dabbler wrote: ↑Sat Apr 27, 2024 2:18 pm
voodoorat wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2024 3:33 pm
This guy just arrived:
It’s a strandberg essentials 6, have been curious about them for a while and these came out and i got a tax refund and well, stuff happened.
Don’t have a fully formed opinion yet though.
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Ooohh, so
that's what the Agile Geodesic is patterned after!
Yeah. I think there are a few other headless clones of the body shape, I think I saw an EART on Amazon that looks similar. I have been playing it a good bit including at a mini-jam (just me and the drummer) last night and I have a little bit of a first impression at least of the guitar:
It's very light, probably a shade under 5 pounds. So it's my first of all these: Ergonomic shaped body, extreme carve neck, solid steel frets, and headless. Most steinbergs are also fanned fret multiscale or extended range 7 or 8 strings, but I'm not really that interested in that stuff, at least not now. But I was intrigued by the other stuff so this seemed like a real opportunity to try out something modern. They also usually come with floyd-y trems, but I'm ambivalent on trems (and kinda anti-floyd) so that was fine with me. I should probably mention that the vast majority of my guitars are very traditional. I have very few with modern flavor (and that's including stuff like the elite strat which is still mostly pretty traditional). So yeah this one was a significant departure for me, and I basically play blues and classic rock so nothing that particularly begs for like a prog-friendly guitar, but I"ve always been curious about how this sort of thing feels.
So, most of the things about it I like. The weight is great, picking up the Heritage H150 after playing this thing for a while felt like picking up an anvil, and I don't think it's even particularly heavy for a traditional LP-style, probably 9 pounds or so but this thing is probably somewhere around 5 lbs.
The headlessness of it is not actually that big a deal for me for the most part--I did get thrown a little bit because obviously the neck length is visually different. I do already play a bunch of different guitars, some with different scale lengths, so I'm not so used to any one thing that it throws me much though (the SG honestly throws me more with how its neck is even though it still doesn't take long to get used to). I don't really look at the headstock much when I"m playing though so it doesn't affect me that much while playing. That said, most of my guitar stands or wall hangers don't work worth a shit without a headstock, so I had to get a few extra floor stands that can be set up to hold this thing (a few because I want to have them in different places around the house). One thing I don't like about the headlessness is the tuners behind the bridge. Conceptually I don't mind them but I find them to be kinda hard to use--they are a little tight and it's hard to get a good grip on them since they almost touch each other. The are knurled a little so at least there's some texture, but I'm not looking forward to doing my first string change on this thing.
The stainless steel frets seem great, that seems like an unmitigated positive. I don't notice any downside. They are smooth and polished, well dressed, and I assume will outlive me.
The location of the output jack is rear-facing kind of on the back of the electronics plate cover--not quite has hard to stuck a jack into as the one on the Charvel SoCal type 2 (t type), but still sort of a pain. I might get more used to that and find it less annoying in time.
The ergonomics of the body I like a lot although it does aggravate the guitar stand issue a little. The body is tiny and carved in ways that it just gets out of the way when you're seated. Standing it matters less but it's so light that it seems like it would also be really comfortable to play standing (I usually play seated though), but might look a little silly IMO. I think that's maybe unavoidable when it's got such a weird tiny shape and no headstock though.
The weirdest thing about it though, by far, is the neck. The "endurneck" is a crazy weird carve, it's like almost a somewhat flattened-edge triangle shape but where the flattened ridge at the back moves from sort of the middle or slightly treble side of the neck to the bass side of the neck as you go up the fretboard. It sort of naturally moves your thumb into a comfortable playing position. I find that for like single note playing it's really almost not noticeable, but that sometimes when I was playing more rhythmic stuff with barre chords I'd feel that edge in a weird spot on my hand. It's such a departure from a more traditionally carved neck that it makes me a little worried that if I get used to it then normal necks will feel weird.
Those are the main things I've noticed. The pickups seem pretty good, on par with pretty decent pickups I have in some other guitars, I don't think I'll feel the need to swap them out, and I like the tonal variety from the pickup switch options (the 2 and 4 split one of the humbuckers, the middle one does something weird but they sounded good to my ears--and the split just added a little touch of single coil-ness along with the more full humbucker tone for those two positions).
All told, based on my 24-hours experience I'd recommend it if you are interested in trying something very different without dropping 2.5x as much on one of the "real" steinbergs with the fanned frets and fancier finishes.
Also, the size of the thing makes it really great for just sitting on the couch playing it unplugged while I'm doing other stuff, can even just wear it on a strap walking around the house if i have to get up to do something real quick since the headstock isn't going to bump into every doorway like every other guitar I own.
For scale here’s a pic of it next to the Charvel which itself isn’t a particularly large guitar.