[now with lipsticks !] New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

For guitars of the straight waisted variety (or reverse offset).
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Flurko
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[now with lipsticks !] New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

Post by Flurko » Sun Nov 21, 2021 10:58 am

Hey OSG,

I wanted to buy something fun for my birthday earlier this month, but this year my spending budget is quite low.

As an active OSG member for more than a decade, and a semi-professional graphic designer, we all know I am therefore a parangon of great taste in gear and elegantly crafted guitars.

So I ordered...

:-* A 7-string guitar with fanned frets :D :-*

(used, obviously, I'm not gonna buy any guitar new, let alone an entry-level one made who knows where by who knows whom)

Image

I previously had their 8-string entry level model, which was for all intent and purposes a pretty decent-made and sounding guitar. Its only problems were due to its design rather than build quality : a neck way too wide, and bad sounding low strings because of the short-ish scale and impossibility of using huge gauges with the bridge design.

I'm really excited to try the fanned frets neck, it looks really fun, and most people who have tried one of these say it's pretty comfortable and fun to play.

The design language of this guitar is obviously ugly as sin, but I like the white and the maple neck, it's a nice change from the rosewood on black I had with the 8-string. And if it's a keeper, maybe a new body will be in the works ? Let's not get ahead of ourselves, for now we keep our fingers crossed and hope that the random seller on leboncoin will do a good packing and shipping job !
Last edited by Flurko on Thu Mar 24, 2022 12:37 am, edited 2 times in total.

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mackerelmint
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Re: Incoming weird cheap ugly guitar day!

Post by mackerelmint » Mon Nov 22, 2021 12:32 am

Flurko wrote:
Sun Nov 21, 2021 10:58 am
As an active OSG member for more than a decade, and a semi-professional graphic designer, we all know I am therefore a parangon of great taste in gear and elegantly crafted guitars.

So I ordered...

:-* A 7-string guitar with fanned frets :D :-*
I legitimately laughed out loud at this. :D Hey, congratulations! I hope it's as much fun to play as it is to make fun of. :freako:
This is an excellent rectangle

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Flurko
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Re: Incoming weird cheap ugly guitar day!

Post by Flurko » Mon Nov 22, 2021 2:44 pm

mackerelmint wrote:
Mon Nov 22, 2021 12:32 am
Flurko wrote:
Sun Nov 21, 2021 10:58 am
As an active OSG member for more than a decade, and a semi-professional graphic designer, we all know I am therefore a parangon of great taste in gear and elegantly crafted guitars.

So I ordered...

:-* A 7-string guitar with fanned frets :D :-*
I legitimately laughed out loud at this. :D Hey, congratulations! I hope it's as much fun to play as it is to make fun of. :freako:
Thanks, I hope it is too !
The fanned frets have me wondering about the short-lived rickenbacker 481, it's fun to see they were kinda ahead of the trend 50 years ago :
Image

(except they were thinking about it from an ergonomics standpoint, it was still a single scale length guitar)

And even if he plays a 480 and not a 481, any excuse is good to post some music by the best band from my hometown.
(it's my thread and I can rep Papier Tigre here if I want to !)

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Re: New 7-string guitar day (previously incoming)

Post by Flurko » Sat Nov 27, 2021 10:16 am

It's there !

All my excuses to the seller, it came in a very well padded box, with the neck off to cut cost on shipping an oversized parcel.
Just the matter of screwing back the 4 neck screws, and going out to buy a pack of strings as I didn't expect if to arrive so soon !

Thoughts so far : The fanned frets are weird the first minutes of playing, and you very very soon forget you're not playing a standard, single scale guitar, it just feels pretty normal under the fingers. The fit and finish is completely acceptable for a sub-200€ new guitar (bought it used for 120€), nothing is buzzing, no sharp fret ends or anything. If I'm really looking I guess the fret edges could be slightly more rolled, but only if you're reaaally anal about it. I will probably file off the fretboard-facing corners of the nut, that's all.
Plugged in the pickups sound like generic humbuckers so far, nothing to report.

I've put in a standard 10-46 set of strings with an added 58 string for the low B, the low strings are tight and the high one are comfy, the tension seems pretty equal from string to string.

The pictures are poorly lit because of the late november evening, but here's something to look at :

Image

Image

(the bunnies are obviously way more preoccupied by their internal power struggles rather than by yet another wooden thing they aren't allowed to chew on :D )

Addendum : Yes, the headstock design is awful, pointy in all the bad ways. What were they thinking ?

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Re: New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

Post by Flurko » Sun Nov 28, 2021 5:17 am

I took this pic before packing for practice today, name a less iconic color-coordinated duo :D

Image

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Re: New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

Post by DrQuasar » Tue Nov 30, 2021 1:46 pm

This made me smile and chuckle. Looks fun

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Re: New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming ! Now with "upgrades"

Post by Flurko » Wed Mar 23, 2022 2:35 pm

What time is it ? It's upgrade* time !

*only if by "upgrade" you mean "replacing dodgy cheap parts by equally dodgy and cheap parts, but this time going in a sonic direction that I find funny and/or appealling"

I was looking for cheap and cool pickups that would fit this guitar, as the stock soapbar humbuckers sounded like the blandest of bland "insert guitar sound". I finally landed on a pair of lipsticks from aliexpress, which I figured would be long enough to capture all 7 strings. As you might have guessed, I could not find proper 7 string pickups in my price range that were suited to the kind of sounds I had in mind.

I had to slightly enlarge the pickup routes to fit the lipsticks mounting hardware, but it's not like I could be losing any more money on a guitar this cheap. I also used the opportunity of a Thomann order to get a 4-way tele switch, as I've always read about the lipsticks sounding great in series.

Some quick soldering, and voilà :

Image

I think this purple Jaguar knob has been on half of my guitars at this point :D

I will have to bring this to band practice to have a real idea of how the sounds work, but so far it's definitely an improvement. Even with the pickups very close to the strings, the overall volume is pretty low, so the series setting can be very useful.

An unintend consequence of using 6-string pickups and eyeing their mounting position is a weird glitch : the lower string is almost not audible by the bridge pickup alone, and it's the same for the higher string in the neck position. In the two positions with the pickups combined, the strings are pretty much balanced, so not a big deal, it even has some interesting sound when you play a string not amplified by the pickup but you get the resonance of the other strings.

Note : the black coloring on the pickups is so badly done that part of it came out when I removed the plastic protection, leaving grey marks. Not a bad look for this particular project, but unexpected.

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Re: New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

Post by Jonesie » Wed Mar 23, 2022 5:34 pm

On any guitar with lipsticks the proper position to use is the series position. The fact that other options are available is frankly ridiculous. Series Lipsticks are a perfect sound.

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Re: [now with lipsticks !] New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

Post by threewordname » Sun Mar 27, 2022 5:27 am

If you build a new body, I vote for a mosrite shape

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Re: [now with lipsticks !] New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

Post by Flurko » Sun May 15, 2022 11:55 pm

After a few months of bringing this guitar regularly to practice, it's become one of my favourite ones. It pairs super well with what's been my to-go 'loud' amp, the EHX 44 Magnum, because it's a bit too dark with my other guitars and reacts really well with the lipstick pickups low output, especially now that I have a preamp with some EQ in between the two, see complete rig :
Image

Now, as I really like playing this thing, I don't think I will want to change the body, this one looks meh but the white is cool, and I like these ergonomics, it's especially fun to swing the guitar holding it by the long upper horn for controlled feedback stupidity.

I think I'd like to incorporate some art into it, to take advantage of its 'whiteboard' nature, and now I'm reaaally thinking of using part of this old webcomic, which I'm thinking about everytime I go to a experimental/noise show :

Image

Maybe just drawing the guy flipping off on the back, with the phrase "sir have i wronged you in some way" written on the front.

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Re: [now with lipsticks !] New 7-string guitar day , previously incoming !

Post by Flurko » Tue May 17, 2022 2:32 pm

After a quick photoshop job, I feel like I should do something like that
Image

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