Complete option paralysis guitar

I mean, that's kinda cool, but not all that complicated. Really just Les Paul with a piezo bridge, sustainer, and hex output for your Roland MIDI rig. For standard guitar sounds there's still only three options and an active tone control. In fact, the sustainer will defeat the neck pickup, so when it's on you've got one magnetic pickup and some tone control.

It would be a lot more flexible if they had series/parallel/split options for each of the pickups. Add a series/parallel switch between the two mag pickups and maybe a phase switch. I guess I'm not completely sure if the Fernandez system would support either of the S/P options, but...
 
ashcat_lt said:
Really just Les Paul with a piezo bridge, sustainer, and hex output for your Roland MIDI rig. For standard guitar sounds there's still only three options and an active tone control.
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So actually nothing like a Les Paul then other than the fact it has frets and strings.

I can just see myself spending ages messing about with it achieving nothing and they ultimately just using the bridge pick most of the time and the sustainer when I'm feeling moody. I came fairly close to getting a Fernandes with a sustainer at one point before I got my tele.
 
The switching for the magnetic pickups is exactly the same as an LP, or even a Tele. You get Neck/Both in parallel/Bridge, and that's it.

The rest kind of does what it does. I think you'd find the piezo to be fun for a couple of minutes and then realize that it sounds worse even than a cheesy Ovation and never touch it again. The MIDI thing is huge, and you might get lost for a couple days walking through all the presets in whatever brain you connect it to, but after that you'd only use it when you had something specific in mind.

Overall, I think this is one of those instruments that you would have built in order to meet your specific requirements, and I feel like it's more oriented toward a live performance situation where the guitarist has to cover most if not all of the instrumental duties. At that point, you kind of know what you're going to need for each song or whatever. Flip those two switches and turn that knob a little bit and move on.
 
I just don't think I have any need for anything like that - I'm glad that I didn't but that Fernandes now too. It was 200 quid more than my tele but no better than it other than it had this thing in the neck position. It also had a one of them hideous paint jobs with crazy binding.
 
Those magnetic sustainers are cool, but The fact that it only ever works with one pickup selection on one guitar makes it pretty much useless to me. A series/parallel/split switch for the bridge pickup would at least give you some options, but it's still a pretty limited pallet. Considering that a lot of the "violin" type stuff you might use it for would probably sound better through the neck pickup...

Edit to add - Used as designed, the mag pickups on this are always buffered. You'd get the output to your pedals/amp from the MIDI brain, and your fancy boutique fuzzface clone will sound like complete ass.
 
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