Let's get the negatives out of the way first. When this arrived, it was virtually unplayable. Now I understand, it's a leftie, so whoever's doing the setups probably can't give it a play to see how it feels, but I mean the strings were lying flat on the fret board, the neck was bowed and the trem was set hard against the body so it took an almighty force to even move it.
The paint job on the front of the guitar was fine, but there were flecks of "dirt" under the finish on the back. It felt like a real "Friday afternoon" job.
If this was my first experience buying a guitar, I'd have been totally gutted.
However, in less than an hour I had the neck sorted, action and intonation set up nicely, and the trem (whilst I still keep it flat) is set perfectly for a little downwards warble.
And once that was done, wow! The guitar sounds brilliant, plays great and stays in tune. And it looks great. The finish isn't perfect, the binding is a little uneven, but from more than 6 feet away no one's going to notice that, and frankly these minor blemishes are more than made up for by the quality of the instrument.
Oh, and one last thing. When it arrived the top of the headstock had poked through the packaging, denting the wood and removing about an inch of finish and paint right on the top "point". That's certainly not Thomann's fault, but they were awesome at getting it resolved. I didn?t want to return the guitar as I live in the Canary Islands and it took two weeks to arrive, so they offered me a discount on the price which I can put towards the repair. Customer service was excellent, friendly and swift.
As for my star ratings above, I've marked "quality" as 3 stars, but this is to reflect the small imperfections (even building a guitar to a price I think they should be able to spray it somewhere where there isn't crap floating about that gets under the finish). However, in terms of playability and reliability, it scores a 5.
