G&L Rampage Limited Ed. Reissue

This is a cream colored G&L guitar made by the Leo Fender company in California, USA. This was a limited run of 70 reissue guitars made to Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains specs in 1999. This was a "Cantrell sig" model before the new run of Cantrell sig models.
Guitar comes with a Kahler pro trem with a Floyd type locking nut, one volume control and one Seymour Duncan TB-4 pickup. Alder body, maple neck and ebony fretboard with 22 frets and Schaller tuners.
These guitars came in a very nice gig bag made by Chevy.

UTILIZATION

The guitar was light weight and had great balance and had the nice ergonomics of a strat type guitar. Access to the upper frets is that of a typical strat type of guitar as well. It has a very sweet unfinished neck that plays fast and is just the right size.

Since it only has one humbucker pickup and a volume control the sound options are limited. It is easy to get a nice sound - just set your volume to taste and you are ready to go.


SOUNDS

I used this guitar with custom built Peters amplifiers, which are kind of a cross between a Peavey 5150 and high gain Marshall/VHT with a little Boogie thrown in. It was also used with these amps: Marshall TSL, Mesa DC-5 and Peavey 5150II. The amp was paired with an Avatar 4x12 that had Celestion G12h -30's and a Splawn 4x12 with Governor/ManOWar speaker combo, and a VHT FB cab.

I usually go for a nice thick Jerry Cantrell AIC tone, to use with my modern rock/metal band.

The guitar had a very open sound to it and all frequencies were represented evenly. It was tight and crunchy under high gain playing. Pretty much Jerry Cantrell's sound. The cleans were just ok because I had to rely on the TB-4 humbucker only.

My favorite sounds with this guitar were the high gain tones - both lead and rhythm playing. Least favorite tones were the limited cleans.

Overall it was a very nice, but limited, sound.

OVERALL OPINION

I really liked just about everything concerning this guitar, except for the lack of a second humbucker for different tones and no hardshell case. The playability, low weight and sounds it did do were great!
I bought this at a nice price and now it would be a price on par with the reissue Charvel San Dimas strats, so the appointments are fairly comprable.
The guitar's value has more than doubled since I owned it, but I sold it at the right time - well before the JC signatures came out.

Knowing what I know now, I would buy it again and probably would have done the exact same with it - hold it and sell. In fact, as an investment, I should have bought five of them

I have owned many guitars and had a number of years where I would buy, try and flip, which enabled me to have many guitars around to try out.
This guitar has ranked right up there with the best of them in overall satisfaction.