Electric Guitar Kit DC Style : Great learning experience, surprisingly OK guitar, wood should be improved

(edited after upgrading the guitar after some months' use)

This was my first guitar building kit. It was a fairly easy assembly. Holes were pre-drilled accurately, and electronics were pre-wired and could be hooked up without having to solder. So perfect as a first project.

The result was a fully playable guitar, though with some issues:

- didn't hold tuning particularly well

- very sharp fret ends that even caused finger bruises

- quite dull sound, little dynamics

- body too light, so it nosedives a bit when wearing a strap. The wood is also quite soft and easy to scratch

After building another guitar kit from another vendor a bit later, I had a bit more confidence to revisit the DC, and basically stripped it down to the woodwork and redid mostly everything:

- new tuners (Grover)

- new nut (Tusq)

- Golden Age pickups from StewMac

- levelled, recrowned and filed frets

After this upgrade, the tuning problem is fixed, the neck plays easy and fast, and the sound is much improved, though still a bit dull compared to my other guitars. I've analysed this sound problem with audio software, and it's measurable that high frequencies roll off faster than my other guitars. After reading some articles, I suspect the latter problem has to do with the very light woodwork and resulting lack of resonance, but I'm not an expert.

To summarise:

Pros:

- Perfect learning kit, little equipment required

- Very decent guitar for the price

Cons:

- Wood not so good: too light, easy to scratch, impacts sound. Much sanding required to get rid of pre-sealer before painting

- Included pickups quite dull

- neck is a bit on the wide side

- Instruction manual doesn't mention important setup steps that would greatly improve the guitar (eg frets)

Overall:

- Good starter kit that can be upgraded to a very decent instrument. Cheap wood limits how good it can become.