Hamer Slammer Special 1

This is a 2001 Indonesian-made Les Paul Jr-type double-cutaway guitar with two generic black uncovered humbucking pickups. I believe the body is solid alder and appears to be one-piece, but due to the sunburst finish, it could be a three-piece body. The neck is basic -- Gibson (24-3/4") scale, medium frets, medium thickness, medium width. The tuners are generic covered units that turn easily -- maybe too easily. The tailpiece is not very good. It is one of those pre-compensated, stamped one-piece wraparound jobs. In defense of Hamer, you could spend like $1500 more and get the same lack of adjustability on a PRS McCarthy. The G string will not intonate properly. It is noticeably sharp with the other strings approximately in tune. The action can't be reduced any further without buzzing, although I think I could get it lower if I file the frets down some. The bridge was easy to adjust. Length is adjusted with two small knurled allen screws at the back of the bridge, while height is done via two large stud screws. One could look at the basic purchase and decide to upgrade the tuners and bridge and still be in the ridiculously cheap range. You could drop a set of Duncans in, upgrade the controls, bridge, tuners and tailpiece and still have a pretty cheap guitar.

I play mostly blues, country, roots music, straightforward rock, some reggae -- almost everything but metal and hardcore. I was hoping to buy a telecaster-type guitar. This is obviously very different. I am playing it through a Fender Princeton 112 amp -- and I was surprised at how good the guitar sounded. Especially because, when I played it in the store, the pickups were set too low and the action too high. The guitar's sound is controlled by two volume controls and a master tone plus a three-way switch. I like the way Hamer lays out the controls -- in a straight line, with the three-way back behind the bridge. The colume controls work reasonably well, without totally killing the tone if you roll off a little. The tone control is pretty good for a guitar in the low-price range. You can get a decent, warm jazzy tone by backing the tone down to 5,6 or 7. Below 5, it's too mushy, but that's generally true with most guitars. The clean tone is very nice and round in the neck position, surprisingly twangy in the bridge position and moderately chimey in the neck. The piskups, maybe because of their relatively low output, have an interesting quasi-single coil type sound to them. There is decent definition and clarity. Keep in mind, I paid $100 for this guitar. It is much better than I expected. You can get a little variation with the three-way in the middle position by playing with the volume knobs -- an advantage to the three- or four-knob layout.

A couple of things surprised me the most. This guitar sustains like crazy. It is definitely not the pickups. I think it is a nice piece of body wood and a good neck joint. The guitar is fairly lightweight, but you can hold a note in clean mode on the amp with no reverb for about 8-9 seconds, with a nice even decay. I might put some Duncans in and set up a coil tap option. You can't really get that strat quack or the glassy neck/middle sounds, obviously, but you can get a number of tones. The other thing that surprised me is what happened when I cranked up the drive channel. The harmonics were insane. You can get overtones and harmonics all over the neck, and the guitar is very sensitive and responsive. Granted, a lot of this has to do with the Princeton's gain/contour setup, and you lose some definition on fast runs, but I still think the lively tone is just basically good acoustic resonance, and it translates well overall when you push it.

CAUTION: I played three of these -- same model, same finish. I would not buy one by mail or without playing it. There were huge differences. The best guitar from a body appearance standpoint had a crack starting near the nut and extending down the fingerboard/neck joint. It didn't sound good, either. The other two had cosmetic flaws that I think would have gotten this tagged with a "2" in a decent guitar factory. My guitar has a dark line in the grain parallel with the controls. It is a minor annoyance, but the key was this one sounded better to me.

On all three that I played, the action was too high, there was too much bow in the neck, the bridge and intonation needed to be set and the pickups were ridiculously low. Despite all this, I bought it. It sounded good. The body finish is not too heavy and gloppy, and while there is nothing to distinguish the grain except the aforementioned flaw, they did a nice job otherwise on the finish (tobacco sunburst, fading quickly to black. The entire back of the guitar is black, with the bolt-on neck finished to match.

Luckily, the adjustments were fairly easy, although I could not get it set up perfectly without a buzz or an intonation problem on the g-string. The truss rod is accessed at the nut end and is easily adjusted with an allen wrench (1/4"). The neck finish was decent except for some buzz. The edges aren't fully rolled or anything but they ar not uncomfortable. The guitar is easy to play, and you can bend strings fairly well on it -- although the tuners slip if you get too aggressive. The nut is cheap plastic. One more time: You get what you pay for, maybe a little more. If I had paid list ($269) for this, I would be upset, but for another $169, I could probably upgrade the bridge, tuners and pickups and have a really great guitar.

I think the guitar will need better tuners and maybe a bridge to hold up live. I think I've bent the strings to the point where the slippage is tuner related. I think the finish and the guitar itself will be very durable. I hope to get a better guitar and make this my backup, but it is simple enough that if something went wrong during a gig, you could probably fix it so I could see myself gigging without a backup.

There is a five-year warranty, but READ THE CARD IN THE STORE AND FILL IT OUT THERE. Hamer requires you to fill out and send the card in "through the dealer" within 10 DAYS OF PURCHASE to get the five-year limited warranty. It's been 25 days, but I'm going to send the card in. I think this is BS. I guess we cna thank e-BAY. I will leave this "No opinion" unless I hear that my warranty is no good. If they tell me that: FLAME ON!!

I've been playing for 20 years and I still suck. I mean, how many people do something they love for 20 years and then buy a cheap Indonesian Guitar like this as their only electric? So if it's stolen, I will take it as a sing from God (if I don't land a regular gig) or buy a better guitar (if I do). It is fun to play and I really like the sound. It's very comfortable. But you buy one of these and immediately think "When can I get a real Hamer?" I played real Hamers, Danelectro, Fender, Ibanez, DeArmond, PRS Santana SE and basically, it came down to money. If I had the money, I would have bought something better. Tobaccos sunburst is one of the few guitar finishes (black is onother one) that I don't really like. But it feels really nice and sounds good, and I think it will help me rationalize buying a better guitar later. I wish it had a better bridge and tuners. But you can customize one of these all you want. It is a decent piece of wood and I'm glad I own it.

Specs enumerated by a previous reviewer.

i cover pretty much a lot of rock genre. from blues, bee-bop, jazz to death, and rap core (it's an obsession really). this gear, which i got cheap, is pretty awesome.

i run it through combinations of zoom, boss and dod pedals into a kick-ass homemade amp, depending on the songs i will play. heck! it can blow the roof into oblivion just by plugging it into a marshall with a built-in overdrive.

warm. that probably sums up the quality sound this beauty has to offer. it's a cute furball on clean but it can mutate into godzilla with the right distortion pedals.

bottom line. it's cheap and reliable. it rocks where my ibanez dare not. i love it.

it's cheap so you cant expect it to come as the original special USA. the action was a bit high for me when i got it. but with a little bitty adjustment, it was good to go. the pickups were too low, which were eventually raised as well.

i thought the machine heads were a bit weak so i replaced them with more stable ones.

damn right you can use this baby live. i don't have the kurt-cobain-wastes-his-guitar syndrome and am meticulous with guitar care so i know my slammer will outlive me. i dont abuse my guitar (in a negative sense). i just make music with it.

by the way, i'm 5 ft 7 and 160 lbs. this guitar will not pass as paper weight, contrary to the previous review. my mba books are even heavier.

never dealt with hamer in any manner. duh?

1 yr warranty. the store from where i got it has tech support but i dont trust them. i hav my own.

my sp1 is my l8est buy. been using it for a while now. i own an ibanez rg-550 and a bc rich warlock type. on the side, i have steel and nylon acoustics.

i chose this axe coz my other two hav double locking setups. ergo, i cant altern8 tune and back anytime.

yeah. i wish it can turn into a prs. he he he.

This guitar is one of Hamer's lower ended models. It has 22 frets, solid top, with a rosewood fingerboard. It's armed with 2 passive humbuckers, with tone and volume controls and 3-position selector switch (bridge, neck, & in-between settings.) The body style is a modified strat, more like a scorpion body, to be truthful. It has the venerable stop-bridge, which I thought actually was pretty good compared so some other low-price guitars.

I guess it was OK, when it came to sound. Played straight through my 15-watt amp on clean settings, it was sounding a bit underpowered, but OK. The sound is definitely good for clean stuff, but it really needed a distortion box to work good for the heavy stuff.

I loved the setup of this guitar. The action was very low, and seemed to suit a straight-ahead, chording style. The pickups were set up OK, but I raised them a bit a few days after I started playing the guitar. Other than that, I cannot complain.

I dont think this would be a good choice for a live guitar. It is HEAVY, and really annoys me in that respect. Other than that, it's a solid guitar, and it IS dependable. I thought it was put together pretty well, without any sort of problems with fretting, etc.

Haven't dealt with them.

I've been playing this thing for about 7 months, and overall I have a neutral opinion of it. It's okay, but not great by any means. I like the tuning stability, but the sound was actually pretty frustrating when you're playing a lot of Metallica, Slayer, that kind of stuff. That's my kind of music, and this guitar is not well suited to that sort of stuff.