Great Tone, not so Great Setup......

I picked this one up for $45.00 in early 2016 as an "office guitar" - it has since been used for parts and to create a functional yet decorative addition to a friend's livingroom. But here's my thoughts on the Memphis A-2TR.

Memphis is a Korean, Samick built guitar, and a badge for an Illinois music store. They made guitars from the late 1970's till the late 1980's. The A-2 is one of the lowest end models they had made. This version is an update on the original A-2 - which was a shortscale guitar int he Harmony H-802/Mahar vein - with practically 60's Teisco hardware and a Bill Lawrence style humbucker jammed in the middle - this guitar improves on it by using a Stratocaster block-less tremolo unit and one of the excellent DiMarzio humbucker clones that Memphis started putting in their guitars in the early 1980's.

The TR Designation means "Tremolo". This guitar takes the original A-2 shape, removes the pickguard and outdated Teisco hardware, and outdated 60's style neck, and replaces it with a rather mid-80's Washuburn like 21 fret Mahogany neck with a rosewood fretboard and black binding (hidden under red, black, or metallic blue paint), mated to a Plywood mini-Super-Strat style body routed for a through body "C" plate Strat style trem, with a DiMarzio super-distortion style humbucker in the bridge rating in at around 12K, 1 Volume, 1 Tone, top mounted input jack, and a set of budget tuners at the headstock. It's a rather simple, but effective guitar.

Sonically this guitar is very close to an old Fender shortscale with a humbucker at the bridge - like a Mustang or Duo-Sonic. Clean evokes very Nirvana-esque tones, and distorted is very thick and grungy. The Vibrato stays in tune excellently, thanks to a fairly decent set of inexpensive machine heads and a rather well done nut and so on.

Where this guitar falls short is the action adjustment. First off, it falls prey to the Memphis curse of a fretboard that was not properly leveled at the factory, making for much fret-leveling off the bat to get any sort of decent action out of it.

Another problem is the neck slot was cut too deep, causing the heel to sink too deep into the body, and causing the guitar to have high action even with the bridge saddles "decked" to the bridgeplate. This is not good, this means you NEED a shim to get a good setup out of it once you get the fret situation sorted out.

And speaking of action adjustment, the screws on the bridge are odd - rather than the usual Allen key screws used on most Strat-style bridges, Memphis, for some odd reason, opted for a stratocaster tremolo that uses FLAT HEAD screws that require a Jeweler's or eyeglass screwdriver to adjust the action for each string. The screws are, of course, made of brass and tend to seize up in their holes so adjusting the action is almost undoable after 30 years of gunk got into the threads, as the soft brass wil lbreak splitting the flat-head screws. If you want to fix this problem, you will need to remove those flat head screws via Pliars or any other means necessary, and replace them with metric thread Allen screws like a regular Strat trem.

Another small issue is if you want easy vibrato action on .009's, using 2 springs, you are going to need some strong springs, or you are just going to have to chock it up to issues and use 3, because there is no way to deck the tremolo to the body with .009's without 3 springs - which on a 24" scale guitar where the string tensions are lower, is a bit ridiculous, I think they did not cut the bridge spring cavity long enough for proper adjustment for my type of action.

But outside of that, the issues stop there. The Truss rod is very responsive, so it should not take much.

decent

This my first guitar and i got for free from a guy that works with my dad. It definitely not a bad guitar but not a good one either. the strings are too high off the fret board, the construction is fairly poor and the tone is kinda flat sounding, but maybe that just me. the only reason you would want to get this guitar is if its your first and your not sure if you really want to do this.