this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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guitars

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I hadn't seen anything about this anywhere. Looks like it's the Bogner Electronics ST-Pro. A pre-wired pick-guard with a set of programmable pickups, selector, and volume/tone/mode knobs. My opinion was the Strat and Les Paul modes sounded closer to their respective originals than did the Tele or hollowbody modes.

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[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

This is pretty neat, got some really usable tones. Brighter than the actual Les Paul in the head to head, but pretty damn close. Darker than the tele, but also pretty close and nothing a touch of EQ wouldn't level out. It's really cool tech. To me it looks like a deeper version of the variax, which I also always thought was cool. You could drop this in any S shaped guitar with a decent neck and have yourself an arsenal which is where it beats all the old modeling guitars. Also, I like that he said it's an analog signal path (I'd want to take a look at that, but I believe him). I think the coolest thing right now is the marriage of analog signal paths controlled by digital boards. You get all the cool shit that goes with digital equipment (cost, no scratchy pots) with none of the down sides (latency, digital artifacts). So if I were at a guitar show I would enthusiastically try this out.

But! I have to charge it. That's an automatic no from me personally. Today if my pedalboard died I still have an amp I can plug in and a guitar I can play through and I'll still get through my gig. Not so if I have to remember to charge things. Second, I get enough option paralysis with a regular guitar. It's too much for me. I'm at the point in my life where I want a guitar with a single coil and a humbucker and I want to plug it into an EQ then into an amp I enjoy. Finally, and this is very similar to my no battery reasoning, all the electronics inside are a single point of failure. If you moved them into a stomp box so that you'd still have a guitar if something failed on the board.

That said, I really think there's a market for this. It's not my thing except as a cool toy, but one person's cool toy is someone else's tonal juggernaut. Imagine a three piece psychobilly band where you get that cool hollow body rhythm but can throw in a twangy ass tele lead while you're playing your sixth song about Dracula in a row or whatever. I think that would be amazing.

[–] baronvonj@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah there's definitely a place for this in a working situation. But you're right about single point of failure and charging. You could buy two to have a backup, but at $1000 just for the kit ... you can get a good enough guitar and a ToneX for that much.

[–] MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 days ago

I was surprised at how close some of those tones got. Definitely not a replacement for the real deal, but it's still impressive tech.