Artisan EA-1 Lap Steel

I already owned and played (at my gigs) vintage 'Supra,' and 'Nationals,' including multi neck consols. I saw the Artisan, and thought I'd try one out at a gig. After performing with one, I bought three more.

I have them in sparkle red, and blue.

Compared to the Morell, which is at TWICE the price, it blows it away. The Morell has only one volume 'pot,' and a painted on fret marking board. The Artisan has a volume and tone, and a RAISED board, with reflective markings.

The pick-ups I found are not consistent from one to another. Having said that, I did replace a pick up with one I had sitting around. However, none of them sounded bad, and with a good amp, and the right strings, any would do.

This has a THREE octave range, and the SHORT SCALE makes it easy to reach and 'bend' with minimal movement. Good for me, because I sing while I play it - AND it stays in tune!

Go here, and you can listen to it's sound on 'Love in Vain,' and 'SLEEPWALK.'

http://www.myspace.com/joeyjoelsblues

I use it to play both slammin 'DELTA' Blues, and soft lyrical tunes like 'SLEEPWALK.'

I use vintage (early 80's) moded MusicMans, on both the clean and overdrive channels. Sometimes run it through a 'Cry Baby,' digital echo, and/or Univibe.

Not particulary noisy any more than any other single coil 'pu.'

Clean clear sound on normal settings, or great overdrive tone. Thick, or thin, depending how you set tones and amp.

ALSO, besides the amp - the STRINGS ARE CRITICAL TO GOOD SOUND. I recomend using a straight 14 set, with a wound third string.

As I said, I own some great vintage lap steels, yet I LOVE this one. I don't have to be so senstive as to knocking it around. (though I don't, I am far less sensitive on who else plays it, or throwing it in and out of my car).

The action is fine, and the string height is good. The input jack is too close to where the wrist sits, but if you use a 'RIGHT' angled plug, it is NO problem.

I have been playing the same one on stage and in the house for almost four years, and it has not been any problem, and it stays in tune. I always take a 'regular' guitar backup, but have never taken a backup for this. My 'National' has broken strings on Gigs due to it's metal bridge, but my 'Artisan' has never broken any strings.

I bought it on Musicians friend, and the bag it came in was under par, and they sent me a new one. Other than that, I don't know.

I've been playing 30 yrs or so. I have vintage Fenders, Gibsons, Supras, Nationals, Harmonys, and Epiphones.

I totally love this lap steel. Inexpensive, so I don't stress if I ding it, and it puts out the sound and plays well.

If you have not a money problem, and want a status symbol, then pay $1500. or more for something else. If you want to play, and play well, not worrying about much, then spend the few bucks for this one. Even a change in pickup will not break you, but the reliability is a great peace of mind. I totally support this model.

Check out it's sound on my MySpace page. (hurry while they are still up: SLEEPWALK, and LOVE IN VAIN.)

http://www.myspace.com/joeyjoelsblues

Basic ,as stated before , Blue Sparkle painted wood body w/ one sigle coil Pup ,tone and volume.

I love the sound I get from this steel , before I ordered it a musicainsfriend ,I went to GC and played on a fender ,so when I got this baby it took some time ,but I love it , just as good sounding as te fender ,but about 350 bucks cheaper.Its not noisy , Pots alittle scatchy but that can be fixed.I love using this with MXR Dyna comp ,and Delay . Get a steel bar , I use the Dunlop lap steel.
Great for counrty ,blues , and a good imagination. I have reworked songs to play with this baby.
Best thing is a Volume & Tone knobs!

Setup ??? Its a raised bridge . saddles seem cheap , but they do a good job, they don't break strings any faster. May put on brass saddles later.Bridge is cheap wood , but I have had no problems with bridge ,so I,m not worried ,(head the steel for 4 months)Saw one reviewer complained about the plastic bridge? Dude there no action on the board!
Tuners are fine

These will last for ever , The leg stands may strip out ,but the lap steel will live forever.

Well they don't sell em on Musiciansfriend anymore ,so your guess is as good as mine.

I f you find one buy one , there cheap and work get ,and everything is easy to fix or upgrade.A Morrell for twice as much has only a volume knob. They are no longer sold on Musiciansfriend ,but you can still find one at Ebay ,sometimes under a differnt name than Artisan

A very nicely presented 4x2 in a lovely black sparkle finish. The 'features', such as they are, have been well described in previous reviews.

Sounds as good as many more expensive steels that I have played. Subject to the alterations detailed below I am currently using it through a Roland Micro-Cube on Brit-Amp setting with a little reverb or delay depending on what I am playing. Any thing from Hawaiian to nasty old Blues. This plank caters for all.

Set up? Are you kidding? Slavishly assembled by nimble little fingers in the Mysterious Orient.
All of the necessary components seem to be in place. The tuners tune, the bridge is a bridge, the pickup picks up, the controls control but the nut is nuts!
The only use that the nut had was to act as a template for the replacement nut I fashioned from a piece of 1/2" x 1/2" scrap aluminium angle. The nut slots were cut with a penknife.
This modification raises the action somewhat and intonation is available at the bridge. The rather low action at the pickup end has been simply cured by the use of a shorter thumbpick.
Please remember that this is the cheapest steel guitar on the Planet and it does what it says on the box.

This instrument has show stopping capabilities in the right hands.
Any hardware issues can be addressed by looking in the 'scrap' box.
The finish is adequate but is irrelevant at this price.
It seems as dependable as any other and hasn't let me down so far.
Please do not attempt to smash this on stage as you will probably hurt yourself.

At this price who cares?

Played steel for a few years after many years with a Tele. I have number of other higher quality steels and this one does what it does quite adequately .
If this were stolen I would have serious concerns for the thief's sanity. I would replace it.

It's made in China, like so many things nowadays. It's got 28 frets, one single coil pickup (adjustable height), a volume knob and a tone knob (not very subtle). It's got an adjustable bridge (contrary to what is said elsewhere, this is very useful, unless you never play chords, adjusting the bridge is one of the first things I did.) The jack is on the wrong side of the instrument, which can be solved by using a square 90 degree angled plug. It's not clear what material the nut is made of, but it's not really strong enough (I had to pad some of the slots to adjust string height.) The tuners are nothing special, but they do the job. Mine came with adjustable legs and a gig bag - and a little hex key to adjust the individual bridge saddles.

It does more than what I would have expected from a cheap instrument (this has to do with the advantage of the simplicity of lap steel construction). It is remarkably quiet for a single coil pickup. The sound is on the bright side. I like it.

I had to adjust the bridge and the pick up a little bit, otherwise I had no complaints (apart from that weak nut).

Everything will survive but the nut (but that's a cheap replacement.)

Well, this comes from China, it's cheap and hasn't much that can break...

It's a great lap steel for its price. It's my first and I guess once I'm totally comfortable with it I'll upgrade to something fancier.

It's a lap steel, basically a two-by-four with strings and a pickup. The pickup is a strat type, and it has one volume and one tone control. It includes a fairly adequate gig bag, with an outer pocket good for steels, strings, and a tuner.

For misfeatures... the output jack is placed right where you would naturally rest your right hand while playing. Ewww! You pretty much have to have a right-angle plug on your cord. I'm knocking the features down for that, but up for the pickup choice, as I'll explain...

The stock sound is a mixed bag. The pickup is suprisingly good. HOWEVER... on mine at least, the strings weren't grounded properly (turned out to be a broken wire), the pots were scratchy, and the tone sweep was poor. There was a great deal of noise in addition to the usual 60hz hum from the single-coil.

I replaced the stock pickup with an old Fender Lace Sensor Gold, replaced the stock volume pot with a new WD 250k pot, removed the tone control entirely, and moved the output jack to the old tone control hole, and paid good attention to grounding. Now it sounds KILLER - hum-free, noise-free, fat and warm and bright and very balanced. I imagine any aftermarket Strat pickup you like would work, although I'd stay away from the "hot" ones.

So a 7 for sound before the mods, but a solid 9 after the work was done.

Actually, it's pretty crappy, but what do you expect for $50? I mentioned the stupid jack placement and broken grounding. Throw in some stripped screws and a nasty bridge design combining the worst features of a hardtail Strat and an old Gibson stop tailpiece, mediocre tuners, a very questionable wood nut, and routing so bad they painted over sawdust inside the guitar and well... yuck.

The real annoyance, though, was when I did my electronics mods. The pickup hole was strat-shaped, but not really strat-sized. The stock pickup fit, but i had to file it out some to fit the Lace Sensor. Then I had to drill out the volume and tone control holes to 3/8" to accomodate the output jack and a better (and bigger) volume pot. Cheap components suck!

While I'm at it, I'll mention that the strings come pre-rusted from the factory, and they're basic "electric guitar" strings poorly suited to lap steel use. Bleh. I've seen bad strings on new guitars, but these must set some sort of record.

I was able to fix the electronics, but the poor bridge design continues to be a little uncomfortable as a hand rest - not something you want on a lap steel.

Out of the box, it was pretty bad. But the problems were mostly electronic and fixable. Right now, I think it's perfectly reliable and should last for ages, although I'm a bit leery about that nut. But hey, it's a two-by-four with strings. How bad could it be?

I plan to gig with it, and I might buy another, just to have in a different tuning.

Musician's Friend has always worked out well for me, but then I've never had any problem. I'm sure they'd exchange it if it was broken on arrival. Beyond that, good luck.

Despite the work required to bring it up to snuff, I'm quite pleased with it. It works, stays in tune, and sounds like a lap steel. It's also very small and light, a plus.

I'm mostly playing it through a Pignose amp, which is WONDERFUL with this guitar. Pignoses can be a little dark with some guitars, but it just sings here. Better yet, it's just the right volume for jamming along with acoustic guitars and unamplified singers. The Pignose and the steel together weigh less than an acoustic guitar, and they're smaller too! If you play a lot of acoustic jams and learn to play this thing well, people will love you AND you get to solo a lot!

But if you're going to jams, please learn to play it decently first! Bad steel players are probably worse than the guy who got a djembe last week and thinks he's a drummer now. :}

I've also played it through a Trace-Elliot Velocette 15w tube amp, and that works fine if you crank it up (typical with that amp and ANY guitar). I've also started adding reverb from an EH Holy Grail pedal, which helps with the Pignose but isn't necessary.

It's a lap steel. It's not a "features" instrument. So some features it does NOT have...

It doesn't have the output jack in a sane location. Better get yourself an angle plug, because otherwise it's very much in the way of your right hand.

It doesn't have decent grounding or shielding for the electronics.

The bridge design really sucks... it uses Strat-style adjustable saddles, but strings through the back, not through the bottom. So actually getting new strings to thread over the saddles is a real trick. Oh, and speaking of strings, it had the worst strings I've ever seen on a new guitar.

This was a pleasant surprise... it sounds REALLY good. The pickup is far better than I expected it to be. Changing strings makes quite a difference, as does adjusting pickup height - experiment! As a plus, the pickup appears to be a standard strat bridge pickup, which means that roughly fourteen gazillion replacements are available to tweak your tone.

Ugh.

Worst. Strings. Ever. Construction is better than you'd expect for $50, but not by a whole lot. Durability is probably a function of simplicity. Mine shipped with a pretty nasty corner ding.

That being said, I think it's probably gonna last forever. The tuners seem okay, the electronics are easily rebuilt (and I'll do so), and then... like someone said, it's a 2x4 with a pickup and strings.

Musician's Friend is a good place to buy from, if you don't mind music-pr0n catalogs showing up on your doorstep every other week. I've purchased from them for years without problems. Throw in a slide, strings, and an angle cord (you'll need it) and you can hit their "free shipping over $99" mark pretty easily.

Despite the knocks noted above, it's a great little guitar! I've hardly put it down since I got it a week ago. A little tweaking makes it perfectly playable. More importantly, it allows me to experiment with lap steel playing to see if I'm really committed before dropping hundreds of dollars on a Chandler or vintage instrument or something. Add a cheesy little battery-powered amp and it can be easily carried all over the house. I brought it to a jam and it was a huge hit... should be an even bigger hit in a month or two when I can actually sorta play the darn thing. :}

I got the black metal flake color. It came with a backpack style gig bag with a pocket for picks, steel, whatever. A top mounted jack, a volume and tone knob, and chrome pick guard, and a white (cheap looking) single coil pickup occupy the top. The body seems to be a synthetic material, light but solid feeling. The worm-gear, non-brand tuners are shiny and seem to be solid as well. The fret board looks like plastic and has gold fret numbers stamped into it. The nut appears to be wood and pretty frail looking. Plain, yet fuctional look to it all.

The sound is nice and crisp, more bright than I thought it would be. My the audio taper on my volume knob seems to favor the upper end...pretty much all or none. The tone adjustment is rather wimpy, with the low being very muffled.

The gap between the pickup pole and the highest string is much larger than the other gaps, reducing the signal from that one string noticably. Not sure if I can adjust this. The nut seems fragile, and the wood where the notches are is very thin. This probably contributes to the overall brightness of the sound. The finish on the body is very nice.

Have only had this for a few days now, but this guitar seems like it would handle years of moderate amounts of playing. Not sure I'd rely on this for my bread and butter, but an ideal back up. At this price, get two or three!

Musician's Friend is an allright place for online ordering. An instrument this inexpensive would probably not be worth investing too much $ into repairing, although a pickup swap out might be a good mod.

This is my first venture into the lap steel guitar universe. I tuned it to the C6 tuning, and my very first strum sounded straight out of Hawaii! I'm hoping to get into David Gilmour type soloing, but I can see trying all sorts of music with this little thing. For my tone bar (slide), I'm using an 11/16 deepwell socket. I might graduate to a bullet type bar one of these days.

It's got what you'd expect in a lap steel - 1 single coil pickup, a volume and a tone control. No bells, no whistles, but what else do you *need* for a basic lap steel? The finish is black metalflake, chrome pickguard (if you can call it that), and slotted tuners (similar to those found on classical acoustics). Came with a gig bag.

Having never played any other lap steel, it's hard to make a comparison. Playing in a surf band, it suits my style perfectly (in C6 tuning, EVERYTHING sounds Hawaiian). Not noisy at all, but I have been playing it through a Johnson J-Station into an old Crate POS (the JS has a noise gate, so I'll have to play it through my Reverend amp and Fender reverb tank for a better assessment).

Personally, I think it sounds great for what it is, ie, a cheap, beginner's lap steel. As far as variety, I'd imagine that's more up to the players imagination than the instrument itself - but hey, if you think you can play 80's metal on it, be my guest. Hello? It's a lap steel...

I do wish it stayed in tune a bit better, and I'm not entirely pleased with the tuning kets. The action was waaaaaaay high (just kidding here, folks, it's supposed to be). Honestly, it's a great little steel for a beginner (ie, me).

I'd buy another one if anything happened to this one (I named him Johnny, I may get another one down the line just so I can name it Santo). I imagine 'lil Johnny will take some abuse, but I have faith. HANG IN THERE 'LIL JOHNNY! You can DO EEEET!

MF can mean several different things to musical instrument consumers...

I've been playing for 16 years. My current rig is either a CIJ Jazzmaster or a Gretsch Streamliner --->Ibanez Tube Screamer--> Boss TR-2 Tremolo -->Visual Sound H2O --> Fender Reverb Tank --> Reverend Hellhound head --> Avatar 212 cab. Somewhere in there I need to fin space for the lap steel. There really isn't anything to compare it to, but for someone relatively well versed on the guitar who wants to branch out into steel territory, I'd recommend it.

This is one of the best lap steels that I have ever played.It is made in China and sold by Musicans Friend.The guitar is a solid wood tone monster.The wood could be bass or alder.The tone reminds me of the Gibson lap steels of the 50s.The guitar body has wonderful blue paint that really stands out against the chrome plate on top.The pick up is a single strat but is perfect in this guitar.The only thing I do not love about the guitar is the fret board but it can be replaced.It works fine but does not look that great.The guitar comes with a nice gig bag

I play crying in your beer Hank Willams style real country music.The guitar is perfect for classic country.I play pedals and non pedal using a LTD 400 and several huge tube amps.The guitar sounds rich and full.

The fit and finish is fine.It looks grand.

The guitar plays and stays in tune.The guitar can stand up to hours of hard country playing.The parts alone on this baby would cost over $200.00 if you wanted to make one .You will not fine a better deal on a new 6 string lap steel anywhere.The construction is flawless.It was made with CNC machines.The reason it is $59.00 is the labor in China is he next to nothing compaired to the wages in the USA.If you want a great deal that is a steel on a steel buy one from Musicians Friend.Pros like myself are playing these and asking why go and spend extra money when you are wanting to try out the steel?

Musicans Friend is great to deal with.

I have one in all three colors.I have been playing over 30 years and have owned more steel guitars then anyone I know of.This little guitar is a fantastic steel guitar that I will be using for years because it has great tone.The builder sure knew how to build a guitar that has the sound and sustain that a lap steel shoud have.Some have tried to ban good reviews on the Artisan because America has nothing to beat this with but I hope these sell like crazy so people can get into a steel guitar without wasting alot of money.

Go out right now and buy a cheap pickup, tuners & vol./tone knobs...
and a quality 2x4, and you can make this thing. But, for $60, you
can have one that someone else built and save the time.

It sounds like the best electric 2x4 you ever heard.

There's nothing here to screw up, except the input jack location.

( I have to admit that I did relocate the input and installed a
higher output pickup in mine, tho' the PU they give you is
very usable.)

2x4s are meant to take hard usage, and I do have another for backup.

I doubt if backup exists.

I've been playing for 38 years in a wide range of styles with guitars
that ranged from bargain-simple to "boutique"-fancy. For pure fun,
there is no reason to spend any more than this to explore slide...it's
hands down the best $60 you'll ever spend on lumber. I've got two.