It's back! I am officially listing my 8-string for sale.
This is a fully custom guitar made by Trevor at Vigilant Guitars. He and I did a sustained collaboration to get these specs figured out and I feel pretty certain that this is one in the world.
There are a lot of magnetic-and-piezo double-pickup guitars in the world, but this one is different. It has two separate outputs, kind of like guitars with OBEL systems, but this is different from those, too. If you're wearing the guitar, the top output is for the magnetic pickups, which on this guitar are the Fishman Abasi set. The bottom output is the Ghost piezos. This is a guitar designed to run in stereo with two parallel effects chains, one for each output. So put, say, an octaver and a chorus in the piezo chain, and an overdrive and phaser in the magnetics chain, and run both into stereo delay-verb. You can also play the magnetic pickups dirty and the piezos clean, or you could play the piezos into stereo modulation and get a wet-dry-wet rig. I wanted all of those options at my *hands* instead of tapdancing around one, or two, pedalboards.
The look: this guitar is largely maple and walnut, with a poplar burl top. The stripes on the top are also maple and walnut, and are inspired by the look of old Matsumoku guitars from the 70s. The finish is satin, the fretboard is lacquered maple, the neck is also maple with walnut stripes, and walnut binding.
Note on string gauges: because of the piezo saddles and tuning pegs, you cant go lower than about .072 or maybe .075 on the low end. Current tuning: the guitar is tuned GCFBbDGBE, which is G standard on the bottom (GCFBbDG) and E standard on the top, for easy soloing (DGBE). The middle bit where you have a major third (Bb to D) is weird at first, but allows a lot of cool jazz chord possibilities and it gives you an "open D" chord form right in the middle of the strings (FBbD) which creates cool power chords for heavy music.
Knobs as labeled in photos: the "MK" knob is volume for the Fishmans, but also a pull-killswitch. Pull it and you kill the Fishman signal and can have just piezos. This is great if you want both acoustic and electric sounds together and separately. The Radial acoustic preamps, for example, really work well for giving piezos an acoustic sound, so if you get one of those you can use this killswitch to go from "solo acoustic" to "full band" (magnetics and piezo both).
The "P" knob is piezo volume. It doesn't, to my ear, shut the piezo signal off 100%, but if you're using this guitar to volume-balance say, a clean flanged piezo vs a distorted magnetic signal, which is how I use it, it's an essential knob.
The "TC" knob is the overall tone control but you can also pull it to get the Fishman second voices (what Fishman calls voices 1, 3, and 5 for the Abasi set).
There is also a 3-way toggle, which is usually for piezo and magnetic pickup blending. I don't generally use this because I prefer to use the three knobs to manage the sound and I got this guitar *for* the blending of the piezo and magnetics, but middle position blends, and up is magnetics only. The down position of that toggle gives a faint sound of magnetics but kills the piezos, so I never use toggle down; toggle in the middle is my usual because up and down both kill the piezo signal. Because of that, this guitar is not, repeat not, like a Petrucci mag/piezo guitar, for example.
General specs: 8 string, 24 fret, ash body, poplar burl top with some nice quilting on it too, maple neck with walnut stripes, body stripes of maple and walnut, maple fretboard, multiscale 28"/26.5", 20" radius, small arcade-style kill switch on the lower horn, offset moon-phase inlay on fretboard, Graphtech Ghost piezo system with onboard preamp, Fishman Abasi active pickups, gold hardware, locking tuners and straplocks, TWO outputs (one for the magnetic pickups and a separate one for the piezos), 9v battery for the Ghost preamp, onboard battery pack for the Fishmans (you plug in a USB to charge it).
What I wanted this guitar to solve: I love running in stereo and I was good and tired of A/B boxes and parallel mixers and dual modulation setups and MIDI and having a pedalboard that was as big and complex as a small city.
When I list a thing like this, it often gets me a few messages about trades. I'll read those, but I have some really specific ideas about what I want in an extended-range guitar: I'm into 7-strings, multiscale, carved tops, and pretty quilt maple tops. If that's any of what you've got, let's see.
