Vestax

TAKANAKA played Vestax GV-IIF only a few years.

As you see in One Night Gig and The Party's Just Begun DVDs, the see-through blue GV-IIFs really looked great and attractive on the stage. He used it extensively in Gaps!, Nail The Pocket and Ballade for both recording and tour. (Fade To Blue's art work also shows beautiful GV-IIF but it was not used).

The model TAKANAKA owned is GV-IIF. It was stock production model which has the following feature.

    Maple set neck with down slope head
    Ebony fretboard
    Vestax original VX-1 active PUs (SSH) with one volume and two tone controls (boost/cut +-12dB)
    Five position selector switch and a coil topping switch
    GOTO peg, nut and bridge (Floyd Rose licensed) in gold
    Semi hollow body with deep curved figured maple top and Honduras mahogany back

GV-IIF naturally produces extremely clear tone and is amazingly responsive to player. The down slope head and semi hollow body - there are two hidden chambers inside of the body - helps to produce incredible long sustain from the thin and light body. Rectangle inlays are located only on 5, 9 and 12 frets with angle which came from an idea of preventing strings from touching them while player is working on those frets. PUs gives player great sound variation. Font or mid PUs have decent power as a single coil PU but is not powerful as the rear Humbucker. However because of its thin and the semi hollow body construction, humbuckering sound is not so heavy. Selecting 2nd or 4th position produces cute half tone. Overall, the beauty of tone lays especially in mid to high end range.

About Vestax guitars

Vestax guitars, even in Japan, are very rare. Vestax Corp has been famous with DJ equipments for long time but they used to produced guitars, basses and effecters through late 80's to early in 90's.

Due to no major distribution channel it was really hard to find Vestax guitars at local guitar shops except a factory direct show/repair room in Tokyo and a shop called Paco where they dedicated to sell Vestax products.

There is no serial number nor anything like that to identify the production date of GV-IIF. It is said that early GV-II had gray "Vestax" logo printed on PUs and has different toggle switch. Later model had gold "Vestax" logo. Since they were almost like hand crafted guitars, it is not surprising if there were minor differences in specification.

GV-I
GV-II had a predecessor. Compared with GV-II, GV-I had less significant curbed top body (or it even did not have curbed top). I saw one in person, which was blue color and had SSH without Floyd Rose type tremolo, IIRC.

GV-II
GV-II had variants. GV-IIF is one of them and is the most popular GV-II since TAKANAKA and several other famous musicians were featuring. F denotes Floyd Rose. There were standard or lacquer painted GV-IIF. No other significant feature difference between them, except pricing. Passive PUs with non tremolo bridge version was lined up at the same time. That one did not come with matching head (head was painted black).There was also a detachable neck version but it was not regular model. With special inray and/or PUs were alson seen. Since GV-IIs were not mass-production model, it seems there were a few specially ordered.

Sometime in '90 several Lemmon Yellow GV-IIF were built for Nail The Pocket tour. The yellow was not see-through. The significant difference was single coil type humbucker PU on the front - which was request from TAKANAKA who wanted more fat and heavy sound on the front. Those were produced by Paco.

GV-IIFT
Takanaka 20th Anniversary model produced in 91. There were some cosmetic difference - 20th logo on the head and "xx" fingerboard inlays to indicates 20th.

GV-IIF 92
When we say Takanaka model, this is the one. The main difference is tree-of-life inlay down the neck. The body was painted blue sunburst which they called "Fade to blue". Vestax said this would be for 92 Fade To Blue tour but TAKANAKA unfortunately switched to other guitars that year.

GV-IIA
They produced GV-II with Alembic PUs. It was SSH active pickups with one volume and one tone control. Bridge was Wilkinson. They claimed sustain became better with that change.

GV-IIW
EMG PU model came out. Pickup layout was still SSH. Bridge was Wilkinson. Position mark was changed to standard dot style.

GV-98
This model was almost identical to GV-IIW except the head shape.

GV-1999
Paco announced they would build twenty of GV-IIF re-issue model which was based on the design of early GV-IIF, which Takanaka owns.

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