Tucson_Don

This guitar was an unbelievably lucky find. Upon returning another acoustic with a flaw, I was looking for something to take its place and stumbled upon this thin super-sounding acoustic. It's only like 3" thick, and they made up for the loss of bass by increasing the width across the lower bout. Brilliant! The Ibanez neck is like all others slim and exquisite to the fingers. With the electronics inside, I can make it sound like a Taylor or a Martin or ...itself. The inlay in the fingerboard is Tree of Life and is beautifully accented by the tortoise shell binding that goes all the way around the body. The action is fast and easy. One really nice feature of this guit-box is that they gave a separate pickup output from the rear strap peg. Again Brilliant! I don't have to unplug to change out my strap-locked straps so someone taller in my band can play her. Honestly it's more like Captain Jack Sparrows compass than the Black Pearl, in that you just have to think about what you want it to sound like, and that's fairly what you hear because the guitar is finely crafted and thought out that it's a breeze to sound good, but I don't think there was a name for his compass. One note of caution, I have a Fender SR 2020 wireless that DOES NOT PLAY WELL with the amplifier in the EP10 new battery or not. I always hard plug in and have no worries.

This guitar has a wide, yet thin neck, like an Ibanez, with the neck through chambered body and slim heel on the neck for super easy access to the 15th and above. Being chambered, the presence is there acoustically before it's plugged in. The guitar holds its tuning well despite not having locking tuners. And it is light. There are 2 volume and 2 tone controls on it. The chambered arch-top body make it comfortable for the arms. So why only 4 stars? Well, the neck volume knob is in the way of an aggressive strumming path. That is a nuisance, so try not to get that carried away. Overall it has a nice old beatles-y or Tom Petty sound to it.

This wicked unit is named: Ann Margaret because she's red and curvy, and has quite a set of lungs on her. She was an 8 pound 11 oz. baby, almost a full pound more than her 3 siblings in the store. She was modified right out of the box with a set of Bare Knuckle pickups: a Mule in the neck, and an Emerald in the bridge, which was installed backwards to give some serious quack. I removed Paul's volume knobs and replaced them with Bourns push-pulls and have each pup capable of series, parallel, coil-split, and when the neck volume pot is pulled with the 3-way in the bridge position, she goes into a mode where the Mule signal is fed into the Emerald out of phase. She can elicit sounds from a Harpsichord to a surfer axe, to smooth mellow jazz machine, to rock monster with sustain out the wazoo.

This head is a 3 channel, for under $500!! It came with a 4 switch pedal, has the range from 7 to 20 something to 50 watts. It can handle any impedance cabinet! Hell they threw in Red or Blue internal LED's or you can turn 'em off! Master volume and reverb that can be controlled by the footswitch. It has independent volume, gain and presence for each channel, plus an expanded EQ range with individual Bass-Mid-Treble controls. Jeepers, those guys even give an extra bright-soak for the clean and Intense-thick selector for the 2 distortion channels. For the cabinet, I have a PhD physicist guitar buddy who is really into vintage tube amps, speakers and sound nuances which got me, a simple mechanical engineer, to looking into Celestion speaker response curves. After a month of study, I decided on this enclosed Carvin cabinet design with a speaker upgrade to a Vintage 30 up top, and a K-100 down low. These 2 complement each other unbelievably well. The sparkle that comes through is remarkable, and the bass capability with .052 or .054 strings resonates like thunder.

So I've got Ann Margaret, a PRS S2 that I modified and love, but she's expensive and heavy, so I needed a practice axe. Viola, a light, 6# 13 Oz axe I added Schaller locks to (like everything). Oh and I changed the pups here to Bare Knuckles as well: A Mule in the Neck just can't be beat in my book, and an Abraxas in the bridge, again installed backwards. I will detour here and add that this came from Deaf Eddie's ES modification where he splits both neck and bridge coils and creates a single humbucker pair from them both. This is key to more quack from a Les Paul-type axe. Now this pickup combo was made a bit hotter at the bridge on purpose because she's lighter and doesn't have the sustain of the S2. And then there's the issue of the single volume & tone knobs, that just wouldn't do, so I had my local luthier add another tone knob hole and route out the back of the 3-way so I could put in a rotary 5-way and wiring modifications like on the S2. This one duplicates the sounds most often used on Ann Margaret with Bourns 500K push pulls on both tone knobs and .022 orange caps. She goes neck parallel & series with that tone knob, and the bridge knob splits the Abraxas' coil. The 5 way switches from neck and bridge pups only at the extremes, and also covers single coil bridge, as well as in phase and out of phase. I purchased the wiring schematic from Guitar Electronics, an online shop that publishes many wiring schemes that do work, however, the one they sent me didn't have the in and out of phase wiring completed. They didn't extend the neck signal to positions 2 or 3, nor the ground on these in positions 2-4 on the neck side. Buyer beware. Otherwise this axe is solid and is handling Roto purples (.012-.052's) with no problems staying in tune.