 As far as mine, it's a "Crafted in Indonesia" with a real pretty TobaccoBurst paint job - unfortunately the previous owner was a little haphazard - and there are a few dings on it. It has a "bolt-on" neck with unbranded, sealed tuners. Dual black open-bobbin humbuckers with fixed equal height slugs - also unbranded, with the only writing being an "F" on the base of the front one and a "B" on the bridge pickup. They were "potted" - to keep the windings from acting like a microphone. Guild-style stop tailpiece and a tune-o-matic bridge. Three position pick-up selector way near the bottom of the guitar and a single volume and tone knob. The 4 piece body is 1.6" thin and light, can't tell what kind of wood it is. The nut is 1 11/16" and I will call the profile thin, since I don't consider myself knowledgeable about neck profiles. This guitar was a real pig when I got it, the pawn shop wanted $99, and I complained enough about the condition that they cut $24 off the price. It looked like the previous owner ate chocolate or peanutbutter sandwiches while playing, there was grime all over the body and the rosewood fretboard. Fortunately I had latex gloves in the house when I started cleaning it! Cleaned up and with new strings it sounded pretty good - no crackle in the pots (amazing!). The lead guitar player gave it a thumbs up - but it didn't have the "sparkle" of his pick-ups (that each cost more than my whole guitar!) Now, I found another one I can get for only $50 - and it's a mess too.... So, I got it strung up with 9's and figured I got a lot of guitars tuned the same - why not do something different. One of my favorite songs was in Dm, and I got a lot of mileage out of playing Dm/D2/Dsus, but it was tricky playing those chords and then hitting the high A all in standard tuning, So I bought 3 new strings, a thicker one for the low E to drop it to a D, and thinner ones for what standard tuning would be G (up to A) and B (all the way up to D) so that the tension wouldn't pull more on the treble side. I got the thickest single electric string in the store to get a good tension on the drop-D and not make it too floppy. I open-tuned to a D2, almost a diatonic chord - low to high D-A-D-A-D-E. That made all those chords easy to play, and with some barre action, easily play the iv/IV/IVsus and v/V/Vsus or a lead lick with a D-A drone happening. (Now for Christmas I got another DeArmond, the nut was loose, so I'm trying something radical - check out the DeArmond S-73 page when I get it up). |