A good Cheap, but basic, Axe

I bought my ME-437 at a pawn shop for $55 on a whim back around 2007 or so. In stock form, it's quite comparable to other First Act Models at the time.

The ME-437 is basically First Act's Wal-Mart available attempt at an Offset Style guitar, combining lines of the Jag-Stang with lines of something like a Mosrite. I think the idea was a inexpensive to produce budget offset that they could sell at Wal-Mart for around $75-150.

First impressions were pretty much on par for First Act. These Wal-Mart grade First Acts were rather under-rated instruments. They have solid wood bodies (poplar I believe), a pretty good maple neck, decent fretboard (not sure what material, looks like ebony but I'm, pretty sure it's either dark rosewood or some other rosewood substitute), 22 modern frets, a 12" fretboard radius off the bat, a decent 8.4K Ceramic humbucker at the bridge, decent enough electronics, and a decent tilt-back headstock. The version in the picture has the six-inline (which I prefer), but mine has a 3x3 on it (I think earlier versions of the ME437 had that setup).

The pros are for the prince it's a rather nice guitar and plays fairly well out of the box so-as-long as you are capable of doing your own setup. Fretwork isn't perfect, but for a $55 guitar I can't complain at all, because it's on par with most Squier Affinities of the period. With some leveling and re-crowning of the frets I'm sure I could get the action pretty low. For a "student guitar" though it does have a surprisingly wide and thick neck. You'd think they'd be copying the skinnier Fender Mustang-esque profile more popular on this style of guitar, but I guess they needed to save $$ on tooling so they just used their standard radius that they also use on the ME-537 (a LP-sh design that shares the same neck), and ME-636 (I've owned all three of these models at one point). I have gigged the other models using the same electronics and honestly, it did a great job on stage. It stayed in tune, it played rather well, and was fun to play, though I gave it my best pro-grade setup before bringing it up there. The fit and finish for something sold at Wal-Mart is also surprisingly above par. Not a single crooked route, screwy mistake, or lack of conformity in shape anywhere.

The cons of these are really only the machine heads and the bridge. The machine heads are your standard fare for a guitar in this price range at the time, and the bridge is one of those cheap Stratocaster copy hardtail bridges where the strings feed in from the back and have the difficult task of feeding them THROUGH the saddle and over the top. I find these SUPER Annoying to restring because it means I have to push the string up using a jewlers screwdriver or small hex wrench or something like that to force it up at the right angle to get through the middle of the saddle if I don't want to have to turn the saddle sideways and then feed the string through, and flip it down. Also, these saddles don't feel that solid.

Mine has some upgrades since then though. The wife decoupaged the generic black finish with a 70's motif. I put in a GFS Lipstick Tube Humbucker which gives it a crazy Hair-Metal-Meets-Danelectro quality, with a three mode coil split allowing me Tele and position 4 Strat sounds from the one pickup. I also routed it out by hand watching Mad Max movies with some Daiso store chisels for a Pro-Tone six screw Strat whammy which stays in tune great even with the 3x3 Headstock.