Guild Surfliner Deluxe

[Firecat]

I just received mine yesterday. I've been eyeballing these for a while and recently found an Italian store on Reverb selling them for about 100 euro less than Thomann, so decided to pull the trigger.

The rose quartz metallic finish is really pretty. There's a couple of imperfections in the finish around the neck pocket, but I can live with that.
The tremolo works really well and feels really smooth, on par with the AVRI trems I have on other guitars. Although I'm not a huge fan of TOM bridges with floating trems, it seems to work fine on this particular guitar.

Just like GGJaguar's above it needed significant truss rod adjustment and some tweaking with the hight of the pickups. I haven't had much time to play it, but on first impression it sounds pretty good to me, especially the two single coils.

[Firecat]

The frets are finished well and the rosewood fingerboard was not dried out as so many are upon arrival these days. Overall the guitar feels like a typical offset body guitar, but with lighter weight than most. The guitar needed some tweaking right out of the box including pickup height adjustment and more importantly a significant truss rod adjustment over the course of a couple days.

The guitar sounds okay, but it’s a generic sound that’s familiar, but not inspiring (for me). The DeArmond Aerosonic pickups clock in at 6.4K and 6.5K ohms for the neck and middle pickups, respectively. They are more in the range of a slightly hot Strat pickup. The have pleasant bell tones, but they are borderline nasal. Nevertheless, they are very useful and flexible enough to be used for lots of different types of music.

The HB-2 measures 7.3K ohms and leans toward the brighter part of the humbucker spectrum, but retains a strong midrange. The HB-2 on my S-100 Deluxe has a push-pull pot to split the coils, but the Surfliner Deluxe does not. No great loss, though, because I find the split coil tone to be anemic and totally useless to me, although it may be fine for other players. On the other hand, I’d much rather have the chime and jangle of an LB-1 mini-bucker or maybe a slightly hotter Aerosonic. On the plus side, it was pretty easy to dial in the pickup heights so the HB-2 didn’t overwhelm the Aerosonic pickups.

GGJaguar, can you share your pickup heights on this guitar?
I've been playing around with mine, but I don't feel I have found a sweet spot. I'm not really used to guitars with three pickups, so having a starting point would be nice

[longtortoise]

I've been interested in these for a long time. I love the overall design; such appealing shapes. I bet this could handle my need for a "humbucker guitar" and something strat-like...