Guitar News: $15,000 Ibanez, A2 Gets Real and Tone3000 Levels Up

The guitar news is starting to wake up again after the summer, and this week’s episode had a few things that actually caught our attention.

First up, Ibanez has unveiled another ridiculously extravagant Steve Vai PIA — and when we say extravagant, we mean $15,000 extravagant. The new model features an ornate gold-leaf finish, gold hardware and the usual PIA design, with Vai’s signature DiMarzio Utopia pickups and Tree of Life-style inlays (but not the actual tree of life, this one is somehow different?).

It’s certainly not a guitar designed to disappear into the background. Whether it’s worth fifteen grand is another question entirely, but there’s no denying that Ibanez knows how to make a Steve Vai signature guitar look like a Steve Vai signature guitar.

And while we were discussing ludicrously expensive gear, Tone3000 has quietly dropped something considerably more interesting for the average guitarist: a new NAM plugin.

The new plugin takes the old NAM experience and turns it into something much more like a complete virtual rig. Rather than simply loading a capture, you can build a signal chain with multiple NAM profiles, amp and cab captures, pedal profiles, EQ and even convolution reverb.

It also connects directly to the Tone3000 library, meaning you can browse and load profiles without having to constantly jump between the website and your DAW. We were pleasantly surprised by just how much more useful it looks compared with the rather basic NAM loading experience we've had previously.

Then there’s NAM A2, which continues to make its way into affordable hardware.

After getting native A2 running on the Valeton GP180, the big takeaway was just how good it sounds. The profiles have a noticeable sense of clarity and openness, with more of that full-frequency, amp-like feel you get from playing through a proper amplifier.

That’s pretty exciting when you consider how affordable some of this hardware is.

In fact, we’re getting to the point where the budget end of modelling is starting to seriously close the gap with the expensive stuff. And that might be the most interesting bit of guitar news of all.

There’s plenty more A2 testing to come, too — including the possibility of a proper blind test between A1, A2 and a real amplifier. That could be interesting… and potentially rather humbling.