cool

want

thanks

Very cool--love the 12 strings, and the dogs...

I found the video interesting. One thing I've noticed in a lot of the vids of the Tyler Vax's (this and the vids from the German music show) is the heavy use of distortion sounds in demonstrating the instruments. They sound good, but in my opinon, you can't really hear the guitar itself to compare the different models unless you hear it more clean.

I have the lowly Vax 300, for about 4 or so years -- and the thing it showed me most was while it is versatile, the quality of the physical guitar is just "ok" at best. I've been a lifelong Fender player -- my first good guitar was a 1973 Tele Deluxe -- still have it 37 years later, and a 1978 Strat I bought used in the early 80's. Love 'em both, but the vax got me thinking about the LP style guitars (the Tele Deluxe was Fender's stab at that world way back then). I was impressed with the overall sound of the HB's and LP sound on the Vax 300, so I went out looking. As a result, I got an Epiphone LP Classic that just felt and sounded "right". The quality of the build of the Epi was quite a bit above the Vax 300 -- sustain, looks, setup, intonation -- everything. As of late, I've had "Gibson envy" and have been looking at the Gibsons again, but am usually stopped short of buying because at 4 times the cost of my Epi, it sounds and plays nowhere close to 4 times as good... I'm a weekender, not a full time pro, so I have a hard time justifying the extra cost just to have the "name". The Epi was made in China, and I was frankly very surprised by the quality of the build. I currently use the Epi LP as may main guitar and use the Vax 300 for special needs of a song like odd tunings, 12 string bits, etc. (about 4 or 5 songs out of a 50 - 60 song set).

My point is, at the cost point of the Tyler Vax production line made in Korea, they are at about the level of a Gibson LP Studio model -- closer to my upper end zone of comfort. The $3000 or $4000 models, are way out of my zone, so won't even be tempting. If the pups are somewhat lacking, they should be fairly easily replaceable with Duncans or whatever brand trips your trigger, and if the "Gotoh-style" tuners are lacking in quality, I'd change 'em as they are really a minor part of the cost at this point. I changed the "Grover-like" "kidney-bean shaped" tuners on the Epi LP to Gibson Modern (all nickel tulip styled) not because the original tuner's were bad, but because I liked the look of the Gibson's better.... It cost me ~$60 to change 'em. Haven't had the need to change the pups, as they sound fine, though I don't rule it out in the future -- tops it would run a couple hundred bucks -- again a relative low cost level, done incrementally...

I like the ability to have real mag pup's along with the Vax modeling technology, a better quality musical instrument, and am hoping the higher processing power of this generation will help out the modeling and lag time of the alt tunings, plus the piezo issues. I'm of course drawn to the LP style 59, but have had a hard time trying to figure out the switching scheme on it as opposed to the strat-ish and shred-ish models which are pretty much stock 5-way switch schemes of the current Vax line and 3-pup strats, etc. I found out through wading through the available vids, where most of the time the demo player is using the strat and shred models, rather than the LP style. I finally found out for the LP type, they're using a standard 3 way pickup switch, for what would be 1-3-5 positions on the standard Vax, then to get the "between positions" 2 and 4, you have to hit one of the lower knobs (I forget which one) and you get what would be positions 2-3-4. Um, it's not a deal breaker for me, yet, but seems it would have been more expedient to simply place a 5-way blade switch in a fairly minor departure from the LP aesthetics for the function of the guitar. The other possibility would be to use or develop a 5-way toggle switch, with 2 axis movement, so the positions would be side to side as well as up and down, so the positions would be:

5

|

2 -- 3 -- 4

|

1

Just a thought....