Kramer Assault Plus Electric Guitar - Trans Purple Reviews

Very well-made guitar. The materials used are found on high-end guitars. The finish is excellent. The Floyd Rose tremolo is stable with only the usual nuances that come with it. The fine tuners were gritty so they were disassembled, cleaned, and lubed. The guitar is balanced and has a great tone without electronic mods. The action was a bit high for my liking and I lowered it without issues during my setup. I gave it a fret polish because that was all the frets needed. All the items I did were for my playing preferences and should not be considered manufacturing flaws. If I didn't have the skill sets to do it this guitar would have been played anyway and added to the rotation. Excellent guitar at this price point. I just made it mine and yes, only mine.

I'm a very casual bedroom guitar player, and I'm totally self-aware that if I spent even half the time I spend "window shopping" guitars and gear actually practicing my playing, I'd be a LOT better. I've always got G.A.S. but can rarely justify buying a new guitar. Enter the Kramer assault plus, a mashup of all the features I'd wanted but never had in a guitar, all in one affordable package: Seymour Duncan pickups, a maple fretboard, a flame maple (veneer) top, and the good quality but affordable Floyd Rose 1000 series. Also, it's PURPLE! It's a fun twist on the classic single-cut design, but really stands out while staying classy.

Pros: it's very comfortable in weight and feel. The neck feels great, and it has slightly rounded fretboard edges and great fretwork. This is my first guitar with a any sort of tremolo system, so I was anxious about the Floyd Rose, but it's worked out great and given me no problems--it's smooth and easy to operate with no tuning stability issues. When I ordered it and received it 7 months ago, the specs did not mention a couple of the hidden extras that I was pleased to find. It has push-pull pots on the volume knobs to independently switch each pickup from series to parallel to provide extra tonal options, and the volume pots also sport treble-bleed circuits to keep you from losing high end when rolling off the volume.

Personal Preference: the headstock is controversial to some internet denizens, but I personally love hockey stick headstocks--and since my other guitar is an Epiphone Explorer, this looks great beside it--and I prefer the the straight string pull over the the tuning problems that come with a traditional 3x3 headstock (although I know the locking nut makes that a moot point). People seem divided on the Jazz/JB set, but this was my first experience with name brand pickups and I think they sound great; however, they are very bright, so might not be to everyone's taste; someday I might swap the neck Jazz for a warmer pickup. Setup out of the box from Sweetwater was great, but I lowered the action quite a bit (several incremental adjustments over a few months) before getting it to my preferred string height. The action is very low now and it sounds and plays great. It's a 25.5 inch scale length, but with it being 24 frets, it feels almost more like a Gibson scale without the squished together feel I've experienced on guitars with 24 frets and a 24.75 inch scale length. If you like the feel of Epiphones, you'll probably like this. Gibson owns Kramer, and this feels like a nicer Epiphone, where they can get away from the traditional expectations associated with Gibson/Epiphone.

Cons: getting a lot of bang for your buck means they cut corners somewhere. Minus the pickukps, the electronics are cheap. They are the same parts you find on Epiphones prior to the switch to CTS pots. The toggle switch is the Epiphone-branded switch, for example. I don't have a problem with this, aside from my specific guitar having a defective bridge pot. I initially thought it was just dirty and contact cleaner helped for a while, but after a few months of owning the guitar, my bridge pot totally died. I was able to fix it myself by swapping out the pot, and considering it was my first soldering experience in about 18 years, it wasn't too bad. The extensive wiring diagrams on Seymour Duncan's website and their soldering tutorial videos made it a lot easier. The other pots have held up fine, so it was clearly just a bad individual part but was frustrating nonetheless. The tuners are also very cheap, unbranded tuners. They are knockoff "Grover style," and I had to tighten all the peg heads on mine before they were even usable; this shouldn't matter too much on a double-locking guitar, but string changes would be a lot better with better tuners, especially that terrifying first Floyd Rose string change I had (it all went fine, but was stressful). Lastly, when it comes to cheap parts, don't trust the strap buttons. I was replacing mine with straplocks anyway, but when I took the original buttons off, I found they had very short and thin screws that certainly did not scream "security." I swapped for the newer style Schallers and they are perfect. The final con is that the originality of the design makes finding a case or even a gigbag very difficult. There is no case designed to fit the thickness of the body, the overall length (with the longer scale and extended headstock), and the angle of the headstock, so you have to get creative. This was a big headache for me for a few weeks after getting the guitar, but I found a creative solution. I went with a bass case (deeper than most bases cases) and modified it to be a perfect fit using furniture foam and crushed velvet from the craft store. I like having a craft project, so it ended up being fun and rewarding to me, and it came out pretty good (though I would do things differently next time), but most people might not like the extra effort of customizing a case.
All in all, I really LOVE this guitar. It feels different from what everyone else has, and has a lot of features that give you a ton of versatility in one package. It's not perfect, but for $, there aren't many guitars out there that can compete with it. I was looking at Ibanez for a long time, but I couldn't spend $1000+, so this guitar gave me all the features I was looking for without me *needing* to make modifications. That said, there are a lot of places where I could modify or upgrade down the road, if I want to. Most of the cons were expected/not that big of a deal, so I think it's a really solid guitar, and if you are considering buying it, I highly recommend.

It sucks out loud.
This guitar feels like a $300 one.

Out of the box the paint job did not hold up remotely to the photos. The highlight portion might as well be the base wood color shining through.
The tuners are low quality in hand, they are really banking on the locking nut.
Tone pots feel loose and cheap.

A guitar in this price range should not require so much setting up.

But even after a lengthy set up this guitar still sucks. Sustain is meh, harmonics are dull. It DOES NOT SHRED.

At this price range it's absolutely unacceptable to have this level of quality.

I was absolutely smitten with this guitar on paper what a tremendous let down. I imagine this is how my father feels about me.