Epiphone Flying VeeWee

Let's take the time machine back to early 1999 when I had recently gotten two nice guitars: my Fender Venus and Martin Backpacker. One day I saw a VeeWee and thought that although my children hadn't shown any interest in guitars, if I got a cheap mini-guitar like the VeeWee the short scale would probably be more appropriate to their hand sizes if they or any of their visiting friends ever did want to play, and if there was a designated children's guitar then I wouldn't worry about anyone messing up my other guitars. And to be even more shallow about it, I knew the red and black VeeWee would look great in my red and black living room. :-)

So I bought one on eBay. At first I was playing it a lot myself, because the small size and "V" shape made it ideal for perching in my lap while I was doing things like reading email or playing board games -- when my hands were busy with something else the neck would rest on one leg and the inside of the V sit against the other, and then when I was between messages or turns it was right there for me to play. But after a while I realized that getting used to the short scale was kind of messing up my feel for standard fretboards, so I stopped playing it so much.

The VeeWee is a tiny thing, only 32 inches high. Although it has a full-width neck, the short scale means that the frets are closer together than they would be on a standard-sized guitar, and that it should be tuned to GCFA#/BbDG or ADGCEA instead of the standard EADGBE, because the latter would make the strings too loose on the short neck. So if it would drive you crazy that, say, when you played an "E" note or chord it would actually be a G or an A (you would have to do some transposing if playing along with others or with recorded music), or if you would be unable to tune to either of those tunings, I would say that the VeeWee is definitely not for you.

It seems like almost all VeeWees are red, but they also come in black ("ebony"). Although the V shape has been billed as "futuristic" ever since the first Flying V/Vee was made in 1958, to me this tiny version looks like some kind of pictograph of a child, with the points of the V being two legs running along. And of course it has a head and a neck, you hold it in your arms, it's little, it looks bright and energetic, you get the picture!

Soooo ... have my children actually ever played it, you might ask? Well not yet, anyway (and one of them in particular does not like the idea of what guitar strings do to an unaccustomed fretting hand), but some of their friends and relatives do now and then. And you never know when it might come in handy. And it was cheap. And it does help to make the living room look like a fun place. And I do like having it around, even though it's not that great of a guitar. We'll see ...

Some VeeWee links

As the VeeWee is usually sold as, again, a cheap (for example, Musician's Friend has it for $119.99 right now, including a mini-amp, soft case, cord, strap, and free shipping), cute children's (or travel) guitar, there's really not much stuff about it on the web, but here are some links I found:

Epiphone put out a press release about the Veewee on October 28, 2005, though it had been around for many years before that. (Epiphone also has a Veewee product page, but the press release is much more informative.)

Coming in with less than 50 words of text, Gibson/Epiphone's Flying-Vee Wee Rave Rig page isn't exactly very informative, though they do inflate the word count a little by breaking humbucking into two words (and not the two you would think, either :-)).

Musician's Friend's Veewee page includes a large number of reviews.

Harmony Central's extensive database of guitar user reviews includes ten VeeWee reviews.

Music Gear Review has a single VeeWee review -- the reviewer got one on sale for $59 to be a "Great functional non-toy guitar to let my very young kid destroy learning the basics" but had not really done much with it yet at the time the review was written.

Here you can see a very young VeeWee player.

p.s. If you look at the picture at the top of my Fender Venus page, you can see the VeeWee hanging on the wall (courtesy of a "String Swing") in the background, though it's since moved to an adjacent wall (actually, you can see it on the current wall in this picture) as things have gotten rearranged.