LAVA MUSIC ME 3 36" w. Ideal Bag SPGR

It is both great and a disappointment

I admit I did not spend much time with the guitar before deciding to return it, but I knew immediately that I would never love it. Why? Hard to say, but while it is fun to have smart guitar with all-you -need built in, I first and foremost wan't a guitar that feels good to play. The sound is... okay I guess, but it is not really "lively" so to speak. The bass is also resonant in a, for me, strange way. Like as if it gets stuck in there and when it eventually comes out it is more like a moaning than a balanced bass tone.

It also felt stiff to play, partly because the setup was not worthy of a €1099 guitar. The nut was way too high, probably the saddle too. I know - relatively easy fixes, but I did not feel it would change the fact that it felt pretty boring, subdued.

The "smart" part is really good though, many of the effects sounded great and I'm sure that it can inspire many, but a lot of it was aimed at other people than me who basically bought it for the looper and some delay.

I do wonder if it is "too" smart though. It annoyed me greatly that I had to create an account with an unknown entity before even get the guitar "started". Am I suppose to store my ideas somewhere in China with very little on terms of promises that only I are in charge of how it is used? I'm not really paranoid and I doubt I will create anything worth stealing, but I still want to choose where to store my ideas. I guess it is a good idea, in these times, to share and "like" snippets in a community, but I do not think Lava have identified their target group correctly when they combined a high end guitar with a social media platform.

As a conclusion I'd say it is a decent guitar, but it is not great. The smart features are a wild mixture useful, silly and TikTok. I also don't understand why they bothered to put the touch display, the little computer with its OS and app, on the guitar when they could have just moved that out into a normal phone app. With its bluetooth and WiFi, everything on that touch screen could have been controlled by a normal smartphone.