This is a nice-sounding guitar with a good feel. It is a hollow-body electric with f-holes and a nice warm tone. For traditional jazz playing, this type of guitar gives you that classic sound. I ran across this instrument in Minneapolis during a tour, and fell in love. I plan to use it for some of the tracks on my upcoming album...
I have been playing this guitar since 1988. It is a highly customized version of Casio’s PG380 guitar, built to my specs. Here are some of features:
- Graphite neck
- Individual string dampers
- special pickups (I‘ll have to dig up the info on what pickups they are)
- Built-in synth
- MIDI out
- Vibrato Bar
- We did some special things with the tone and volume knobs (again, I’ll update that info when I find it) One thing I remember is that it has an active preamp with a switch-selectable boost. The gain of the boost is fixed, and is set to compensate for the dynamic difference between tapping and picking. I don’t remember what the gain is, but I think we set it a bit too high anyway. It was like 20 db or something.
- Battery-operated
The built-in synth is great, because it tracks nicely, being that there is no MIDI involved. The data from the tracking circuitry goes directly into the tone generator modules.
Sound Designer Rob Zantay helped me to design some cool sounds for it. Many of the sounds we created were dervied from factory sounds which we warmed up by turning down the modulation on some of the operators. If you’re familiar with FM synthesis, you’ll recognize the word “operator.” Operators are signal generators that can modulate each other in various configurations. FM synthesis uses frequency modulation, whereas in the Casio PG380 phase modulation is used. You get similar sounds to FM, but a bit warmer in my opinion.
In 1988 and 1989 I was an endorser for Casio because they had a line of instruments for professional musicians, and I liked what they were doing. The had a whole line of Phase Modulation synths, the VZ10, VZ10M and the VZ8M. The VZ technology was built in to the PG380 guitar, and you could exchange sounds between the keyboard or rack module and the guitar via memory cards.
Also they had some quality samplers, the FZ10 and the FZ10M
None of the products I am mentioning here are still being produced. It’s too bad they discontinued that line, because I thought they were doing some good things. To this day, the Casio PG380 is the only MIDI guitar I know of with a built-in synth that runs on batteries!