Blueshawk tingles, but Fretlight woes

I've put an offer in for a Blueshawk....its a limited edition model with a few customisations, which makes it ingeresting, to me at least.. The US supplier really ended up a bit of a dead end, strange emails which felt like cut and paste efforts to other buyers so I've given up on that, despite the warehouse full of Blueshawks I suspect its going to cost too much once you factor in postage and import..so need to look to the UK/Europe.

The owner of this House of Blues BH is asking a fair bit for his, though he seems to have not noticed its been altered from stock..that removes its limited edition price tag and puts it into the slightly lower "cared for" price range, so I've offered him an amount I think reflects that..we'll see.


The Fretlight woes however continue, in spite of some sterling efforts on the part of the Fretlight exec who sent me a new cable and some replacement nuts and a huge T-shirt (thanks for that it was a nice thought but a bit big for me (must keep eating)), the thing is still noisy as hell when hooked up to a computer..Though admittidly gets better with good cables.

But shielding is clearly an issue thats not going to go away easily.

More interesting was the new nuts, I was set 4 all "cut" the same way and needed normal shaping to fit. Since I wanted to play the Fretlight today, I did a quick temp replacment of the nut myself which provides proper spacing again for the strings, but once again..the cut of the nut leaves a lot to be desired...1st and 2nd strings popping out of the cut every time you do a tone bend lower than fret 3. I'm not going to attempt a re-cut though, its too special a job.

So...basically its a pretty poor quality guitar, nut cutting is a skill that if not done correctly totally ruins an otherwise ok guitar.
Not to worry though, in the hands of a good tech it can be saved, I will be taking it to a guy in Breda to have the nut properly set (I didn't adjust the height, leaving its intonation all over the pace) and cut to hold the strings and maybe get rid of the buzzes which could be down to some poor soldering.

I've had a lot of good results in the old days when I bought mostly cheap guitars of taking them to good luthiers and having them setup properly, my old Epiphone strat copy was one of the cheapest bits of crap around but set up well I got a lot of compliments about how well it played.

I'll take the Fretlight to the shop on Monday and let them do some magic on it, if it comes back a good guitar, I'll keep it, otherwise...ebay!



Ahthankyew