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My main guitar is a Peavey Vandenberg Custom with black finish and hardware. I got this guitar in 1991 while playing in Delayed Reaction. It's the neck thru bridge custom version, maple neck, mahogany body, and ebony fretboard with the Vandenberg landing strip inlays. It's fitted with a Kahler Spyder double locking trem and the Kahler autolatch system. During the late 90s I replaced the stock pickups with a Seymour Duncan JB bridge pickup and Fender Silver Lace Sensor in the neck position. Since then I've moved those pickups to my Vandenberg Signature, which is my current gigging Vandenberg, and put an EMG 89 in the bridge and an EMG SA in the neck position. The controls are a three position pickup selector switch, bridge pickup volume knob, and neck pickup volume knob with a pull switch to activate single coil mode on the EMG 89.

I had been looking for a guitar for about a year before I settled on the Vandenberg. I needed a replacement for my old guitar, and was looking for an ultimate shred machine. I tried out various guitars from Kramer, Ibanez, Jackson, ESP, BC Rich, Peavey, Hamer, Fernandes, and probably a few others. I liked the Vandenberg Signature bolt-on guitars that I tried, but not decisively more so than the high end Ibanez and Jackson models. Finally in late 1990 I got a chance to try out a custom shop model when Whitesnake came into town for a show. A local shop had a white Vandenberg custom autographed by Adrian Vandenberg on the showroom floor. I already liked the little stylistic differences that the guitar had from the various other guitars I'd tried; the little cutaways and carved areas gave it an aggressive visual edge that I liked, but the feel of the neck-thru model decided it for me. The neck on the Vandenberg guitar is thin like an Ibanez Wizard neck, but narrow like an ESP neck, and with no neck joint access to the upper frets is unbelievably easy.