Ok, since i'm the brilliant person i am, rather than study for my comprehensive exams (friday morning- 1 hr oral exam, and not the good kind, either
) i decided to, after slacking off around here for an hour and a half, take another hour study break and redo the setup on my 7620, which i've gradually been refurbishing after it became clear that i wasn't going to get enough reselling it to be worth the sale. I'd been considering selling the 2027 i bought to upgrade it for a while for a 1077, because it's become apparent i'm really not that big a mahogany fan... something about the sound just doesn't do it for me. And even with a bad setup, i'd been digging the way the 7620 resonates for a while now- i'd left the 2027 in a friend's room after a gig (along with my amp) and to hold onto my sanity broke out the 7620 after a boog 6 months of inaction. So, tonight i decided to give it a final (well, for the fretboard and bridge, anyhow) once-over to get the action right.
Finish up (it looks like it could use some fret dressing- the distance from the string to the fret tops when it's fretted out @ the 1st and 24th frets decreases noticeably ~10-12 or so), and plug the thing in... Not expecting much, because the pickups are a bit too low (the neck only a few mm, but the bridge pretty substantially), flip the amp off standby, and hit one of those big Satch-y upper register bends. Oh MAN... paused to make a few action tweaks (it was choking slightly above the 12th fret on the unwound strings) and just ripped for a good 20 minutes, reveling in the sound of th thing. Then, just for kicks, flipped over to the
bridge pickup- even with a VERY substantial volume drop (checked it clean just to make sure my ears were hearing it correctly), the Tone Zone (a pickup that i thought sounded liek crap in mahognay) just screamed in this thing... I gotta get some foam spacer sort of things to get the pickups to a more manageable height, but even the way the thing is, i'm VERY impressed... I'd forgotten how good this guitar really is, and since i was sorta looking for a new amp, anyway, i'm seriously considering selling the 2027. Gotta finish off with those pickups before i can be sure, but...
On a side note, during the setup process when i was looking to sell it and consequentally tweaking the hell out of it to get a good "neutral" setup, i shimmed up the neck a bit to a slightly harder slant, necessitating raising the bridge... the bridge drifted back into the body a bit, and since the seller bailed, i never leveled it. Just did that tonight, after replacing the
arm holder (oops- got a little over-zealous last time i worked on it
), and something about having the bridge sitting that high off the body (you can clearly see the little rectangle where the knife-edges intersect the body of the bridge- that's pretty high) makes this thing float like mohammed ali. I think i'm going to have to put an extra spring in there to stiffen it up- it's just too much for me, lol.
Now if only the 7620 had the 2027's ultra neck profile...
Anyway, i've been feeling bad for having two pro-quality 7-strings ever since i grabbed the 2027, but i NEVER thought i'd ever consider remedying that by selling the prestige one... but i'm digging this tone SO much more... Ahh, guitars.
-Drew
