jwhitcomb3

There's nothing about this that would normally appeal to me. It's bloody brilliant.

I have three QSC CP8s. Loud, clean, wide dispersion, light, dependable and versatile. I use 'em for mains (paired with a small EV sub), floor wedges, and FRFR for guitars and synths. Did I mention they sound great?

The only thing worse than engineer guitarist CEO would be an engineer lawyer guitarist CEO. -Jonathan (BSEE, JD)

The RC Boost (2-button version) is the only pedal I use in tandem with my multi-effect as an always on front-end sweetener. Not louder, no noticeable mid cut/boost, just...better! I miss it when it's not there.

You nailed it! Marquee Moon is kind of its own sub-genre. The only other recording I've heard that taps into it is the menacing and much more obscure "Moonhead" by Thin White Rope, the title track being a masterpiece of rock guitar interplay that slowly builds tension to a glorious climax. All wrapped in a weird Tex-Mex gothic horror movie soundtrack vibe. Sticking with this topic, their "Exploring the Axis" debut album is pretty wonderful, too.

Same here, even though I haven't used a Fender amp for years. My son (a composer and bassist in a regularly gigging local band) laughs at me when I get a new guitar rig (amp based, stomps, plugins, whatever) and spend hours and hours recreating my same old favorite tones.

I performed with the GT-1000CORE on a very compact board (Voodoo Labs Dingbat Tiny) with just a Boss FS-7 dual foot switch and an Xotic RC Boost V2 front end, going straight to the mixing board, monitored with a QSC CP8. I used the BandHelper app to select songs and pre-configure the GT-1000CORE for each song with MIDI PC and CC messages and used the FS-7 for in-song adjustments (mostly solo and effect switching). Using as few presets as possible helped balance volume across my set - 90% of songs share the same 5 base presets, the rest having song-specific presets. So during performance I tap my iPad to select a song from the BandHelper playlist and then use the FS-7 switches in-song so I can concentrate on performance rather than tap-dancing. Great effort to set up, minimal effort to use. And I could run it on a battery. The GT1000CORE is now backup to my VG-800 based rig. In general: for live use mono is your friend, and less distortion/bass/reverb/delay results in a cleaner band mix.

I blame the guy I sold it to.

I've been using modeling amps for many years. I've tried a some with NAM captures, but the latency that technology introduces makes me feel disconnected from my guitar. I've been enjoying the Boss GT-1000 and more recently the Boss VG-800 that introduce less than 1 ms of latency, and the amp models (typically a Fender Deluxe Reverb or Twin) sound great to me. I really like the effects in those units too. I have two fine amps, but they don't get much play these days. And the new Boss GX-1 sounds amazing for $230 new.

That 30th is an amazing guitar.

Besides being a brilliant debut, it is one of the greatest guitar duo albums ever.

Thank you, Ted!

Cool guitars, just not $8500 USD cool. https://www.chicagomusicexchange.com/products/gavilan-miramonte-reverse-silverburst-light-relic-serial-2566061

I assume that Fender went after the name "Danocaster" because they were trying to protect the "XXXcaster" IP associated with a guitar. So that's back to trademark law - protecting Fender's rights to the name in the US, even if they can't protect the shape. As LucSulla pointed out, there are many ways to slice the IP pie, the main IP categories being copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. And then there is geographic scope, as the IP laws differ by country/region. Even if the laws themselves may be similar, the judicial precedents for interpreting and enforcing the laws may be considerably different in different regions. Patents expire after roughly 20 years, so any inventive aspect of the original Strat has been up for grabs since the 1970s. Patent laws were intended to give inventors a limited term monopoly over their inventions, which thereafter become public domain. This provides incentive to the inventors in the short term before the invention becomes part of society's technology base. Trademarks protect a business entity, not an invention. Trademarks enter the public domain if they become generic due to lack of enforcement by the trademark holder: names like escalator, aspirin, thermos, etc. Add the strat body shape to that list in the United States. But it seems Fender can still protect the name "Stratocaster" in the USA, as well as any variants that might reasonably create confusion in the marketplace. So in the USA, you can produce and sell a strat copy, but you can't call it a XXXcaster. Trade secrets can only be protected as long as they are kept secret. A guitar design is readily apparent, so it's never a candidate for being a trade secret, although a specific manufacturing technique might be. That leaves copyright. Different countries/regions have different time limits for copyrights. Fender seems to believe it has an angle on protecting the strat shape as a work of art in Europe, so they are going for it. So yeah, it's a small piece of the IP pie - but Fender has calculated that the European market for strats is big enough to go after. The present internet kerfuffle reflects the layman's general misunderstanding of both IP and the landscape of international law. Fender's European gambit is not a quest for WORLD DOMINATION OF ALL THINGS GUITAR. It is a corporation grasping at the final available IP straws protecting its cash cow.

The legal strategy would be for Fender to go after some of the small fish first and win some cases for relatively small money, which would establish a trail of precedent and make the bigger fish think twice about challenging them.