“Gypsy” turned out to be a bit of a pleasant surprise. I sold my semi-hollow Ibby AS83 a couple months ago, but not before I pulled the P-Rails out of her and put back the stock ACH humbuckers. Ever since then I’ve been keeping a loose eye open for a good platform for my orphaned P-Rails. I stumbled across a cheap LP copy at GuitarFetish and thought “What the hell... it can’t be THAT bad.” So I ordered an XV-550 which comes stock with the GFS Crunchy Pats humbuckers. They’re supposed to be pretty decent, so I figured I’d use them for some future project.
It showed up at work on January 6th and WOW! This guitar is BEAUTIFUL!
But beauty isn’t everything of course. I tuned it up at work and it definitely had some intonation issues out of the box. Frets felt good though. I didn’t spend any real quality time with her until the following weekend when I sat down and started figuring out the intonation problems. Turns out that there wasn’t enough travel in the G string saddle. I tried taking it out and turning it around, but the cheap bridge ended up stripping out on me. Fortunately I still had the original bridge from my Ibanez AS83 around, which was much heavier, had more travel for the saddles, and fit the existing posts and spacing perfectly. Changing the bridge allowed me to get it intonated and now it’s a really great guitar!
Especially for $239!
What about the pickups you ask? Well, it turns out that the GFS Crunchy Pats sound really great and I also remembered how much of a PIA it is to work on a semi-hollow. I’m officially now STILL looking for a good platform for my P-Rails!
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It showed up at work on January 6th and WOW! This guitar is BEAUTIFUL!
But beauty isn’t everything of course. I tuned it up at work and it definitely had some intonation issues out of the box. Frets felt good though. I didn’t spend any real quality time with her until the following weekend when I sat down and started figuring out the intonation problems. Turns out that there wasn’t enough travel in the G string saddle. I tried taking it out and turning it around, but the cheap bridge ended up stripping out on me. Fortunately I still had the original bridge from my Ibanez AS83 around, which was much heavier, had more travel for the saddles, and fit the existing posts and spacing perfectly. Changing the bridge allowed me to get it intonated and now it’s a really great guitar!
Especially for $239!
What about the pickups you ask? Well, it turns out that the GFS Crunchy Pats sound really great and I also remembered how much of a PIA it is to work on a semi-hollow. I’m officially now STILL looking for a good platform for my P-Rails!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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