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Heritage Owners Club

Old-school Heritage simplicity


brentrocks

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You have to give Heritage an A for effort, when it comes to their attempt to keep up in the superstrat/poiny hard rock guitar market back in the 80s.

They made several guitars that went toe-to-toe with the Charvels, ESPs, Jacksons, Kramers, etc....

One of these examples was the VIP 1.  

A bolt on superstrat, single bridge humbucker, locking tremolo system.   With the Ren Wall touch of the VIP phase control system and a coil split.   Maple body, mahogany neck, dark- streaky rosewood board.  Simplistic, classic and straight forward rock/blues machine.  

The Kahler Flyer is not my favorite tremolo system...I wish heritage would have used Floyd Rose's instead.  But when setup properly, the Kahler flat top systems can be dependable.

The pickup is a Seymour Duncan Black Back.  From what I understand, these pickups were made for Ed Roman in Las Vegas.  This must have been "laying around".   Ed Roman, at one point did special order a lot of Heritage guitars, until his relationship with heritage eventually soured.

These Heritage bolt-on superstrat style guitars, as a whole, from my experiences with them, are fundamentally good.   They couldn't compete with the flashy, high-end ESP, Jackson, Charvel, BC Richs of the time...so they quickly got lost in the shuffle of Heritage's daily routine...their bread-and-butter (H535, H150, jazz boxes, etc)

Never-the-less, these are still a part of the history of The Heritage in Kalamazoo!   They are never gonna be "the ultimate collectable" but still solid players.

 

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I would definitely play one with pride.

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  • 4 months later...

Great remembrance, Brent.

I had the original VIP2, but the hard maple body made it a bit unpleasant for me to play. No warmth, no blues. Superb neck, though (hope you have one too), so I had the body copied and remade in African Mahogany. This was also a good moment to kick out the Kahler trem which was unstable.

Later I gave the original body to one of the club here. He had received an original VIP neck that had been lying around in the Parson St. factory from Rendall Wall and constructed a new original VIP2 with it.

I remember I was also quite happy to get rid of the incomprehensible VIP switching…

Albeit charming, the VIP2 was not a great succes imho.

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