Fusion-III HH Roasted SSP : Would be great regardless, but price makes it an absolute must buy.

The guitar arrived very well packaged, and in perfect condition. No dents, nicks or scratches. Good start.

The feature set on this guitar is top shelf. Roasted maple neck, stainless steel frets, locking tuners, Wilkinson trem, nu-bone nut and roller style string trees. The only other instruments I could find with that same list of features cost over £1,000 each, and let’s not forget that until 2 or 3 years ago roasted maple was something reserved for custom shop or limited edition runs from the big brands.

The guitar plays really well. Very comfortable neck with a fretboard radius that is perfect for my preference - I don’t like anything too flat and thin. The satin finish makes the neck very smooth, no sticky hand issues which are common with high gloss necks. The fretboard edges are nicely rounded - no sharp edges or rough fret ends that I have found. There are some minor tooling marks on the fretboard edge, but they absolutely do not detract from the look or feel - you have to put your nose on the thing to see them.

The sound of the guitar is straight up 80’s hot rodded strat territory. The bolt on maple neck and fretboard makes for some very satisfying snap to the high end with plenty of midrange warmth. Bass response is a little light, so I wouldn’t recommend using this guitar for modern metal - but look at it, that’s clearly not what this guitar was made to do.

The pickups are the only area of the guitar where I have any complaint and it is a minor (ish) gripe which is that they are very inconsistent across the range of the volume pot. Rolling off the volume even a little completely loses the punch of the pickup, along with a lot of the high end and while using the coil split mode it makes the pickups almost inaudible by comparison to the full humbucker mode. Leave the volume and tone at 10 and shred away, but I will almost certainly replace these pickups down the road. They look nice in brushed metal though.

In terms of setup, the guitar comes in a very ‘raw’ out of box state. There is dust left over from manufacturing visible around the frets, neck joint and around the trem cavity and the guitar required some adjustment before performing to it’s potential. For me this meant putting 1 1/2 turns on the truss rod, lowering the bridge by a turn on both sides, tightening the locking tuners and adjusting the bridge saddles for the D,G and B strings to nail the intonation. If you have any experience maintaining or setting up guitars this is easy to do and took me about 10 minutes, plus another 10 minutes for a clean and polish. I don’t count any of this against the instrument BUT beginners may not be able to get the best out of this guitar without a trip to their local guitar shop to get it setup properly.

Finally then, there is the price and I guess that this is where the story comes together. For £349 (and free shipping!!) I got a great looking instrument which plays just as well as my Epiphone and PRS SE instruments both of which cost twice as much and has a list of features that neither of those guitars come close to. This guitar sounds awesome (bearing in mind shortcomings of the Roswell pickups) but this is easily solved with some light soldering and a set of Seymour Duncans one day in the future.

All in all, this would be a good guitar for £800. A great guitar for £500. For £349 it raises the bar for every other manufacturer still selling ‘Professional’ instruments with plastic nuts and generic trem systems (*cough* Fender and Gibson *cough*).

Buy one. With experience and a little TLC this thing is an incomparable value.