You can see how the upper rest has been bent almost parallel to the body. I did that with a bench vise and a bad attidude.
What else did I learn?
- More composites in the neck, or none at all. The neck is strong but I'm not sure it's much better/different than a wood neck.
- Keep knobs farther away from the bridge. Sometimes during extended palm-muted riffing sessions, I find I've nudged the bridge volume down with the back edge of my hand.
- I've always hated the G string - it sounds nasty on every guitar I've ever owned. But on this guitar it doesn't, because somehow the composite neck is eating those frequencies and damping them down. It's so pronounced that I've noticed the G string has less sustain than the others. This is kind of cool but I'm not sure it's all good. Some fret positions on the G string die out quicker than I'd like them to.
- The balance of the guitar is excellent with respect to the leg rest. I record with this guitar exclusively and whether I use the strap or not it stays where I put it when I'm sitting down.
- The arm rest is still a lot taller with respect to the bridge than most other guitars. But it works well.
- The EMG 81 TWX and 89 XR pickups sound very nice. It's a pretty non-resonant, clinical sounding guitar and the pickups convey that accurately. I've never played any other EMGs so I can't tell you about the X thing. The guitar sound itself sounds sweet enough in neck single coil, fat and nasty in neck humbucker mode, brutal and cutting in bridge humbucker mode, and thin as all hell in bridge single coil mode. The neck single coil mode evokes enough of that strat neck thing that I'm very satisfied with it. The middle position doesn't do much for me; mixing the two pickups in single coil mode doesn't evoke any of the sound of mixed neck/middle on my G&L S-500. So...
- Based on all that, next time I'd skip the dual mode pickups. The dual mode pickup in the neck position is probably more than I need, as well. I should have done single 80X/SAX/SAX, I think. That's just me. I love the strat single coil sound in the neck/middle positions, and I love humbuckers at the bridge, and that's all there is to it.
- Battery life is nuts. I've had two batteries in there in the past 6-7 months, and I only changed them to see if a new one sounded different - it didn't.
- I'm glad I made it funny looking. There are quite enough strats, teles, pauls and prs's in the world IMHO.