HB JA-60SB Vintage Series : Incredible value, but not perfect as it needed some work

This is a beautiful guitar. The pick guard seems to be a bit polarizing but I think it fits the vintage vibe. Finish on this one is near perfect. I love the sunburst finish and off-white neck binding, pitch covers and controls. The only blemish I have found is a bit of bubbling in the chrome finish on one of the tuning heads. More on those later. Playability out of the box was just ok. It needed to be setup, truss rod and intonation adjusted and have the action lowered. The frets, although having the ends finished quite well and being very well leveled,, were a bit rough and needed a mild polishing. The strings were in pretty good shape but since I had to have the whole thing apart for set up work, I put some new 9?s on it. Now it plays really well. Comfortable neck feels very similar to a vintage spec?d stratocaster. The tuners are passable. They keep it in tune, but feel a bit skippy and one is quite stiff feeling. As far as sound goes, these Roswell p-90s are very hot. Very different from real Jazzmaster pickups. They?re not bad sounding pickups, but I?ve noticed that they sound too similar to each other. I?m not sure if these pickups are a matching set with dedicated neck and bridge specs or if they?re identical to each other. I?m guessing the later. The tone pot doesn?t seem to be very usable. Nothing happens until you get down to around 3, and then it?s just all dark down to 1. This might as well have been a switch...

I have however found a couple very usable and great tones out of this. The pickups lend themselves out to do both clean and dirty very well. Over all I?m very impressed by this guitar. Be prepared to do a little work on these guitars, so it might not be the best for a complete beginner, however for only around $150, it could be a great guitar to get your hands dirty with and learn about setups, mods etc.