Overall I can't stress enough how impressed I am with Schecter's quality on this guitar. I will probably be purchasing another guitar from Schecter in the very near future because of this (The Loomis 7 string has caught my eye). I hope that you give this guitar a chance if you're looking for something different and quite affordable. I've used it for Heavy Metal but this is easily a fantastic sounding jazz instrument as well. Again, the tones on this guitar are so customizable that you can't go wrong with any genre of music.

Sound
The guitar sings with sustain. Very impressive for the price of this guitar. I own an Ibanez Universe 7 string guitar and it doesn't even come close to the sustain that this guitar has. The pickups sound very good and you have lots of options with the coil tap on the guitar (Which singles out the humbuckers to give the guitar a more "strat-like" sound). I will say this the guitars "clean" tones are exceptional. It picks up the lows and highs very very well and if you're looking for a guitar that gives you a "boost" during solos this axe is going to do you just fine. I play a lot of different styles of music (studio musician) and I have found that this guitar can play Metal to Country just fine.. but it is an AMAZING sounding Jazz guitar.

Features
The neck is a little thick for my tastes. It'll take some time to get used to. But, the great news is that with this guitar you want to take the… read more time to get used to it. I am an Ibanez player normally (going on 20 years now) so I am used to the thinner "Shred-Guitar" necks. If you are used to Gibson or Fender this neck is more along the lines of those guitars. I give this feature an 8 for my personal preference. Other than that all of the frets are very accessible and spaced out well. Again, we return to the coil tap again and I cant' praise high enough the great sounds it helps you achieve.

Ease of Use
I mean, it's a guitar... so you plug it in and play. If I'm referring to the action on the guitar I did have to do a little tweaking to lower the action slightly. Again this is all for my personal preference. The guitar was VERY playable right out of the box. It sounded great. I tuned it up in like 1 minute and discovered I wanted the action lower so I grabbed the (INCLUDED) wrench and lowered it to my liking in about 5 minutes. It was that easy... and again, I did this out of personal preference I think that the average player would like the action just fine the way it is but for sweep picking you need the action sort of low (I find).

Quality
If I could give this an 11 for quality I would but, since there is no 11 feature I'll just try to make 10 mean a little more. The guitar is quality. The hardware is top notch. From the locking Grover Machine Heads to the TonePro Bridge. As someone who's used Floyd Rose floating bridges for the last 20 years it's so nice to have a reliable 7 string that I can cross tune in literally seconds. The guitar is a good weight. Reminds me of an old Washburn I had. Heavy, tons of sustain and beautiful design.

Value
Most of my guitars in my collection are easily double the price of this guitar and I will display this one proudly right beside them. I don't know if some of the people who rated this guitar earlier just got bad models or they waited so long because they were on backorder... but this guitar is well worth what you pay for it. It is comparable to a $1,200 guitar at least.

Manufacturer Support
Haven't needed it personally but, I've had a lot of musicians come into my studio that praise Schecter for their quality and I can really see why. Let's hope I don't need their support though... unless they can help me with some difficult patterns I've been working on.. hehe

The Wow Factor
It's black and sleek with a very classy ivory stripe outlining the guitar. The guitar is striking and I will put it as one of my "wall display" guitars.

Musical Background:
Sound Engineer, Producer, Musician, Noise Maker...

Musical Style:
Metal, Rock, Jazz, Fusion, read less