Having spent some time with it, playing it at home, at rehersals and live, I have reached my verdict on this guitar.
Pros:
- overall quality of construction is great, minor crack in the laquer near the joint, pretty common on s-style type guitars. Otherwise no other problems.
- the neck is just amazing. Beeing used to Fender standard tele and strat necks (42 mm, modern c shape, 9,5 inch radius...), I was worried that this neck will be too wide and thin. Not the case at all. Its wider and thinner, but in a good way. After 5 min od getting used to it, you play faster and more effortless on wider string spacing, and the neck still feels great in the hand and enables fast playing. The hand rubbed satin finish is also a dream to play. This might be my favourite neck in my collection.
- the pickups sound great, but I needed to fiddle with height as they come set pretty high from the shop.
- tunning stability is impeccable. No problems thus far.
Cons:
- the volume pot is low-friction, which is not specified on the website (like it is for example for EVH guitars). It turns very quickly and if you have big hands like me, you bump it quite easy. I did it a few times on a gig, so it will get replaced or slowed with some rubber.
- the no-load tone is a great feature, but imo it has a design flaw. The no-load tone pot bypasses the tone pot when you put it on 10 and it has a slight notch so you feel when is bypassed. This makes the sound (particulary the attack of the strings) feeling brighter, its more clear and focused. Very useful with loads of gain on a humbucker, makes it thicker, leads pop out more etc. But it makes single coil a bit shrill, so you want to dissengage it for more dynamic sound. When you go from 10 to 9, its quite hard to get it right, it moves quickly and you dont know if you just engaged tone pot or you are on 8 and loosing a bit of high end. It would be better with a push-pull so you know exactly what you have, as I would rather have the tone pot in the circuit most of the time than the other way around.
All in all, great bang for your buck, awesome guitar!
Thomann delivery process 10/10, as always!
