Product: Keiper Guitars 130BK
Price Paid: GBP 47
Submitted
04/12/2007
at
01:19pm
by
jagged
Features
:
8
This guitar has a basswood body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard with 24 jumbo-frets and pearl dot-inlays, grover-type tuners. Electrically it has a humbucker at the bridge and one singlecoil at the neck, plus a master volume control and one tone control, and a 3 way switch. It has a black gloss finish. The body style is what I can best describe as 'rock'. The guitar was bought on ebay from Germany, but I don't know where it was manufactured. It came with a lead, tools, and a whammy bar. All this for a total of 47 GBP including shipping!
A Lo-Pro Floyd Rose licence vibrato with top-locknut and finetuners keeps the right tuning even though performing hardest bendings.
Sound
:
7
The sound without any effects added is pretty thin and very bright (too bright in my view). That could partly be caused by the strings, which are poor quality but of course easily changed. The shape and type of body also has an influence. However, it's not all bad. I hooked it up to my marshall GV2 pedal and the guitar comes alive. It really does sound pretty good with some distortion thrown in. It gives quite a heavy sound, and as this is sold as a rock guitar, that's a good thing. It's not as tuneful as say an 'SG', but for blasting out power chords it's spot on.
Action, Fit, & Finish
:
6
Action is quite high. I would not say it is a guitar that you would want to solo with unless the strings can be lowered significantly. The high e-string is also very close to the edge of the fred board, and easily slips off the fret if you're not careful. The position of the socket for the lead also makes it difficult to play sitting down. Other than that, and I'm not an expert, it seems to be set up quite well. The main problem I found was trying to get it in tune.
Reliability/Durability
:
5
I doubt this guitar would stand up to much punishment if played live often. The body and neck seem pretty sturdy but I think the switches, electrics, tuners etc might not stand up to the rigors of life on the road. The finish on the fretboard isn't too great either, and some of the frets seem a little sharp. All fixable but out of the box it's not as good as what I would consider to be perhaps better makes like epiphone or squier standards.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
No opinion at the moment. I e-mailed them to try to get a tracking number, but the following day it arrived. So, I guess there was no reason for them to respond.
Overall Rating
:
6
For a cheap guitar it's not bad. Ideal as a first instrument, especially if you like a heavy rock sound. I think it may show it's limitations after a while. I'll restring it and see if the sound improves any. I don't think I will be keeping this guitar long term, mainly because I own what I would say are proper guitars (gibson les paul, tokai les paul & sg). I bought the guitar because I wanted to see how one could be sold for such a low price. This guitar is not bad for the money, I would say as good as low end squiers, but I would say a distortion pedal or amplifier with distortion is a must.
