Guitar Reviews

This thread is for you to post a review of any guitar you own. Please make it informative to the readers and give a thorough overview of the whole guitar.
I will set up a topic like this on the amps forum and and the pedals forum and will submit my own reviews tomorrow
thanks

This is a review on my 2009 Vintage AV1. It has 22 medium jumbo frets on a 24.75" scale mahogany neck with a rosewood fret board. It's a mahogany body with a glued in mahogany neck. It has a carved flame maple top and it's finished in cherry burst. Les Paul style body with a very handy cutaway for unrivaled upper fret access, I was going to fit it with a Bigsby vibrato system but decided against it after talking about it with Trev Wilkinson so it just has the standard stop-tail bridge. 2 Wilkinson humbuckers which I took the chrome covers off and they have the 'roll control' coil tap which although only has effect when on 0 or 10 (you could have it at 1 and it would still be a full humbucker)it's got a basic 1 volume and 1 tone (like the coil tap, the tone only has an effect on the sound when set to 0). It has Wilkinson tuners but I am going to swap them for another set of Wilkinsons (I smashed the G and B tuners so the no longer hold tune very well)
Only allen keys for the truss rod and bridge, no gig bag.
It suits my playing style very well as it gives a smooth bluesy crunch on the neck pickup and can handle huge amounts of gain for heavier stuff on the bridge pickup.
I'm running it into: Vox wah, Big Muff, Modified Marshall Guv'Nor Clone, Marhsall Class 5. It sounds great, the simplicity of the amp brings out all the tone and sustain of any guitar. the humbuckers are very fat sounding on neck, both and bridge, theres just no getting away from it, on the single coils, there is definitely a loss of volume, gain (if using distortion) and at fatness. I prefer the single coil modes because to my ears the cleans sound a lot nicer and not so in-your-face and when using overdrive they really sing and twang like sinlge coils should. Obviously there's some hum when your using single coils but you can't hear it when your playing and I don't care about it anyway. I would say that this guitar can go from blues to metal, it wouldn't be ideal for chicken pickin' or any form of super heavy metal.
The factory set up was great apart from 1 pretty big draw back. The high E string had been snapped when I opened the box, this really sucked because I had to go out to the shop to buy a new string when I could have just played it straight away. I'm sure this wasn't Vintage's fault but they should urge the couriers to be a bit more careful with them. The action was almost fine, it fretted out on the 9th and 12th fret of the high E but it was a 2 minute adjustment. All the routing was great and there were no problems with the tuners or the nut. The bridge position on the toggle switch sometimes doesn't work (it cuts off the sound) which is a sign of a bad solder on the toggle switch. The roll control does scratch when I turn it but I'm not bothered by that.
So far it's taken some abuse (dropped on the head stock twice, 2 tuners ruined from my own mistakes)One of the strap buttons was almost facing up so I got strap locks but put them nearer the neck so the screws or wood wouldn't get ruined. The hardware is built to last even though the guitar is a good modding platform. I would depend on it without a backup, the only concern I have (as should all guitarists) is snapping strings but there's no proper 'cure' for that.
Overall it's a great guitar that's very well suited to my style and although my next guitar is the total opposite (Stratocaster)I'm very glad I got this guitar

Any thought's on how to make future reviews better?

I think we could set out a format for gear reviews, please could we all follow these headings so we get fair information within each review as found on the Ultimate Gear website.

Price paid:

Purchased from:

Features:

Sound:

Action, Fit & Finish:

Reliability & Durability:

Final Impressions:

What do you guys think?

I agree, that's pretty much standard these days.

Let me make another suggestion: make the reviews a group and each model a topic.

Admin wrote:I think we could set out a format for gear reviews, please could we all follow these headings so we get fair information within each review as found on the Ultimate Gear website.

Price paid:

Purchased from:

Features:

Sound:

Action, Fit & Finish:

Reliability & Durability:

Final Impressions:

What do you guys think?

Funnily enough I wrote this review on Ultimate Guitar then copy and pasted it here. But since I didn't separate the paragraphs it all seemed a bit vague (I didn't do much for the final impressions bit either)