Sometimes you want to try something
A while ago I bought a cheap headless guitar from Latitude for traveling.
It actually surprised me how well it played and the whole headless thing was actually genius when sitting behind the console.
I found myself really enjoying the guitar, and that let to the creation of this beast.\
On YouTube I saw a lot of videos about superb Chinese builders that created awesome guitars for next to nothing.
So that triggered my curiosity.
I will not mention the name of the builder I used because this was not an easy process.
Well let me rephrase that.
The communication at the start was great.
The guitar is in fact 100% what I wanted.
A Walnut body and a roasted maple neck with a tree of life in red.
Two hum buckers and a floating bridge.
If I would buy something like this it would probably be in the 2-3K.
So when I saw the price of 350,00 I was very surprised and wondered what would happen.
After checking and double checking it did all seem to check out.
So I paid for the guitar and mentioned that I had no issues if he would take a week or 2 longer as long as the guitar was 100% setup with a low action and perfect intonation.
Of course I can set the guitar up myself, but making sure it’s perfect from the builder makes sure that everything is setup correctly and I don’t need help from someone else 😀
So far so good
One week, became two and three.
But as long as it was setup perfectly I was fine.
As you can imagine I could not wait till the guitar came in.
But what a dissapointment.
It looked awesome (as you can see), but the output was so weak that I could not even get a point of breakup.
No suprise seeing the pickups where so deep in the body I wondered if they would come out the other side.
Also the action was INSANE high, you could put a finger under the strings.
But the worst part was the bridge, uneven and intonation was so far off I decided to stop trying and bring it to Ray’s guitar repair shop. This is a luthier I trust with everything I can’t fix myself.
His first reaction was “great materials and feel, but who the heck assembled this mess?”
Yep I was right to bring it in…..
After a few days I could pick it up, and can finally say….
The combination of Walnut and roasted maple is heavy but OMG it sounds tricking awesome.
And that’s with the standard (probably 10 buck) pickups.
The idea was to change the pickups but they sound so intense I did not yet feel the need to be honest.
Conclusion
In the end it’s an awesome guitar that plays like a dream.
But when you order something from a Chinese builder make sure you know how to change things yourself, or calculate the costs of a good luthier. Out of the box it was an unplayable mess, but after some love and care it’s one of my favorite guitars.
So let’s end with some more images.
