I got this guitar as a present for my son. I am very happy with the purchase, and imagine he will enjoy it for many years to come.

As a bit of background, I like to build guitars. Because of this, I cannot pick up a guitar without immediately inspecting every inch of it to assess the quality of workmanship. For the most part, the workmanship on this guitar is quite good. I think it is acres better than that of a similarly priced Gibson or Fender.

The good:

As I mentioned, the workmanship is very nice and the materials are mostly of higher quality than you'd expect at this price point. The fretboard is great, the frets are well done. The guitar is much lighter than you would expect given its shape. The neck has a very pleasing feel (a little thicker than many other metal guitars, which I like, but to each their own). The pickups are incredible (I'm very tempted to get some Hetfield EMGs for one of my own guitars now).

The bad:

The number one disappointment me was the workmanship on the electronics. I should point out that I ordered the left-handed model, which was part of the problem. The volume knobs were basically binary - all on or all off and no inbetween. I opened up the cavity, checked the pots with a multimeter, and discovered that they used right-handed pots for a left-handed guitar. Normally there is no such thing as left or right handed pots (you just switch which side you connect the signal wire to), but these were audio taper so the handedness makes a huge difference. My son actually likes the knobs on his guitar to be right handed (righty loud, lefty quiet) so it was no big deal and I would have switched them around anyway, but I'm mentioning it here because not everybody feels comfortable taking a soldering iron to their guitar. If you do like your knobs to be left-handed, you will also have to order LH audio taper pots.

The other thing that stuck out was the plastic nut. There is a lot of debate about how much difference a nut's material actually makes to the tone of a guitar, but to me a plastic nut looks really out of place on such a beautiful guitar. I replaced the nut with a Tusq one and my sensibilities are no longer offended. When I was ordering the guitar Sweetwater offered to replace the nut for a small fee. I would recommend that to anybody who does not know how to replace a nut themselves.

Though I did go into a lot of detail on the shortcomings, all in all I think it is a great guitar, and I would happily buy it again. As always, Sweetwater's customer service was second to none, and I was more than happy with everything they did.

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