[FrankHudson]

I'm no expert on guitar marketing, so I'll mostly leave that to folks who know more about that. Speaking generally, most "new ideas" fail, it's not just new guitar ideas.

The guitar that this is most reminiscent of to me is the late Sixties Dan Armstrong Lucite guitar, which was originally sold with the idea that one could easily drop in various modular pickups.

Even further back, Leo Fender had modular ideas for serviceability and ease of manufacture decades before that. Have a problem with your neck? Here, screw a new one on. Or how about the Strat all the electronics on the control plate except for the output jack idea? What Leo probably didn't plan is that over the decades that serviceability idea became a huge platform for mods and aftermarket parts.

Of course the modularity concept only works to the maximum after it succeeds in the marketplace so that a wide variety of parts is assured. If Dan Armstrong had sold tens of thousands of guitars, many of us would assume in an alternate time-line that trying out a new pickup would be easier than trying a new set of strings.

As the owner of a JTV era Variax, I'd have to say it's not a bad guitar just as a guitar. The modeling of various guitars is middling* at best in my experience, but the instant open tunings are super neat.


*How much of this is psychological? I can't say, When I play my Gretsch I feel like I'm playing a different instrument, same with a Les Paul, or Stratocaster. Some of that is just acting in costume, some of that may related to physical attributes of the guitar (how easily can one induce feedback, where are the volume and tone controls, what kind of bridge does it have). That probably makes me play differently and hear what I play differently. When I turn the dial on the Variax between models no such different object is in my hands. It looks like the linked guitar tries to imitate some of the physical layout to mitigate this.