This guitar is an extremely rare piece of vintage Japanese guitar history and especially nice. Vestax was one of the brands created by Hidesato Shiino after he left ESP. Hidesato Shiino is best known for creating the H.S. Anderson Mad Cat and being one of the founders of ESP. Well, he created a number of guitar brands with a common theme of being very high quality and using the best materials. Vestax itself is better known for electronics targeted to the DJ market and guitar effects.

Vestax guitars as a brand started in the later 1980’s. This guitar appears to be made in 1987 based upon the date codes on its pots. While other Vestax guitar models come up for sale pretty regularly, this may well be the first Les Paul to come up and I’ve been told these were non-catalog models, available only by custom order with an orginal price of ¥400,000.

The guitar is very well made, with an amazing solid flame maple top, one piece mahogany back, one piece mahogany neck with no wings on the headstock and an ebony fretboard with fret edge binding. Electronics appear to be all original, including the pickups which unfortunately don’t have any markings to identify them with. The pickups are an excellent sounding PAF clone.

As high end vintage Japanese Les Paul’s go, this one is among the rarest of them.