Mr M wrote:
Definitely agree with you on that, although the MI Audio Tube Zone is probably the closest I've heard, just not as tight at super-high gain. You tried one before?
No, but I love the way they look - very solid and tanklike.
Speaking of VG, have you tried the VG Strat? Read alot of mixed reviews, so wondering if it's any good.
It's getting mixed reviews from some
users - but I think it's more a case of resistance to the concept rather than problems with the product itself. Most unbiased reviews are good. I spent 20 minutes with one when they came out and I have to say it's streets ahead of the VariAxe. Well thought out to be as usable as possible for a gigging musician, which is where the market for that kind of thing is (at the moment) - the cover musicians who need as much flexibility as possible in one instrument. You don't need special modelling amps, cables or additional software to get the best out of it.
First and foremost, I like that it is a decent guitar rather than just an arbitrary platform for the electronics. The batteries die and you can use it like a normal Strat. Selection is simple and straightforward: Select the guitar type, the 5-way selector gives you five sound variations from that instrument and you can use the detuning knob on any guitar/tone.
Sonically it's good. Is it the same as having a Strat, a Tele, steel and nylon acoustics, a banjo, a couple of downtuned guitars and a 12-string on stage? Of course not - but for many players, the fact that they don't have to carry the aforementioned glut of guitars (or the space on stage for the guitar stands - let's be realistic here), gives it a major advantage.
One problem with it is the power consumption - it chews batteries way too fast to be a reliable performing instrument. No doubt they will address this in future versions though. For the meantime , rechargeable batteries make this manageable.
The other thing I don't like is that these guitars now have built in obsolescence - once someone goes this route, they are going to be "upgrading" every few years when a new and improved model comes out. Good for the manufacturers though - they are no longer in competition with their own older models.
I wanted to start using guitar MIDI live with an AXON, but the latency put me off.
A common complaint. While it can work for precise players like Morse, McLaughlin and Holdsworth, most of us don't want to adapt our playing to the instrument, we want it to adapt to our playing. My approach is to use it for what it
is good at, rather than try make it do the things that it's
not. MIDIguitar is often troublesome for percussive things because of the immediacy of the attack, but where it does excel is for pads and textures. Coincidentally, the "natural" guitar sound itself has a percussive attack, so I usually blend the guitar for the attack and synth for the sustain. Most synth sounds these days are layered anyway, so if you edit the patches to dial out the attack component of the sound and replace it with the natural guitar sound, it gives you the immediacy of instant response and still keeps the synthiness.
