Superb value for the knowlegdeable player

I bought this guitar at a Media Play, which is a store where people buy CD's and DVD's, but also carries some musical instruments - which nobody ever buys. Seriously, who goes in to buy a CD, and also picks up a guitar for 200 bucks?? Anyway, all the instruments were marked down, and I got the guitar for about 40 dollars, planning to just use it for parts or as a slide guitar. I've played for years, and am able to do set-ups myself, which was lucky. The oddest thing about this guitar is that the parts are high quality, but the assembly, especially the setup, was absolutely terrible.

The pots (500k mini-pots) were new, and are actually good quality components, but the mounting nuts weren't tightened all the way, so when you adjust the volume or tone knob, you would turn the whole pot (whereas normally the pot is stationary and you only turn the shaft), and the volume/tone is unaltered. That was a super easy fix, though.

The saddle height and intonation were also basically un-set, so I had to do that myself as well. I think that's pretty easy - especially since this instrument has the Stratocaster-style tremolo bridge - which, in my opinion, is the easiest of all bridges to set saddle height and intonation on. You do have to know what you're doing, however. The guitar sounded absolutely terrible as it arrived out of the box.

The pickups were just randomly screwed in there (there are no humbucker mounting rings, which actually gives the instrument a cool look), with no concern taken for distance from the strings, angle, etc. But that, also, is a very easy fix if you know what you're doing.

When all that was done, however, I was astounded at how well the guitar plays and how good it sounds. I thought the pickups were going to completely suck, but they don't. They're humbuckers, but they have no visible brand anywhere on them (including the back), so I don't really know who makes them. Samick, probably. Anyway, the box the guitar came in says that the pickups are "high output" but I don't really feel that is a very accurate description. My ohmmeter reads them at 9.3k - which is about 25 percent higher than, say, a PAF, but not particularly high as pickups go these days. They are nice and warm, and bring my preamp tubes to a pleasing level of saturation, but this isn't a "shredder" guitar, even with the gain up pretty high.

The neck is nice - 3-piece maple, bolt-on, 22 medium-jumbo frets, and the cutaway allows easy access even to the 22nd fret. The nut is unremarkable. It doesn't bind the strings when you use the tremolo, so it's fine. The tuners are grover knock-offs, but they work great, so I don't really care who makes them.

All in all, after I finished re-setting-up the guitar, it's turned into one of my favorites. I added some coil-cut switches to turn the humbuckers into single coils (which was actually a big-time pain on this guitar - don't even attempt it unless you are an expert), and it sounds a whole lot like a Tele when it's in single-coil mode. It's definitely one of the best 40 bucks I ever spent.

I'd recommend this instrument to any experienced player who has time to do a full set-up. If that's you, this guitar is a steal.