mickyd wroteSure gets an A+ for looks. Nice job. You happy with the play?
Ah, the old question of tone in an electric guitar.
If you ask a musician, you'll get all kinds of gobbledy-gook about tone woods, glue types, fret types, pickup resistance, bone nuts, stainless steel frets, etc.
Some of the wisest guitarists say that 90% of the tone of any guitar is in the fingers of the guitarist. This isn't a new idea]The Master's Touch[/URL]
Paul Reed Smith builds beautiful guitars out of high-quality tone woods. But the single most valuable guitar he ever built had a maple top taken from a drawer front on his mother's antique dresser. Today that guitar is worth around $100,000 and is owned by Howard Leese. Howard was the guitarist for "Heart" for a long time.
The earliest electric guitars were made from a slab of wood. No body at all. Many guitarists think that while those early guitars were very important, they don't sound all that good.
Good quality electronics (and careful soldering) go a long ways toward the sound of an electric guitar, but there's no reason to assume that the electronics in a 1960 Strat are any better than a 2010 Cort. Probably not as good, in fact. (Cort is the largest guitar manufacturer in the world, producing guitars under contract to virtually all the big name guitar companies, usually for their lower lines. That includes Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, etc. Their Strat copies are probably every bit as good as the Strats built in the 1960's and which now go for $30,000.)
Now, as to this particular instrument, I would have to call the sound "acceptable." Glue has a reputation for being a tone-killer, and you can bet there is a lot of glue in this one. The construction is neck-through, so that has a reputation of improving the sound of an electric guitar. The purpleheart fingerboard is VERY hard, as you'll know if you've ever tried to cut any of it, so that should improve tone, too. But birch doesn't have a reputation for tone quality. Had I known where to get it when I started out, I would have made it from Baltic birch plywood, which is higher quality.
The pickups and tuners came off a cheap e-bay guitar which turned out to have a bad neck. They're OK, but nothing fancy. The pots and switches are good quality. But I know that the fret positions are a little "iffy" in spots. To someone with a great ear, it might be noticeable.
It's really easy to spend a lot of money for specialized luthier tools, and while I have some, I don't have a couple that I would get if I were going to make a lot of guitars.
So, I guess in answer to your question, it sounds good enough, but probably not as good as a $100 Cort Les Paul copy, which likely sounds as good as a 1958 Les Paul did, when it was new.
