First Act Overtone

The "overtone" as I'll call it,(that's what's written in the truss rod cover...no other model name on the thing) is basically a Telecaster-ish body, made of Poplar with a flame maple neck (2-piece with a really ugly glue-line) 3+3 headstock, strat-style bridge, one humbucker, 1 tone, 1 volume.
I got this guitar for free at work (I'm a Luthier and repair tech at a guitar shop), so I'm not going to complain about the lack of effort when this little bastard was made. This guitar was literally abandoned at the shop by a customer who brought it in for repairs. Appearantly, for the price of 2 hours labor, you can buy a new one at Wally World.

this is a very neutral sounding guitar...flat tonal response. Nothing really jumps out. the one pickup it has is a very generic looking humbucker, but it throws a pretty hot signal. Maybe 50% hotter than a Gibson P.A.F. but with less warmth and complexity. It's not really noisy, but with less than a foot of wire inside the pickguard, there ain't much there to make noise.
I'll give this one a 5 but only because of the high output (enough to drive a pair of headphones)

Ok, here's where I have to throw a little mud...the neck sucks balls. I realize this guitar is used, abused, beat up, played hard, and put away wet when I got it, but there's a hump in the neck so bad that it's damn near umplayable above the 7th fret. sorry guys, that's just unexcusable. I fiddled with the truss rod on and off for two days, and it still buzzes. what bothers me even more is that First Act used a really good looking piece of tiger maple for the neck. they could have at least used cheap wood, and sold all the pretty stuff to a decent manufacturer rather than waste it by building a crooked neck.
The Finish seems decent though, and there aren't any extra screw holes, so I'm assuming whoever built this thing didn't make any mistakes.

well, the bridge springs were way too week, and beginning to fail, the hardware is some of the cheapest I've seen anywhere, and it's spent more time on the repair bench than actually playing since I've owned it, but I think I got'er fixed up pretty good

No Freakin' clue

ooohhh...here's where the story gets juicy. I was looking at the first Act website to see if I could return it for a cash refund, and noticed an article explaining how they've developed a guitar that can be played thru a stereo, car audio, boom box, Microwave, TV, or anything else you may wish to plug into...plus you can plug headphones into it, and the "on-board Analog active circuitry" that makes all this possible can also serve as a distortion box. They act like this is some major accomplishment in guitar design. Long story short, some bets and dares and "bet'cha couldn'ts" started flying around the shop, and I found myself committed to proving to my co-workers that I can make this little crapper guitar do all that stuff without spending more than 50 bucks.
Here's how it works:
To solve the playability issue, I kinda cheated the dare a little bit. short of a neck replacement, nothing is gonna straighten out the hump at the 7th fret, so I stuck a high-rise nut on it...yup, it's DOBRO TIME! now with a action height of over a half an inch, it plays slick as glass, provided you're using a glass slide instead of actually fretting notes, which is now impossible. To cope with the high action, I put super heavy nickel/Steel Dobro Strings on it...something like .015 gauge. Now that it plays ok, I went ahead and whacked a wood block in the body cavity to lock down the tremolo, and keep it in tune. with the tuning issue out of the way, and a nice roomy hole in the back where the springs and hangers used to be, I started looking around for the "active analog circuitry/preamp" and found just what I needed for $20...a Dano-lectro FAB distortion pedal, and a dead guitar cable.
here's where things get creative. I removed the 1/4" plugs from teh cable, and cut the solder tabs off really short, then disassembled the Dano pedal, removed the two circuit boards, and plugged the cable ends into the jacks. these two circuit boards got screwed to the inside of the spring cavity in the guitar, and the following connections were made:
-old wires from guitar's output jack go to the Dano Input.
-two new wires go from Dano output to guitar output Jack.
-stuff the 9-volt battery in next to the circuit boards.
-find the two solder points for the on-off switch in the back of the controll-circuit board, and with two 12" long wires, connect a doorbell button or other momentary switch to them.
-install doorbell button on pickguard
I've found that all this stuff won't quite fit under the back-plate, which is ok, because if it did, I wouldn't be able to get to the distortion controlls. I took the liberty of cutting a big hole in the back plate to make room, then screwing some little pieces of wood down around three edges of the hole, and screwing another, smaller back plate onto the wood blocks. What I ended up with is a raised panel on the back of the guitar about 3"square and a half inch thick, with one edge open for the controll knobs to stick through.
Surprisingly, I didn't manage to abandon the project, destroy anything or spend too much money, and the guitar is playable, unique, and now features an onboard pre-amp/distortion circuit. besides a half inch thick box screwed to the back side, the only visual clue that anything is different is a tiny black button next to the volume knob that kicks the distortion box on.
This guitar is Just what the doctor ordered for playing Slide...simple, loud, big strings, and big action