count), were built on clinics and mid-size venues, not arena stages.

It is also, in his telling, a settled, happy place after a career that zigzagged through two major-label bands, three decades of independent solo releases, and two different signature-guitar deals. "I've never been afraid to try something new or make a change when I felt it was necessary," he has said. When Guitar World asked in June 2026 whether he might ever reunite Nitro, the band that made him a name in the first place, his answer was short: "No, no. I play in Manowar now, and I'm happy."

Before Manowar, Batio's calling card was invention. He built the Double Guitar, a V-shaped twin-neck instrument he can play both-handed at once because he is ambidextrous, then went further with the four-neck Quad Guitar, built by luthier Wayne Charvel after a label executive dared him to top Steve Vai's three-neck guitar: "Steve's got three necks and you have two. You know what you need?" Batio's answer: "Four." He debuted it in the video for Nitro's "Freight Train" in 1989, and the original was stolen in El Paso, Texas, after the second show of that tour, only for two of its four necks to resurface in November 2004 when a young fan brought them to one of his shows.

That's the short version of a career that runs from a one-album Chicago band called Holland, through Nitro's extreme glam metal, through founding his own record label, M.A.C.E. Music, in 1993, into decades as a globally touring instrumental artist and guitar clinician. We go deep on the whole arc, including the parts that don't get repeated in every press bio, in our full sourced profile on Michael Angelo Batio.

The other current story is a brand change. Batio was Dean Guitars' exclusive signature artist for roughly three decades, releasing more than a dozen models, most recognizably the graphics-heavy Armor Flame series. That ended: per Ultimate Guitar, Batio has said he left over how Dean's newer ownership treated its artists, drawing a direct line to Dave Mustaine's own departure from the brand and to how the company handled its relationship with the late Dimebag Darrell's estate. "Dave Mustaine left, the Dimebag thing was bad, it's not just me," he said.

He moved his signature partnership to Sawtooth Guitars in 2021: a 24-fret ST-M24 series and a 50-piece limited-edition run of his Double-Guitar format (Premier Guitar). His own YouTube channel description leaves no ambiguity about where things stand today: "I exclusively use Sawtooth Guitars & Amps."

The one piece of his own gear that is genuinely strings-adjacent is the MAB String Dampener, a spring-loaded mute he invented to kill the feedback his twin-neck playing produces live. ChromaCast now manufactures the signature version.

Michael Angelo Batio Approved

ChromaCast

Michael Angelo Batio Signature String Dampener

Price tier: $

Why this one: Batio's own signature invention, built to stop feedback and unwanted ringing when playing two guitar necks at once. Works on any 6, 7, or 12-string electric or acoustic.

E StandardMetalHard rock

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Batio's official channel, @MichaelAngeloBatioOfficial, carries the bulk of his video output: decades of instructional lessons at every skill level, play-throughs, and the Double Guitar and Quad Guitar performance clips that made him a fixture on guitar-focused corners of the internet long before "shred content" was a category. In his own words, from the channel's About page: "Whether you've been playing for 5 minutes or 25 years, there is something for you on this channel." It is also where he has occasionally teamed up with other well-known players, including a filmed shred session with DragonForce's Herman Li.