1998 Parker Midi Fly

After owning the Parker Fly Deluxe below for awhile, I started thinking about MIDI capabilities.  I thought if I had magnetic pickups, a piezo for acoustic sounds, and MIDI, it would be the ultimate gigging guitar.

Unfortunately, I only had a big bulky Roland D-20 keyboard at the time, and I wasn't about to schlep that around to gigs to get synth sounds out of this guitar.  I had thought about picking up a really small Roland half rack synth.

At the time, I was running a Boss GT-5 into either a Marshall DSL50 half stack for big stages, or my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe for smaller (i.e. cramped) stages.  To incorporate the MIDI functions to turn on and off the synth, as well as the guitar patches, it would have been fairly complex, so I scrapped the MIDI idea altogether.

As far as this guitar goes, the neck was a bit bigger than the Parker Fly Deluxe neck.  The pickups were weaker in output.  The MIDI tracking was decent, but to use it required a breakout box.  The 5 position switch was non standard, and the tip kept breaking off because the blade of the switch was slightly larger than standard.

After a few years I no longer used this guitar, as I was becoming more low-tech, and I sold it.