Product: AcePro AE 625
Price Paid: UNKNOWN
Submitted
03/18/2009
at
01:31am
by
Ian B
Features
:
10
22 jumbo frets on a 24 3/4 scale mahogany neck with rosewood fretboard and abelone dot markers. PRS style solid carved/contoured string thro' mahogany body wirh spalted maple top and gold strap buttons. The body, neck and headstock have abelone inlays with ivory coloured binding. 2 EMG Hz passive humbuckers, 3 way selector, gold grovers, gold tunomatic style bridge, 1 each of volume and tone pots, both of which are knurled gold with abelone inlays. It came with a decent quality hard case.
Sound
:
10
This is my first EMG'd guitar and I'm very happy with these pups, used with my VOX AD15VT and Toneworks AX1500G multi fx, I can get every sound/tone I want from smooth jazz to out and out rock.
Action, Fit, & Finish
:
4
It looked stunning gout of the box and I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't very playable as well, but changing the strings fromthe fitted 9's to 10's led me to discover a major quality control failing. I tried to give the truss rod a 8th of a turn to compensate for the slightly heavier strings, but found I couldn't get the supplied key in the truss rod.
As the overall build quality was so good at the price, I felt it warranted a full setup, so I asked my local guitar tech to have a look. He had the same truss rod key problem as myself, and first of all tried the old luthier trick of soaking oil in the wood surrounding the truss rod in the hope it would swell and so release the rod, but that didn't work. He next cut a groove in the end of the truss rod, then used a screwdriver to try and free/move it, that didn't work either, in fact all that happened was half a nut/collar of some kind snapped off.
This did give access to the truss rod, but the problems hadn't ended, seemingly there was some kind of hard resin there, which was the cause of the key not fitting in the first place, and said resin had to be carefully burned out. Once all that was done, the truss rod was accessable and easily adjusted.
Seemingly a good few frets were *loose* which had to be tapped and glued before the fret levelling/crowning could be done, tho' I can't say as I'd found any loose frets myself. Once done tho', the action is now superb.
Barring the above, the overall build quality was excellent, with only a few minor niggles regarding the finish/laquer, but you have to look closely to actually find them. It's a shame about the truss rod issue as it means I'm going to have to mark this down, when a little more effort with quality control would have stopped this guitar being shipped to my supplier.
Reliability/Durability
:
7
Everything about this guitar screams quality, tho' as desribed above, it wasn't in reality. Everything appears substantial enough to use for regular live use, tho' as a hobby guitarist I'll never put it to the test.
Customer Support
:
7
No contact with AcePro themselves, but the supplier was as helpful as I could have hoped for.
Overall Rating
:
10
After all the faults I've detailed, it might come as a surprise to see me giving this guitar a 10 for overall rating. This is purely based on the quality of woods and hardware used at the price I paid. I won't claim the woods are premium grade, they simply can't be, but to find them used at all on a guitar at this price is simply staggering imo. It looks absolutely stunning, and after the setup now plays and sounds as well as it looks.
Even with it's faults, I'd happily take a chance on buying another if something happened to this one. If AcePro could get their act togetgher regarding quality control, they would surely become a name brand.
