Whenever I check in at the Coffee House I start at the bottom and work my way up (so I don't miss anything
unfunny important). Just getting to this one! First of all, I'm glad that the guitar arrived ok! The backstory isn't all that exciting, but here goes...
When Line 6 Variaxes were new and seemed interesting the main complaint that those of us who were "first adopters" had was with the quality of the guitar the electronics were housed in. At the time there were only one or two people putting the electronics into worthy instruments and Jeff Miller was one of them. I ended up helping Jeff on six songs of a CD he was putting out and he offered to put my Variax electronics into one of his custom guitars at a VERY attractive price. Well, this guitar was going to be an S/S/H so I sent him the pickups I wanted. About half-way through he emailed me very disappointed in himself because he had gone and routed the guitar as an H/H (he was going to shelve it and restart another to get it right for me). Instead, I sent him a couple of different humbuckers and the Raspberry Twist was the result (Raspberry because he wanted to see if he could match the PRS color and Twist because of the Variax guts).
This led to the creation of a second guitar (the Gaudy Paul) and it was his idea to see just how exotic he could make a guitar. Since I was getting these made at pretty much the cost of the parts (albeit not cheap by any means!), I let him do what he wanted after just a few requirements. Unfortunately, one of those requirements was the desire for a Sustainer. At the time I didn't know just how crappy both the Sustainer and Fernades' customer service were (or that the Sustainer was just an old, licensed version of a Sustainiac). Ironically, this meant that the original pickups had to be put aside again since you HAD to use the ones that came with the Sustainer. Needless to say, not long after receiving the guitar, it became apparent that the Sustainer had to go so I put in
different pickups and now had a couple of extra switches sitting there doing nothing. Next up was to add the Super Strat 5-way switch, the Fat-O for Fatties knob and some custom electronics which allow it to have all those 24 different tones (hope you pulled out the manilla envelope with the laminated sheet in it!). Of course there's now an unused battery well in the back but it works well for holding extra picks.
The funniest part is that, after all this, the original pickups are STILL sitting in Jeff's workshop so (and I must be the luckiest guy in the world) I've got yet another beautiful custom being built which will finally use those pickups.
A couple of things that I learned out of all this is that Sustainiac has wonderful customer service and they also have a clip-on product which can be used on multiple guitars without requiring installation into the guitar itself. Maybe not usable live, but perfect for what I will use it for.
