Product: Keiper Guitars 93WH
Price Paid: 95 (Euro)
Submitted
10/21/2005
at
03:32pm
by
f-u-s-s-l
Features
:
9
My Keiper 93WH is a white 2005 Fender Stratocaster copy by the german company Keiper (manufactured in China).
The look an features are like original strats. The body is alder, neck is maple, fretboard is rosewood.
The guitar comes with a 3m cable, an allen wrench (which you'll need to adjust the hottible factory settings!!) and awfully bad strings.
Sound
:
7
You can compare the Keiper with the cheap Squire Strats. Not better, not worse. Played clean or with (very) little distortion it mostly sounds like a real Strat expecially the neck pickup works great. Whenever you combine the singele coils the output gets very very low, almost no dynamic playing is possible anymore. You can't play this guitar with distortion because it gets so damn noisy, more than a real Strat gets.
The pickups are very cheap, so are the volume and tone knobs. I'll probably gonna exchange them sometime... Anyway, I'll give here a 7 because for a 95 Euros guitar the sound is absolutly accepable.
Action, Fit, & Finish
:
5
The finish looks good. I haven't gigged with the guitar yet (and probably never will) so I can't tell if its gonna stand some major bumps.
The hardware is very cheap as you can expext it for that price. The tuners are crap, exchange is a must. The pickups and potis are not very good either but they work. The tremolo system works a little different compared to the Fender ones but it works and I don't use it anyway. The body and neck are build very well there are no visible flaws. Some frets where a little scratchy while bending but after I exchanged the strings and played a bit this problem got solved without useing a file.
The factory set-up was the worst I've ever seen. Every string was in a different height. It took some time to get the guitar playable not to mention the stings.
I'll only give it a 5 because the body, neck and finish are good. The factory adjustments and hardware are really bad. If you're a beginner and don't know how to setup your guitar its impossible to play with this thing in facory settings.
Reliability/Durability
:
7
All the people who use a Squire Strat live can use the Keiper too - not much difference.
It seems to be dependable but I wouldn't use it in live situations because of the crappy tuners and the noisy pickups. After an hardware exchange this guitar will be live-ready but I wouldn't use it without a backup anyway.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
I've never dealt with them and hopefully never will. The guitar comes with a two year warranty.
Overall Rating
:
8
I've been playing for 10 years, mostly blues an rock. I own a Tokai Telecaster and an Epiphone Les Paul but I regulary play a Fender Strat (my amp is a Hughes & Kettner Triplex, no external effects but a Cry Baby).
I think for that price the Keiper is a very good guitar which, after upgrading a little bit, will be a good middle class instrument. If you think about buying one you should have in mind that its not a real US Strat! A friend of mine has a Squire Strat and I don't see big differences between this two guitars but the price.
If it was lost I wouldn't buy a new one because I bought it out of couriosity (can such a cheap guitar be any good?) and don't really depend on it.
