R-457BK Fanfret : Excellent guitar

I bought this since I wanted to try out a multi-scale seven string and I was not disappointed. The finish is flawless. Everything feels sturdy including the often wonky budget switches you can find on cheaper guitars. The neck feels great although it might take some time to get used to the width of a seven string. The fanned frets only took about an hour or so to get used to and any guitar without them feels quite unergonomic now.

The tuners were a bit annoying in the beginning, the tuning stability was fine, but they had some dead spots and were very sensitive to turning. This has however stopped being a problem over time. You might want to turn them a few times without strings whenever you next change strings however.

I did however find the pickups were too muddy, luckily for me howerver, that is easy to fix. What I did was unsolder the wires running from the pickups to the pots and simply soldered them directly to the switch. Now the pickups have all the bite I could ever ask for.

If you want to retain your volume and tone controls you might want to get new pots that are 1 Meg Ohm instead of the stock 500k ones.

All in all: I doubt you can find a better guitar for the price and even if they added more to the price it would still be good value