ESP Guitars goes slightly overboard with a £9K Signature Guitar for Japanese Virtual Holographic Pop Star Hatsune Miku

So surely £9K for a Virtual Persona's Signature Guitar is a somewhat ridiculous proposition despite how good the guitar actually looks. And indeed the guitar is a unique and really interesting sort of mix of a Gibson Firebird and Ibanez Iceman - with a very prettily shaped headstock to boot.

But we're talking PRS Private Stock levels of pricing - without those impossibly rare quilted woods, and not quite enough special details for me to really justify that price point. I actually really like the look and concept of the guitar - but its price is somewhat significantly inflated, and the run somewhat artificially limited to just 39 units.

Beyond the shape and colour here this is a fairly stock guitar in terms of the sum of its parts - with off-the-shelf Gotoh Hardware and Seymour Duncan Pickups. This is high on the artifice scale and I can only see it appealing to an incredibly wealthy Japanese fanboy who would likely just hang it on the wall as artwork / memorabilia!

• Colour : Miku Blue
• Body : Light Ash (45mm thickness)
• Neck : Hard Maple 3-piece
• Fingerboard : Rosewoood, 305R Radius, 25.5" Scale
• Nut : Carbon (42mm)
• Frets : 24, Jescar
• Inlays : Geometric + Lumilay Side Dots
• Construction : Set-Neck
• Tuners : Gotoh SG360-07 MG-T Locking Machine Heads
• Bridge : Gotoh Wilkinson VS100N
• Neck Pickup : Seymour Duncan SH-2M
• Bridge Pickup : Seymour Duncan TB-16
• Controls : Volume + Tone per Pickup with Coil Split, 3-way Toggle Pickup Selector
• RRP : £8,999 / c$11,863
• Weight :  8.6lbs / 3.9kg
• Limited Run of 39
• Only 1 in Europe @ Andertons

Supposedly this is the only version of this guitar we will be seeing in the rest of the world - while there is already a similarly pretty Signature Acoustic Edition - with that same shape, and an interesting design for sound hole - as follows :

I also understand that Japan will be getting a more affordable version of the electric too which is only intended for that domestic market. It's a good looking guitar - and I feel there could be a universal audience for it at the right price point - while I can't see how the £9K version will appeal to anyone outside of this particular quirky Japanese culture.

I got one of these from Andertons back in 2017 - and while I use it fairly infrequently it's a lot of fun whenever I do deploy it - obviously a special use pedal! It essentially syncs your guitar playback / note tracking to specific Hatsune Miku sampled phrases - which are played back at the appropriate guitar pitch. The tracking isn't perfect - which is part of the pedal's charm as it delivers some really interesting quirks.

This was a very popular pedal in its day, and I'm somewhat surprised that Korg decided to discontinue it. Said pedal is currently displayed next to my Kotobukiya figurine. 

It has 2 LEDs - one for Effect (on) and one for Peak, and then various options on sounds / phrases / vocalisations :

Vocalisations :

• Random 2
• Random 1
• Scat
• Looh
• Lahh
• Ahh
• Pahh
• Nyan
• Phrase 1
• Phrase 2
• Phrase 3