So now I'm up to: 4 electric guitars, 3 electric basses, 2 acoustic guitars, and a mandolin. (Also 5 toy plastic guitars.)
For the last decade I've been using Roland's "virtual guitar" gadgets (VG-8, VG-88, VG-99) which use a hexaphonic (guitar synth) pickup to allow processing every string separately and do virtual modelling of arbitrary guitar and amp types--it simulates various brands of electrics, can sound like an acoustic or banjo or sitar, etc. They also offer guitar-synth-ish sounds. There's an even newer model out now that's more in the guitar-synth direction but still with the guitar modelling stuff as well, and I was wondering if I should get it. But then I realized that maybe I should go in the other direction. Since I have a pretty varied set of guitars now probably the only really significant thing the virtual guitar offers me is selecting arbitrary tunings (since it can pitch-shift each string separately). However, I almost never use that feature (I used an open tuning on one of the "Suggest a Title" tracks many years ago, and I probably used a tuned-down-to-D tuning on one of the recent sketches), except when sketching I use an octave shift for a simulated bass sound (and generally it's good for quick sketching since I don't have to switch physical instruments for a different sound). So I'll probably try to wean myself off the virtual guitar entirely (unless it turns out that I get too much hum/noise with regular pickups, which I do remember being a constant issue back in the day).
