Leaderboard

I actually have a close friend with serious musical chops that had a local finish guy knock back the finish on his Gibson 1956 Reissue Les Paul, and on his 1959 Reissue Les Paul. I personally thought it was a mistake when he sent them off. But the guy did a great job on them, and they actually look better, and more importantly, feel better to play (less plastically feeling for lack of a better term.) Both of these guitars have pretty microphonic pickups (Throbaks in both), and he swears the guitars sound more resonant.

Yeah...I think you're looking at diminishing returns on that. You might be better off hooking an oxygen mask up to it

This sounds like an easy way to ruin a nice guitar.

Frankie's rockin' that thing! I guess he's not so "country" anymore.

Yeah but I can live with those compromises. And my response was to your statement there are NO consequences of the Fractal. In the real world there are plenty! I can't deal with menus on digital units where I have to reset my FX to the venue, and I play in a ridiculous amount of different venues a year, and in the venues where we get a soundcheck, the room totally changes when all the bodies get there. On my pedal board I change everything I need in under a minute or two, and if one pedal goes down, I can still use all the other FX, if a digital modeler, preamp/FX unit goes down,you lose all the FX. And a backup unit would be too expensive ($700 for the cheapest VP4). Although I love having a few gain/drive pedals along with the Origin FX Revival Drive on my board, the only FX I really need are volume pedal, tuner, trem and delay, everything else I can cover from my amps. And before you think I'm a luddite who doesn't know his way around technology, I've owned a recording studio most of my adult life, with the last 20 years being computer based, so I've programmed more pieces of menu driven gear and software than most people will do in a lifetime of gigging. I recorded plenty of songs, (with amp and FX plug-ins) where there were no amps in the room or pedal boards, but I will still take a pedal board (with as many analog FX as possible) everytime, and a killer tube amp! That said, I've seen many people use Fractals/Kempers/etc and they sounded just fine, so there are many ways to skin a cat so to say, I just prefer my way! BTW I do have a compromise board where I use an HX stomp to program all the 'verbs/delays, and modulation FX..

Any piece of equipment has compromises. Take it out on a stage a few hundered times a year and you'll find them

Does this mean I can play my Hello Kitty guitar without fear of ridicule or guitar shaming?