Electric Guitar Kit ST-Style : Great starter/workhorse guitar

This great little guitar recently joined my axe army to fill the role of workhorse/allround guitar.

It's quite impressive considering how cheap it is.

It has a 14'' radius fretboard, a modern C-shape neck (I could be compared to a '50s gibson neck, quite chubby but not unpleasant) with a smooth satin finish.The rosewood fretboard is quite thick (surely thicker than on my Strat), the frets are well placed and leveled, although fairly rough: I had to polish them with steel wool. The trussrod is precise. The body is fairly consistent in weight, sporting a well designed contour-body, although the routings for pickups and bridge are a little tight (I slightly widened them with a dremel).

The machine-heads keep the guitar tuned, even when abusing the tremolo, but their gear ratio is too small, re-tuning is more laborious than it should be. I changed them with gotoh locking tuners, now the guitar is as stable as a floydrose. The bridge is fairly cheap, and not very precise, bearing tuning problems and lack of sustain. I strongly advice an upgrade to a decent wilkinson 5+1 (I did, excellent upgrade).

Soundwise, the guitar handles excellently, the pickups are not bad and akin to vintage, thin sounds. However, a good set of pickups can turn this cheap studio guitar into a serious instrument, if backed by the aforementioned Bridge and tuners mods, with a final cost dwelling just under 300¤. That's quite a feat.

Rock on!