Incredible value

Good things can be had for little money these days, at least when it comes to guitars. This guitar arrived extremely well set up, with low action (almost too low for my taste), no buzz, no sharp fret ends, great neck, excellent playability. And the sound? Glorious! At first, I thought it was too trebly, but it was strung with extremely loud and bright roundwounds. I put on a set of my favourite strings, Thomastik-Infeld 12–50 nickel flatwounds, and they really brought out the best of this guitar.

I was surprised how good this is for clean, jazzy single-note stuff. Beatifully smooth on all pickup settings. The tone control is actually usable all the way down, and it's good to knock off a little treble when playing clean solos.

Any negatives? The master volume goes from zero to eight in the first couple of millimetres, and the treble bleed is, unusually, way too subtle. I found out why: the potentiometer was wired in reverse. Easily fixed, but QC must have been asleep. The Bigsby has the normal Bigsby issues; stringing is a pain, and it isn't really possible to hold the bar while you pick. But I have Jazzmasters and Stratocasters for that. Tuning stability isn't great, but subtle wobbles are fine. When I put on the new strings, I didn't put the four wound strings under the bar thing, eliminating one friction point. This helped, and of course, with medium gauge flatwounds, everything stays a lot better in tune. The tuning machines are adequate, but doesn't feel very high quality. But they won't cause any problems, so they'll stay. At this price point, these things are almost irrelevant.