New guitar! Ventures Strat-style

Just bought a new guitar yesterday to keep me occupied during my year in Seoul. I visited the famous Nagwon Arcade in Jongno, Seoul in the hopes of finding a nice used guitar, or a cheap new guitar I wouldn't miss too much if I had to leave it behind when I go home. While the Arcade was impressive, and there were thousands of guitars there, I did not find what I was looking for until I went outside and visited a very small shop on the second floor of a building across from the subway entrance (#5). The store is called Guitar Muse, and they had a decent selection of used guitars, including some very nice Gibsons and Fenders. Even these premium guitars were reasonably priced. There was a 1980 Gibson Les Paul custom (Black Beauty) for 2.5 million Won (around $2100)

After looking around at the selection, I determined that all of the used guitars were either out of my price range, or not exactly what I was looking for. That's when I saw this beauty hiding between two other guitars on a rack. The brand is "Ventures", a sort of house brand for the store. The guitars were made in China, but they are some of the best quality I have seen in a Chinese guitar. After viewing several incarnations of this model, I determined that there was very little consistency in the construction, set-up, and overall feel of the guitars. One had the wrong strings on it, one had a horribly bowed neck, and the three that I tried all had very different neck thicknesses and profiles. This one was almost perfect. It had a little fret-out on the 15th fret when bending, but the gentleman at the store fixed it for me.

The body is solid maple, with a flamed top, and the neck (also maple) is nice and skinny, and also has a flamed figure to the wood. The frets are made from beefy stainless steel jumbo fret wire, and the inlays are even real mother-of-pearl! The electronics are all functional, though the single-coil pickups are MUCH weaker than the humbucker. The machine heads are vintage Kluson-style in-lines, and they hold tune well, and have very smooth action. Overall, I am very impressed with this axe. I spent the whole afternoon playing it, and it didn't let me down once. It has great tone, especially when driven a bit, and it feels and looks spectacular! The best part: the price. This guitar cost me 150,000 won ($132). Nowhere in North America could you find a guitar of this quality for even close to that price. So if you're in Seoul, or planning on traveling there in the future, be sure to check out Guitar Muse, and keep an eye out for one of these beauties!

Update: Broken Sigma Guitar

Since it appears that this guitar is still not considered garbage by local trash collectors, I have decided to document its slow decay and deterioration through a series of photographs. The chopsticks are gone, but someone has stuffed a twisted clothes hanger inside, and it looks like it's been stepped on. Stay tuned for more tragic updates on the worsening condition of this once-beautiful and still interesting guitar!

Broken Sigma Guitar

A broken Sigma (Martin) guitar I found lying on the street outside my new apartment in Bangbae, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Korea. I guess these are more common here than they are back home in Canada. It's a real shame that this one is beyond repair; I've known a few of these guitars in my time, and they are gorgeous instruments. This is (was?) one of the earlier Korean-made Sigmas, which came into production in the 1980s, when Japanese manufacturing became too expensive to compete in the entry-level market. Made from high quality materials and built to the same specifications as their American cousins, these guitars are renowned for having a fantastic sound, and being able to take a beating (though, apparently, not this one).

Briefcase Pedal Board

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A couple years back, I saw a blog about someone making a pedal board out of an old briefcase, and I decided to make one for myself. I scored the case from the local thrift store for $3.99, and went to work! This is what I came up with. The board has a two-level bottom made from 3/8" plywood, with a slightly lower area on the right to accommodate a wah-wah pedal. All of the wiring connecting the pedals runs neatly underneath the bottom layer, and the entire rig runs on a one-spot power adapter.

Although these are no longer all the same pedals I have on the board, they are, from left to right:
(top row) MXR Smart Gate, MXR Micro Amp, MXR Phase 90
(bottom row) Ibanez DL10 Digital Delay, Ibanez CS9 Stereo Chorus, Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer

(far right) Modified Jim Dunlop GCB95 Crybaby Wah

I have since painted the bottom black to give the whole thing a cleaner look; I will post pics as soon as I have them. Thanks for looking, and feel free to contact me for any advice if you're trying to make one for yourself!

My New Guitar: Peavey HP Special CT

This is my latest guitar, a Peavey HP Special CT. This is one of the finest guitars I've ever played. Along with my Levinson Blade, this guitar is proof that you don't need a Fender, a Gibson, or a PRS to get the highest possible quality in an instrument. This particular guitar is the brainchild of Hartley Peavey, the owner and sole proprietor of the Peavey Musical Instrument Company, and the only guitar to bear his name and signature.

The similarity to the EVH Peavey Wolfgang is no coincidence: while Eddie van Halen had an endorsement deal with Peavey - this guitar could be considered the evolution of the Wolfgang. The body shape is slightly different, but the same woods are used (birdseye maple for the neck, and an alder body with a thick flamed maple cap). The bridge is a solid, well-built Floyd Rose style tremolo that can be set (by means of a movable brass block inside the spring cavity) to down-only or floating.

Although the guitar itself is pretty impressive in many respects, by far the best feature of this axe is the pickups, which are hand-wound humbuckers designed by Hartley Peavey himself. They are splittable as well, by means of push-pull volume and tone pots, although in my opinion they sound much better in humbucker mode. These pickups are extremely high output, and have a clarity I've never heard anywhere else. Unfortunately, they are ONLY available in this guitar (I'd love to take them out and put them in one of my other guitars, but then I'd have no pickups in this one!).

The original retail price for these guitars was almost $3000, which is, I'll admit, a bit steep, especially for a guitar made by a company without a reputation for world-class instruments. And, although this is an exception, the price was too much for most, and very few of these made it to market. Nowadays, you can buy them used for around half that ($1500) on Ebay, in a shop that sells used guitars, or from someone who for whatever reason, actually bought one brand new. For this money, I'd say the HP Special is a great deal and can truly compete with anything in that price range.

My only recommendation for someone looking into purchasing one of these is to try and find one of the later ones that were made without a tremolo system, unless you a) REALLY love whammy bars, and can't live without one, or b) are a professional guitar tech with a ton of experience setting up guitars with Floyd Rose style tremolos. Otherwise, you will have trouble getting the bridge to 'float' properly while still achieving perfect tuning. If you set the guitar to down-only mode, there is an unpleasant 'clunk' noise when the bridge hits the brass stopper, and because of the hotness of the pickups, this can come through your amp when you don't want it to.

Overall, this is a great axe, and a very beautiful one at that. As I said to my wife earlier today, "this guitar doesn't make me miss my other guitars," and that's really saying something!

1982 Rogue Stratocaster copy

Guitars I used to have: 2000 Gibson Les Paul Studio