Vandy | soldguitars

Peavey Vandenberg Series 2

'Vandy'

#00004905

I wanted one of these for well over a decade. Designed by Adrian Vandenberg (who I suppose was most successful in Whitesnake, before buggering his hand up during a hand-stratching excersise). This is VERY similar in design to the Kramer NightSwan, which was designed by Viv Campbell, Adrian's bandmate in Whitesnake at the time. Both have a cool reverse headstock, both have an unusually narrow neck (low string spacing) and both have a short Gibson scale length. Who designed theirs first and who copied? I care not (although I suspect that the NightSwan came first). This one was the bolt-on neck version (with a thick slab of ebony for a fretboard) which is the one that I always wanted most ... there is also a neck-through variant, which, although more expensive, just isn't as cool. Just my opinion. This is a Series 2 model in 'Laser Red', and has the Kahler Spyder trem (the 2720). It also has a pretty low serial number. The trem was, on paper at least, very decent, and should have out-Floyded a Floyd ... pretty much everything was nicely machined, well thought out and adjustable, and spare parts are easy to come by (God knows, i replaced enough bits). However, I ran this one as a hard-tail, and blocked off the trem, in an attempt to sort out the tuning stability The pickups were active EMGs, which suited the guitar really well. Controls were a three-way selector and a volume per pickup, which is odd, but worked great in practice. The micro-tilt neck joint on this caused all sorts of problems when it arrived. I appreciate the idea ... put a bloody big grub screw in the neck cavity so that you can adjust the neck angle without shimming, but in practice it was dreadful, and caused lots of tuning instability. Which I can't tolerate. Once I disabled the stupid micro-tilt, it played really well. The fret-work was superb and the smooth ebony was really nice. I traded this one for my excelent GJ2 ... I had no plans to sell this, but the owner of the GJ2 wanted the Vandy A LOT and made me an offer that I couldn't refuse. Would I have another just like this? Yup, in a heartbeat.

VERY cool guitars.