- Overall:
2 out of 10
- Features:
- 5 out of 10
- Quality:
- 2 out of 10
- Value:
- 3 out of 10
- I Want It:
- 8 out of 10
- Sound:
- 7 out of 10
- Ease of Use:
- 4 out of 10
- Support:
- 2 out of 10
Feature:
The preamp is okay, not too much control over your sound, but I dont mess with that much anyway. The tuner is pretty terrible, especially if you are a beginner and don't know what you're doing. It gives a lot of mixed signals, makes it hard to tune, so you might as well have a korg sitting next to you in case.
Quality:
This guitar is very shoddy. It seems like something someone threw together as quickly as they could so they could get it out of the shop. The frets need to be filed (it looks like a 5 year old installed them), the pins in the bridge are pieces of crap (plastic and hard to remove), the screws on the tuners were loose, there are imperfections galore on the surface, and biggest of all, the neck where it attaches to the body is cracked. Pretty big waste of money if you ask me.
Value:
I guess a 200 dollar guitar isnt very much, but I still say this guitar was worth less than i paid. Overall bad quality.
Desirability:
It looks pretty cool, but i'd take a crappy looking guitar with great sound over an ugly guitar with terrible sound.
Sound:
Taken at face value, the sound isn't too bad for a 200 dollar guitar. By this I mean, the sound is relatively rich and pretty bright, but that's ignoring all the imperfections on the fretboard that you run into.
Ease of Use:
The frets buzz pretty badly, and its dumb that that is even a problem because its washburn, not some crappy company. However, I was very disappointed to pull the guitar out the package to find the first note I played buzzed. Numerous spots on the fretboard sound bad, and as I said, the tuner sucked.
Support:
Didnt help me too much in the return process, told me I couldnt return the guitar though I definitely tried to within the return period. very dissatisfying.
Overall:
Like I said, very bad craftsmanship, not what I would exect from washburn. Save yourself some money and put in for something a bit more expensive and a hell of a lot nicer, like a takamine.
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- Overall:
- 8 out of 10
- Features:
- 9 out of 10
- Quality:
- 6 out of 10
- Value:
- 9 out of 10
- I Want It:
- 7 out of 10
- Sound:
- 6 out of 10
- Ease of Use:
- 5 out of 10
- Support:
- 4 out of 10
Feature:
Amazing for the price: I got mine with a gig bag (decent quality, no padding though), on-board tuner & XLR output (reason I bought it), 4-band EQ, strap, picks, allen key & a CDR from emedia for beginning guitarists. Pretty amazing for the cash.
The tuners are better than I thought they'd be. They're not great, but I feel no need to replace them.
The binding work, while over the top, is pretty, and well done.
I like that it's got a compensated bridge. The intonation is pretty good up through the higher registers, I'm loving the cut-away body.
The cutouts for the electronics are crudely done, and the EQ unit's curve doesn't mate well with the contour of the guitar.
Quality:
I suspect I got a good one. I've had it for a year and a half and it's still in great shape, but given the rough edges and some of the strangeness of fit around the electronics, quality control might not be its strong suit. Some of the ferrules on the tuners needed to be tightened when I got it as they were buzzing.
As for durability, I tripped the other day and came down on the guitar, which was in the gig bag, leaning against a wall. Smooth. I hit it at an angle, not full-force, but the guitar came out just fine.
It's plywood, so it should be quite strong.
Value:
The shortcomings of the guitar are eclipsed by the price to performance ratio of the guitar.
To sum up, the shortcomings are:
1. The tuner is not chromatic, even though the hang tags claim it is.
2. The action is way high. You will need to set this up to your liking.
3. the fit isn't very tight around the edges
4. the faluty XLR output.
5. thin-plywood sound. Great beater guitar though.
Desirability:
After a year and a half (or more), I'm still very happy with the features and what I paid for the guitar.
Sound:
It's a good beach guitar...the sound is typical for a laminated top guitar. Well balanced, leaning towards the high end, but not very loud or rich.
Amplified, it's on the average to low end of electo-acoustics. This guitar also has an xlr output, which was a big draw for me. However, it's faulty by design. But if you're a tinkerer, it can be fixed with a transformer, op amp, or just cutting a PCB trace. The 1/4" out is fine.
Ease of Use:
Brutally high action. I think washburn didn't consider the bridge would need lowering when they added the piezo pickup. I took off about an 1/8th of an inch to get the action in the ball park. Also needed to grind the nut down a bit to help with the action at the 1st fret. I used the 'floss' method, and it worked well.
Support:
They're easy to get in touch with via phone, but won't answer emails.
There's a design flaw in the xlr output (pins 2&3 are shorted together), and they told me to send it back to the seller for an exchange. Which, of course, would do nothing to fix the design flaw. That said, I think they'd be fine on warranty repair as they are easy to contact.
Overall:
If this were a first guitar, one would outgrow it pretty quickly. For me it was an impulse buy to fill the roll of beater / road guitar. It's great for that.
- User: a customer from ednet.net
- Submitted: 5/8/2007
- Style of Music: rock, folk, alt, country
- Location: sf, CA
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