HT
Great guitar to pimp!
My intention even before buying this guitar was to make it better than any American Strat, which it now is without a doubt.
Straight out of the box though, this guitar does little to impress except for the immaculate finish of the wood grain through the transparent sunburst finish. Just about everything on this guitar needs to be set up correctly... the frets needed to be polished and the pau ferro fretboard well oiled. The neck, tremolo springs/height, tremolo pole height, action, saddles/intonation all needed to be corrected, but I was expecting this. The screw holes beneath the tremolo cover and pickguard were also made without any tender loving care and consequently all needed to be cleaned up. The standard strings are rubbish, but that was easily fixed with some Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky 009 - 046ers.
The alnico 5 standard pickups sound rather dead and lifeless and nothing like the sound demo on the Fender website, but that's alright 'cause I already had the DiMarzio alnico 2 Area range in a perloid pickguard ready to drop in. The volume pot mod has been done as advised to do by DiMarzo and the tone condensor has been replaced with an orange drop TAD condensor. In addition, the rotten standard bent saddles have been replaced with solid brass rectangular saddles. Two full days of work has however been worth it.
Played through a Dumble with compressor pedal, this guitar now sounds and feels AMAZING! This guitar now OOOZES QUALITY the second you touch it. I would buy it again in a heartbeat for this price. I would give the end result 6 stars ******.
Straight out of the box though, this guitar does little to impress except for the immaculate finish of the wood grain through the transparent sunburst finish. Just about everything on this guitar needs to be set up correctly... the frets needed to be polished and the pau ferro fretboard well oiled. The neck, tremolo springs/height, tremolo pole height, action, saddles/intonation all needed to be corrected, but I was expecting this. The screw holes beneath the tremolo cover and pickguard were also made without any tender loving care and consequently all needed to be cleaned up. The standard strings are rubbish, but that was easily fixed with some Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky 009 - 046ers.
The alnico 5 standard pickups sound rather dead and lifeless and nothing like the sound demo on the Fender website, but that's alright 'cause I already had the DiMarzio alnico 2 Area range in a perloid pickguard ready to drop in. The volume pot mod has been done as advised to do by DiMarzo and the tone condensor has been replaced with an orange drop TAD condensor. In addition, the rotten standard bent saddles have been replaced with solid brass rectangular saddles. Two full days of work has however been worth it.
Played through a Dumble with compressor pedal, this guitar now sounds and feels AMAZING! This guitar now OOOZES QUALITY the second you touch it. I would buy it again in a heartbeat for this price. I would give the end result 6 stars ******.
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