My Guitars
I bought my first guitar after I seen the concert of Pink Floyd in Venice.
It was in 1989 if I remember well. I like playing very much, despite the fact that I'm really not much a good player!
Here's my guitar equipment:
Guitars
My first guitar. It was built around 1973, so it's a vintage guitar!
Unlike most acoustic guitars, it had stock .009 strings (with three plain strings, not two). It's not a folk. Pretty small body (a little smaller than a classic guitar). Vintage bluesy tone. I love it because I can bend over one tone by pulling strings.
It has a metal first fret (a real fret just under the nut), an uncommon solution found on old Italian acoustic guitars, also known as "zero fret". In April 1991, however, Manne built the GM model, that was a semiacoustic, hollow body guitar and it had the zero fret. The current Manne Semiacustica, does not have it anymore.
The bridge is arched. The fretboard is flat, not rounded.
My first electric guitar. Black plywood body and maple neck (the wood of the neck is very nice, with fine straight veins, but the headstock is not one piece, it has a little piece of wood glued). Single layer white pickguard. 21 vintage frets. Korean. The neck is nitrocellulose lacquer finished. 5-way switch.
The pickups, three single coils, are wired the vintage way, with the tone controls that not work with the bridge pickup.
Commonly bashed, this guitar is not bad at all and I think that for the price you cannot find much better. People judges it wrong because they compare it to original USA Fender axes (witch costs way more!).
I must say, however, that the acutual Squier production (not Fender Squier which are still Korean) are crafted in Indonesia, and the quality is much less than old Korean Squiers.
Here's some users impressions.
This is my best guitar, made in April 1998.
The body is mahogany whit flame maple top. The neck is two pieces maple with fingerboard in F-resin. Inside the neck, aside the truss rod, there are two fiberglass bar to reinforce the neck. Gotoh Floyd Rose double locking tremolo bridge and Manne (Gotoh) machines wich are vintage style (oval). The hardware is black.
.
The pickups are:
Manne Lead Humbucker (bridge)
Manne Silky Edge Single (mid)
Manne Vintage Humbucker (neck)
The humbuckers are ring mounted while the single is direct mounted. They are very quite and weather resistant pickups since they are double aluminum-copper shielded, and waxed with epossydic resin.
The color is quite difficult to explain, something between Brown and Red, darker on the back of the body (since is mahogany) and is slightly sunburst on top and headstock, while the back of the neck is blonde amber with smooth shading to the darker body and headstock. The color is transparent to see the amazing wood veins of the flame maple top. The surface finish is opaque.
24 Dunlop 6110 jumbo frets. The neck section is asymmetric (more curved on the bottom back and less on the top back, following the natural shape of the hand). In addition I requested a custom rounding in the neck-fingerboard boundaries.
Manne nickel plated steel wound .009 strings.
Controls are:
Volume
Push-pull tone (to split the humbuckers)
5 position Shaller PowerSwitch.
The wiring of the pickups is custom (Mr. Manne kindly made the possible to fulfill my desires!)
The guitar is hand crafted by Manne in Schio (Vicenza Italy) and is simply fantastic!
The construction is top level quality and the shape is very cool (this is matter of taste, however!).
Connected to an amp this axe performs a big, warm and fat sound. The humbuckers are quite different in tone: sweeter and darker the Vintage (neck) and a little more powerful and bright the Lead (bridge) with less mids. The first is a jazz pickup that do his best played clean. The tone is sweet, very smooth but with a nice amount of high end. A little nasal, overdriven is nice, but tend to be too much low end when the larger strings are played. The bridge humbucker is a rock pickup, that sounds better overdriven than clean (like almost all bridge humbuckers, I think!). Not too bright, it's very versatile, and can handle well different styles, doing his better in the progressive rock area. In extremely high gain usage, you could wish a little sharper character, since pickups for this style are generally pretty mid scooped. You can get it around with a little eq tweaking.
I'm extremely satisfied with this guitar, it plenty matches my taste and it's even better than I expected (since before ordering I tried a Manne Bolty SSHF with Alder body and it sounded good but not as good as mine!)
I get it used because I needed a guitar to tune in D.
It's black and mounts two Infinity humbuckers, INF1 and INF2. The bridge is a LO-TRS II.
Chrome hardware.
I found it for a very good price and I'm happy with it. the Wizard II neck is very nice and it's easy to reach the upper frets with the All Access joint.
It stays in tune very well too, nothing to complain. The bridge pickup is nice
but the neck one is little convincing to me, but I have it for too little time to judge it properly. Unlike the RG 420 and RG 320 I found it has a three position switch instead of the more common 5 position.
In the middle position the two humbuckers are wired splitted and in parallel.
I sold it.
I found this guitar at a very nice price and I bought it.
Mine is slight different from the one sold today. It has a creamy pickguard and the plastic pickup holders are creamy too instead of black.
I liked the shape of the guitar but the stock pickups (AH1 and AH2) are not of my taste. Nice and warm clean at with a little gain, but at high gain they start to squeal like a pig.
The guitar, as any other model when the strap is fixed near the neck bolts, is unbalanced and the neck tend to go down.
I sold it.
I bought this guitar new to substitute the RG 420. I use it flat tuned in D.
It's a very nice guitar and I was very luky to find one new 'cos Ibanez discontinued the model.
Mahogany body with quilted Sapele top, Ibanez V7 and V8 pickups, Cosmo Black chrome hardware, Ibanez Edge tremolo, SuperWizard neck with Bubbinga strip.
The pickups are ring mounted.
Amplifiers
My first amp. It is a solid state jazz amplifier. Pretty loud, the dirty channel were too weak so I sold it.
This is my current amp. I like it very much! It has a tube pre for nice
"Marshall" overdrive. Small enough to use it at home and powerful enough to play with the drummer.
Here's some users impressions.
I bought this rack mounted stereo power amp to leave it where I play with my band.
Pretty powerful and very nice tone. It mates perfectly with my Rocktron VooDu Valve On-Line.
Preamps and Effects
Hand Made Stuff
I built a distorsor, a compressor, an overdrive and a wah-wah from
projects from electronic magazines but this crap doesn't work very well... :)
This little black box has several effects into and it was nice for years. Now I sold it.
Here's some users impressions.
This rack mounted guitar effect processor is nice and it was the best on his price range. Now it's discontinued. Take a look at my BOSS GX-700 Page!
I tried this preamp some years ago and found it very nice.
But it was too expensive.
Recently I found one used at a very good price so I bought it and now it takes the place of the GX-700 in my rack.
It's a nice nice piece of gear, the best preamp I tried so far.
Good tube distortion with hi quality 24 bit DSP effects. Unlike other preamps you have the feel of a real tube head, not digital modeling.
I'm extremly happy with it and it could be my definitive preamp.
Speaker cabinets
I bought a couple of this 1 x 12 closed back bass reflex speaker cabinets to leave it where I play with my band.
Pretty light but solid it sounds very well and can handle 75 Watt. I didn't need the built in speaker emulator but since I found it at the same price as
the S-112 I took this.
I'm very satisfied with the sound, it has exceptional bass response for a 1 x 12 speaker. This because of his trapezoid closed back bass reflex cabinet structure (I guess).
Rocktron have discontinued the SE-112 and now the closest cabinet is the Velocity S-112
Sequencers
I bought this handheld portable sequencer (with incorporated expander) to compose music.
It's just fantastic! 519 sounds with 20 drumkits of XG sound quality and a very capable and easy to use sequencer in a compact box with built in display!
I don't use it anymore and I'm trying to sell it.
Home > Guitars > My Guitars
This page hosted by
Get your own Free HomePage