I bought my Axstar from a friend in high school who had won it at a concert festival. I remember taking it to a guitar shop to get it appraised so we could know what it was worth. They looked in their books, hemmed and ummed for a bit, and pulled a random price out of the air. After a few years of getting comments like "Sweet guitar! What kind is that?" I once again tried to find information on the web. I finally ran across a few people at Ibanez Collector's World who had some good info - and one of them had an original hardshell case to sell me.

While it's been fun to learn that this is a rather rare and respected guitar, it's more valuable to me as my first electric. It's light, and fun to play. It's taught me that I don't have to get a guitar that looks like "everyone else's" to get good sound.

My Axstar (Ser. A850076) is unique from other other Axstars, too. It wasn't in the greatest condition when I got it. And sad to say, it's gotten a fair amount of bumps and nicks from my mishaps with it. Before I got the hardshell case, I had to replace the plastic on the toggle switch because the old one got cracked off. But what makes it different is the tremolo system. It has one, but it is not a locking system like the catalog says - the headstock has holes for string trees, and just a graphite nut. The pickups don't say anything on them; though writing could have gotten worn off, it doesn't look like that happened. Unless somebody did a really slick job of modifiying this thing, it appears to have come from the factory with these peculiarities.

So that's my guitar...
If you want to hear it, I think it's the one I used for most of the "Solo experiments" on the music section on my homepage, as well as when I played guitar on "Better Than Padre".
If you want to see it, check out the Pictures of my Axstar