I bought this guitar as a cheap guitar for gigging, that I wouldn't have to worry too much about getting stolen.
However, gigging guitars need to be reliable and I just can't get on with the vintage-style tuners.
I play 9s, which seem to be too slinky to grip on the tuner shafts and keep popping out. I've watched all the videos on how to restring and my technique seems correct, but can only get the shafts to grip with many extra turns which then lead to less-than-perfect tuning stability.
Aside from this...
+ guitar looks really great, totally cool.
+ the finish is flawless.
+ balances perfectly, no neck dive.
+ the frets were nicely polished, didn't have to do anything to them. The fret ends were not very rounded but no fret sprout.
+ the frets are low, vintage-style, which I prefer.
+ except the pickup alignment, setup was good out of the box, but I tweaked it anyway.
+ despite having binding, neck is very similar to my Fender mexi strat and Thomann tele which is exactly what I wanted.
+ if you like vintage-style tuners, they're pretty good, precise with very little dead spot, for the price.
- the vol and tone control knobs feel a bit cheap, but hey, they are cheap.
- the tone control doesn't seem to do much until it's really in the low numbers, but because of the warm pickup voicing, I tend to leave it on 10 anyway.
- the pickup alignment was horrible but this is very easy to adjust.
- those tuners.
Neutral
<> the pickups sound very different from the humbuckers and tele/strat single coils that I'm used to. They're relatively warm, which doesn't cut through a gig mix.
