Thinking about a Strandberg, talk me out of it!

[stonge]

I picked up a Strandberg Metal hard tail in black with 2 humbuckers. Plays and sounds good, but I think I can tweak the string height even a little lower. Wanted a hard tail so I can retune to Eb without the hassle of a trem lol. 

[Jimbilly]

The Eart available from Amazon showed up for my birthday (don't waste your birthday toy requests). So far it has been quite fun, and I can sit on the couch and play when needed.  The fretwork is impressive: level, smooth and well intonated. Nice medium neck, about 6 pounds even. The pickups sound good and are well balanced, and somewhat vintage-ish, I was a/b ing it with my old Tokai LP yesterday, but my ears have poor short term memory. Surprisingly, the output is quite a bit lower/quieter than my other guitars (maybe 20% less loud?), but it sounds good, the pup ohms read 15.85 for the bridge and 7.25 neck, 5.02 combined.  It stays in tune and is fun to play. I was a bit surprised by how much I have used the headstocks as a reference point.  Also a pleasant surprise, it sits nicely on an old regular guitar stand. For $319 + tax, it's hard to not recommend one of these.

[stonge]

The local GC has a used one of those last year, and i thought it was pretty remarkable for the price (i think one of the employees had it on hold). 

Couch guitars are fun; I'll pull up spotify on my tablet and play along unplugged after mrs stonge crashes out. 

Don't know if it's a strandberg-specific issue (maybe it's a fanned fret issue), but I tried a set of ernie ball primo slinky (9.5-44 with a 16 g string) and just couldn't get the g intonated right. The g# and a were horribly sharp, which matters a lot to an E/A/D chord basher like me. I put on a set of d'addario nyxl .010s balanced tension strings, and everything intonated correctly. The nyxl set had a .017 g string; I wouldn't have thought there could be such a big difference between an .016 and an .017.

Edited March 11 by stonge

[Brooks]

On 3/11/2025 at 4:33 PM, Jimbilly said:

 

I really like that natural finish!

I put Wilkinson pups from Amazon on the one I had (and a few cheaper Ibbys, too), the alnico neck & hot ceramic bridge sound great and are cheap (I'm not putting $200 of DiMarzios on a $300 guitar).