Hondo 775 Deluxe

I bought this new in Saskatoon Canada for $330 without a case. It was built in Korea at a time when all the good guitar makers were leaving the U.S. for Japan; unfortunately none had made it to Korea yet! Single humbucking pickup with non-adjustable polepieces, old strat-style tremolo, one volume/one tone control, 21-fret maple neck with maple fretboard (strat scale length) , candy-apple red body with creme binding, and sealed precision tuners. I bought this as my stage guitar for a very busy young weekend band and it was my only guitar for awhile until I bought a Carvin V220, after which it became my backup. I knew it was not going to stay in tune for the heavy rock stuff we did but I bought it after I had already ordered a "Rockinger" tremolo for it. The guitar was sold by me many years ago.

The pickup was slighly overwound and the crappy plywood body actually resonated fairly well. I ran it into a Boss Distortion DS-1 into the clean channel of my Carvin X-60B head to a Marshall cabinet. With one pickup and no coil tap you can imagine the variety of sounds was not there. The guitar's sound was probably its best feature. When I bought the Carvin (eastern hard rock maple body---not the type of material to build a guitar out of as it is not resonant at all) I needed to warm up its sound, so I installed Fury pickups on it (from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada; these are the best pickups made, without a doubt) and it beautifully took away the Carvin's ultra-brittle sound. I then but the V220's M-22 bridge humbucker into the Hondo and it improved its sound slightly

Before I start dissing this electric I should mention that When i purchased it I knew it wasn't of the calibre someone with my skills should be playing, but it was what I could afford and I knew it was sort of a transitional guitar.

Well it looked cool and fit the kind of band we were (the bass player was just flown out to New York to audition for Slash's new band...he didn't get chosen, nor did Sebastien Bach formerly of Skid Row). The body's finish was quite good, actually. Everything else about it was horrible. It would not stay in tune without the Rockinger trem, the neck was like a two by four, again the body was made of plywood, the electronics were of a very poor quality, etc.

It did all of the above.

Zero.

At the time I had this guitar I had been playing 3 years. I have since seen and thought about buying a Hondo set-neck flame top Flying V that looked like a very, very good guitar but it is very hard to get the "Hondo" on the headstock out of my mind...the electric I reviewed above leaves a bad taste in my mouth; the fact that I paid money for the thing makes it feel like my shorts are just a little bit sticky all the time, you know? It was a ripoff but looked cool onstage, if only a person could have magically replaced the headstock and given it a lean neck, and extra fret, better hardware, a solid wood body...ahh, just forget it; the whole darn thing would need to be replaced!

Now, having thus spewed venom about Hondos, I have just bought ANOTHER Hondo, this time via ebay. I am anticipating this new one to be of a much, much better build quality, though, as it was designed by Paul Dean of Loverboy who is something of a luthier himself and these things are both elusive and mysterious (extremely difficult to find as I think the owners usually hang on to them).