Received the guitar on Friday, was sick most of the weekend so I couldn't play it much, so now I've finally gotten around to giving my review:
First, I must say that the pictures don't do the guitar justice. The figured maple top is gorgeous and the finish is impeccable. I had never heard of luthier who built this, Michael Dolan (
www.dolanguitars.com), before, but his work is no joke. The neck is sturdy two-piece maple with a Fender-style "scooped" headstock that is not back-angled (not the best, but I think this was at the behest of the guy who commissioned it). For some reason the knucklehead who commissioned this guitar removed the string retainer for the bass string, so it sometimes pops out of the nut if you hit it hard enough- sometimes hardware is there for a reason. The fretwork is flawless as well. The controls are total knob-city, but it breaks down easily: one tone and one volume per SD pickup, a 3-way for the humbuckers, a concentric tone/vol for the bartolini pickup, and a switch that lets you toggle output configs (either bass+guitar out one output or both outputs split between the two output jacks).
As far as playability goes, I was expecting to be totally thrown off by the
fanned frets, but I really wasn't. It actually felt quite natural. Of course, I was also initially skeptical about Ralph Novak's (the guy who's collecting the royalties from luthiers who use fanned frets, let's just say) "metaphysics" about "clang tones." His theory is that each string of an instrument has a "clang tone," a sort of non-musical overtone thats sole variable is string length, and that instruments with strings of all the same length have a buildup of clang tones, and that muddies the sound. Fanned frets, he claims, do not have that problem as the "clang tones" are distributed far apart and therefore less audible. What I can say is that notes of chords have excellent note separation, sound as clear as a bell, and the intonation is scary-good up and down the neck. BUT, isn't that what people say about any well-made guitar? Is it the technology or the luthiery- it's pretty much impossible to distinguish.
This guitar makes me somewhat ashamed, I don't know if it's that there are not enough guitar strings and not enough bass strings to make things work, but maybe I'm not good enough of a player to get the most out of this. As exciting of a guitar this is, I found myself reaching for my 7-string
Les Paul more often, though I wished it had fanned frets, too. I'm going to try using heavier strings so I can get it tuned to the range that I normally write in, so I'll have some familiarity and see how it goes, though I'm kind of tempted to sell this and buy a 6-string Novax neck and put in on Warmoth body and go from there. It probably doesn't help to go from hardly ever playing to trying to tackle a hybrid guitar-bass instrument, too.
