I hope this thread doesn't sound silly to you guys, but as I've gotten more serious in my playing, i've noticed the limitations of my equipment. Always a picky person, I'm sure better players would gladly deal with less than perfect equipment for far longer than I am willing to, but at least I'm making the retailers happy.

So I've been playing anything I can get my hands on and I've decided on a few things I really like.

1. Fat Strat orientation - I really like it, seems to fit the many styles I'm interested in.

2. Thinner neck - I have smallish hands, not freakish or anything, but enough so that playing low on a C shaped Fender neck gives me trouble. I seem to do much better on Ibanez style necks, but it's a bit fatiguing.

3. Sustain - None of my guitars have much sustain. I realize this is a somewhat complicated issue, but my equipment is very bad at this and I just got both my guitars professionally set up.

4. Overall quality - I feel limited by my electronics, I can't use some pickups, some pots don't really work at all. I will fix it at some point, but it's like... well I used to be a paintball player and I ran a gun called an Autococker, thusly named because it was like an automatic pump that physically cocked itself. Sometimes I'd go to tournaments and the gun wouldn't behave, so I'd spend time fixing the gun before a match and would sometimes have to sit out. I've felt like that with the band before.

So this has lead me to look at a couple of different guitars. Fender Strat, Ibanez RG, S, and some Carvin models.

I think I'm going to go with the Carvin DC135 - it's a neck-thru 24fret fat strat that I can fully customize. The neck joint is a full blend which should make life very easy for me when I play high up the neck. I am going to trust that it has high quality electronics, and the overall quality is very good based on all of the reviews I've read and some friends (lefties) ravings about the brand. Neck-thru should have good sustain and I think I should get my single coil Frusciante tone, along with my crunchy Tim Mahoney tone on the bridge bucker. I never use a single at the bridge, but for $10 extra I can put a splitter in for the bucker on the bottom and have that versatility should i ever want it. I know there's no true single coil tone on a split bucker, but I don't use it anyway and am just looking for some extra tone options.

This will be about $1k based on how I've designed it and I think it's what I want to do. The only thing I think I'll have to stress about with it is what color options I'll want.

What do you guys think about this selection? Do you have any other possible recommendations I should take a look at before this gets written in stone?