http://www.fender.com/products//search. ... 0117502700

Why?

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If guitars were cocaine I’d be John Belushi.

Its too expensive in my own opinion, and it flopped. Most of us are quite traditional and some would much rather have a modelling amp

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When you think about it, it must have flopped real bad.

Imagine the cost of R&D on a project like that. The Company would want to recoup that expenditure if at all possible. Even a few sales would surely be better than none.

So if the guitar isn't even selling well enough to make it worth the cost of warehousing and such, well - wow.

The only faint possibility is that it has been withdrawn because something better is in the pipeline. But that seems unlikely: wouldn't you run one model till the new one was ready to take over?

'Fraid it shows what a traditionalist, conservative minded lot we all are...

Cheers - C

Yes,and those precious few that like Fender doing new and untraditional things are probably flat broke foks like me who can't afford to support new ideas by making a purchase. Sucks,doesn't it?

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If guitars were cocaine I’d be John Belushi.

I saw one of these at my local guitar shop and decided to try it out, and frankly it felt extremely cheap for the listed price.

The build quality was sub par to say the least

The neck felt like a log, like they just cut down the tree and slapped it on the body

The roland synth is a good unit but mixed with the strat it sounded really cheezy, for a synth that does what a modeling amp or effects pedals would do it just doesn't sound right.

My 2 cents, I know I wouldn't buy one

You can almost buy two Strats for the price of one VG lol

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Ceri: You know, I had exactly the other reaction when I first saw the VG. I figured the R&D on that was dirt cheap.

Look at it this way... the guitar exists. The hex pickup exists. All you need is some modeling software... the pitch shifting stuff is practically written for you, so you come up with, what? Three or four voices? Store it on a chip and you're done.

I agree that it's being discontinued because people didn't buy them. But I think they just took a guess about the market was wasn't accurate: The VG's feature set was aimed at gigging players working in fast-paced shows. There just aren't enough guys who fit that description, and the ones that do exist have a lot of options for achieving their goals.... something like the VG would have to be "insanely great" to gain a solid purchase.

Maybe it might've had more success if it were MIM- you're right, the technology existed, it's nothing new... so why the high price tag? I think it could've broken into a market if the price were lower, lets say Road Worn territory. whats even more funny is Gibson coming up with a les paul that tunes itself- I bet they must be formally managing there RD dept.

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gibson came up with that guitar a few years ago. its called the Robot Guitar. it tunes itself, and even tells you how much to adjust your intonation.

The new Gibson guitar is called Dark Fire. it is a true virtual guitar. I don't feel like listing all its features, so here is a link to Gibson's page on it. http://www2.gibson.com/Products/Electri ... tures.aspx

I don't really want to preach Gibson here, cause I really don't like most Gibson guitars, but I think that they are going to be running the market when it comes to virtual guitars.

Mmm. I suspect there's more to it than that.

Sure, it's built on an existing platform, so it ain't a ground up project. But I'm just thinking about the time it takes to come up with all the mundane bits: the VG pickup, the special pots - all the little bits and pieces. Even the software aspects: from what I've seen that stuff always takes vastly longer in man hours than you ever think possible at the beginning.

And all at the hourly rates of the better paid employees. And knowing big companies, endless meetings to consider and approve every step too.

For sure they weren't building a new space shuttle or anything. But I bet there's hundreds upon hundreds of expensive man hours tied up in that thing. Fender's a big company - but it ain't that big that a project like the VG is just a casual toe in the water to see what happens.

I bet the price tag is surprisingly more than most of us on the outside would suppose. Gotta shift plenty of units to cover it. I'm guessing it's been a painful flop for them...

Cheers - C

Ceri, I'm not saying VG R&D was free. (Hey, that's like a poem.) Just that it was hardly ground-up engineering. I saw it as a collection of existing tech, so while it does seem a floperoo, I'd wager it's not a huge writedown for Fender, or Roland, for that matter.

Sure. I don't think we're really disagreeing much here.

I'm just reflecting on the glimpses I've had into the workings of large-ish companies. Seems to take SO MUCH effort to make the tiniest thing happen. Meetings, meetings about meetings, scheduling, budgets, meetings to approve budgets, liason between departments - yadda yadda yadda... The agony of it all!

And all of that seems to get magnified in multiples when more than one company is involved.

The VG even has its own little website:

http://www.fender.com/vgstrat/home.html

Brad could (but I'm sure won't) tell us how much time went into that. More than we think, from what I've seen of IT. And someone had to approve that time and money. And liase with Brad's department.

And hire Greg Koch to do all that promo work. And hire a video crew. And. And...

...Someone came up with the idea for the VG. I guess a big part of the politics of all those management meetings is that guy getting repeated approval for the project, so everyone shares in the blame, not just him...

Sometimes the words "self-employed" are a blessed relief!

Cheers - C

Roland has been making synth access for guitars for years every decernable type has already been produced the incorporation into a fender would be pretty much seemless, the only excessive work that needed to be done the retrofit so that the hardware doesn't look to outlandish on a strat as it does with most of their other synth systems.

That being said re-designing housing and aesthetic apeal does take a long time and as mentioned big corportation like to have meetings to see if the designer is allowed to scratch his $@!, so in a way Fender killed the system through administration before the market killed it. In my experiance in design a job like this should only take a couple months to generate a prototype. But the process gets dragged out looking for the "BEST" solution which is impossible to find and then they end up releasing a prototype that is inferior to the original, because they blew their budget developing new prototypes and can't afford to put the good prototype to market.

As for Gibson's dark fire, it's a les paul with a p90 a humbucker and a piezio bridge, along with some tone modeling computer software, hardly what it takes to dominate the virtual guitar experiance.

Godin has been making Synth access guitars that truely give the whole range in tonal capabilities.

The true masters in this field are line6 their variax instruments appeared way before the VG and appealed to a certain type of user. Not guitarists, home recording multi-instrument players. C'mon who among us would want one guitar that can do an approximation of all when you can aspire to get fourteen and really cover your bases. The people the variax appealed to it suited perfectly, right price, no frills for what it is, reliable tool. From £350 up to £800 odd depending on model.

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No no and no