Cheesy name, nice guitar!

Nice offset style guitar at a price which seems to vary even with the same vendor from around £130 ish to around £180 or thereabouts. Pick your time carefully! The same manufacturer produces an identical guitar for the Thomann in house brand Harley Benton which goes for the lower end of the price range.

Nice ebonised fingerboard, block inlay markers and a vintage looking but not overdone binding job give this guitar a classy feel. The radius is about 14 inches and is a little flatter than your average Squier fretboard, may take a bit of getting used to, but feels nice to play especially at the high end. The frets are adequate at this price level and might need the edges smoothed off if you want to improve the feel of the neck but they weren't sharp or uncomfortable on the guitar that I played.

The ceramic P90 soapbar style pickups are adequate without being anything outstanding but give a nice tone somewhere between a Strat single coil sound and a humbucker. Think Gretsch Filtertron or the neck pickup on a Telecaster, With some judicious manipulation of the controls, A decent measure of chime can be dialled in without getting into ear-jarring "ice pick" treble territory. Dialling back a little will result in some smooth bell-like tones while a tweak of the volume and amp settings can elicit a decent growl. The pickups on this model are ceramic but the ones on the identical Harley Benton guitar are Alnico and might be the better bet for tone purists.

The generic tuners are more than adequate for the money and hold tune well enough. There is no floating tremolo to complicate things so tuning stability shouldn't really become an issue. I lowered the string action via the ABR style bridge, not essential but this improved the overall feel and playability. The intonation was OK straight out of the box but might need some fine-tuning for the more OCD inclined.

The fit and Finish are fine at this level, with no obvious flaws in the paint (poly) and the controls do what they should without fuss or fanfare. The slightly angular contours of the body give a clue to the cost savings as far as finishing but I am OK with it. The body is Basswood, about 41-42 mm thick and of light (ish) to medium weight.

Some people can get a bit snotty about Basswood. It's a neutral sounding wood that doesn't impart any real tonal character to the guitar either way but then again doesn't overly colour the overall sound too much, leaving the pickups and tone control to do the job. I personally think that some people make too much of how "tonewoods" ( all wood is tonewood! ) affect the sound on low-end guitars. Basswood is a happy medium between the brighter sounding Alder and Ash and the darker tones of Mahogany type woods. These are getting rarer and more expensive and so correspondingly, tend to be used on the higher end stuff. At this price point, there is nothing to criticise.

I was not overly keen on the colour combination but its all a matter of taste and at the price that I paid for the guitar, it was definitely something that I could live with.

All in all, a great budget offset for those just starting out or, a more experienced player looking to get into the world of quirky offset style guitars. This guitar is a keeper and would definitely benefit from a mild upgrade at some point, maybe a nice budget set of open face Alnico P90s or some cheapish Gold foils and some decent full sized pots. Maybe a cheapo Bigsby style tremolo to finish off?

On balance, I would go for the Harley Benton model just on specs, better pickups, matching headstocks and the option of a nice looking sunburst model as well.

These budget offsets would easily give the similarly placed Squier "Affinity" series a run for their money as far as this particular style of guitar is concerned, with better pickups (Harley Benton), bound necks, and price, what's not to like!