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Demo of the VG Strat from NAMM


Beckman

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Check out Fender's website for their NAMM videos. They have Fender rep Greg Koch playing one and in the first vid he demos some of the different tonal options. It sounded amazingly good when he was playing it. Make sure you check out his other vids though. His performances were incredible as well. Dude is badass.:thu:

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Looks and sounds great! That may be my first American guitar.


Only thing ... 10 Hour battery life? That hurts ... that could become a pain but I guess keeping 4 AAs on a charger at all times will elminate that.

 

 

 

I was thinking of a power supply on my gadget tray and running an extra wire along with my guitar cable to keep the power on.

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I played it. There was some good and bad.


The positive was it played like a real strat. I own 3 variaxs now, and from a playability perspective this is really nice.


But, the digital modeling is nowhere near as good as the variax as well as the software to modify the sounds (workbench). I asked the guy about it and he looked at me funny.


I thought the acoustic was very bad, where the variax pulls off a believable sound.


I'm glad Fender got in the ring with this because I believe in the technology, but it is not better than the Line 6.

 

 

Thanks for that information. I also have a Variax & this guitar has interested me. It's good to hear what another Variax owner thinks about this. Honestly, I'm kind of glad that you didn't say that it trounced the Variax, because I was already trying to figure out my plan for saving up for it.

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I was thinking of a power supply on my gadget tray and running an extra wire along with my guitar cable to keep the power on.

 

 

I don't know why they did not do what Line6 did and made it so you can run a 3 wire jack and power it up????

 

When I usually play my variax I use the network cable into the XT. That way I can control all the guitar changes with the footswitch.

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I don't know why they did not do what Line6 did and made it so you can run a 3 wire jack and power it up????


When I usually play my variax I use the network cable into the XT. That way I can control all the guitar changes with the footswitch.

 

 

Exactly. 95% of the people using it will already be plugged in to something...why not add power to that existing connection? The 10 hour battery life is kind of a bummer.

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There will be a market for it, for people who want a guitar that looks and feels like a Strat, but can do Variax-type things.

For me the lack of AC power and the short battery life (10 hours on "the high voltage batteries you use in digital cameras") makes it a non-starter. On normal alkaline batteries or rechargeables, it sounds like battery life will be very short

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It does seem like a Variax put into a real guitar. I would take an American Strat over the high end Variax any day. Plus without the electronics, its a fully functional strat. This is as good or better than custom made Variax drop ins, or the $10k Adrian Belew Parker with the Variax electronics. Perhaps Fender will develop the platform and integrate this technology into the next generation Cyber-Twin if they chose to come out with another one of those, or perhaps integrate it into future Roland products. I think if you are in the market for a new strat, its cool to have the extra sounds.

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It does seem like a Variax put into a real guitar. I would take an American Strat over the high end Variax any day. Plus without the electronics, its a fully functional strat. This is as good or better than custom made Variax drop ins, or the $10k Adrian Belew Parker with the Variax electronics. Perhaps Fender will develop the platform and integrate this technology into the next generation Cyber-Twin if they chose to come out with another one of those, or perhaps integrate it into future Roland products. I think if you are in the market for a new strat, its cool to have the extra sounds.



Well, it has sort of gone the other way. This was Roland cramming an existing product into the Strat.

The VG system has been around for a good decade or so (with Roland synth's available before that).

So, what they did was cram a tiny bit of one of these...
ROLAND_VG88.jpg
...under a Strat pickguard. Works the same way, uses the Roland midi pickup at the bridge which runs into the mini-synth under the pickguard. It would have been nice to have a midi out so you could have driven more outboard synths.

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During my keyboards period, I had some Roland XP keyboards. Excellent, but absolute bitches in that every onboard button had function under function under function under function. That VG Strat Demo seemed to show at least a couple instances of that on that guitar--pull up, twist this, and push this to the left for this sound and the opposite way for DADGAD.

But I might be wrong--of course.

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im for the digital les paul all the way.

 

 

Vaporware is software or hardware which is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge, either with or without a protracted development cycle. The term implies unwarranted optimism, or sometimes even deception; that is, it may imply that the announcer knows that product development is in too early a stage to support responsible statements about its completion date, feature set, or even feasibility.

 

~wikipedia

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