Patrick Eggle Berlin Pro

My guitar was made in 1994. This model has 24 frets, Wilkinson Trem, Sperzel Tuners, but as I bought the guitar second hand I dont know what the pickups are.

I play most styles - Blues, Christian music in church, Metal, Jazz etc. The sound is good (esp distortion)but can be very harsh at times when played clean (even when bypassing my pedalboard). I run the guitar through a fairly complex pedalboard into a Marshall VS265R.

The only complaint about the finish is that you can see glue from between the fretboard and the neck under the finish.

I have giged with guitar and I expect it to stay the distance.

I tried to use the online webb site to find more information about the guitar but had no luck.

I have been playing for 20 years consistntly and I am impressed with the guitar. I would probably buy another if this one got stolen.

I own a '95 Berlin Pro Model that is obviously made in England. It has 22 Frets with a beautyful honeyblond solid-top maple body. It allthough has a ebony fingerboard, two Seamour Duncan humbuckers, one volume, one three ways toggle switch as pick-up selector and one rotary three way selector for coil tap (externe coils, humbucker, interne coils). In other words: You get every tone you want. Wilkinson locking tremolo and Locking Sperzel tuners. The neck is great and fits to my hand. The intonation is perfect all over the 24 frets. There's no binding at all on the guitar. It came including a real goog case.

I love the sound of this guitar. I play everything from blues to funk to rock and it fits all my needs. In every way this is a guitar with a huge spectrum of sound. Forget PRS! My amp is a Fender Champ 12 ( the old ones made by rivera) over a 4X12 Marshall box. The guitar is very quit.

The set-up was bad made by the factory. Especially the Wilkinson locking tremolo was and is still nearly unadjustable. Another problem is the neck. It makes sound because of the internal screws that are not fixable. That problem came up after one year of playing. Everything else is really topquality

It is a good guitar for live playing. Most of the other guy are very impressed by the sounds that guitar can produce. The finish nis very worthy and i still use on stage.

What customer support???

Patrick Eggle and his team even do not care about the shops! My guitar shop has taken the guitars out of there program because of the non-existing support. Do i have to say more?

I am playing for almost 20 years now and when found that guitar i though this could be the one i was searching for. I own a Fender Telecaster Standrad and a Blade Strat. I love the sound and the playability on the Patrick Eggle - it is really better soundiing than every PRS and Gibson i have ever heard. On the other hand the craftmanship is not that good. All the adjustment are a sign of sloopy work. If it would be stolen i would look for another one. But i ould look carefully for the quality. MY suggestion: Take your time in testing Eggle's guitars - at least severall hours. They are pretty good. But make sure that you will have one of the well made guitars.

As stated in earlier reviews it's a UK made guitar, PRS style but definitly NOT a copy. Mine was built in 1992. Maple (AA grade) top, mahogany back and neck, ebony fingerboard, maple head top matching body top (great look!). Finish is 'transparent honey burst' flamed but not too exessive and not too regular. Two Seamour Duncan humbuckers, one volume, one three ways toggle switch as pick-up selector and one rotary three way selector for coil tap (externe coils, humbucker, interne coils), no tone wich I tend to miss a bit, probably my only complain on the guitar. Wilkinson locking tremolo and Locking Sperzel tuners. The neck is great and fits to my hand. It's just a tad wider than the neck on my Guibson 355 so switching guitars is almost unnoticed. The intonation is perfect all over the 24 frets. There's no binding at all on the guitar, so it looks very pure and natural. The case is ugly but very good and it came with all the keys needed to adjust neck and bridge.

Sound is not as fat as a Les Paul but much fatter than a Fender. On the neck humbucker it's warm and rich but still very clear. On the bridge humbucker it's crisp but not agressive. When coil tapping to externe coils you can get close to a tele sound on the neck pu or using both pu and the interne coils sound soft. In total nine different tones and all usable. Too bad there is no tone control. I currently play mostly jazz so my main guitar is the Gibson 355 but fora more modern sound I play the Eggle and it suits the band and serves the music well. I play it through a Digitech RP6 and a Boogie 50/50 stereo into two 1x12" Celestions open back and I really love the sound I get from it, as well clean as overdriven. Great blues raw sound and heavy distortions, it sings. Chords overdriven stay clear.

The guitar dates from '92 but was new so after so many years I doubt that the setting was the factory one but it was good. It was fitted with 0.009 strings so I changed to 0.010 and had to readjust the set-up anyway but I didn't need to touch the truss rod. The Wilkinson tremolo is a bitch to set-up but the good news is that you have to do it only once. Anyway the fine tuning of an instrument is a very personal matter. With the exception of one little ditch on the body, condition was mint, a wonder for a six years old guitar even if it stayed in the shop.

It's a premium quality instrument hand made by excellent luthiers and it's totally dependable. Patrick Eggle-the man left the company in '95 I believe but he had to leave his name and design behind. He worked then with Gary Levinson (from Blade Guitars) for awhile and recently started a new brand, Maximum Guitars (MXG) built in California. Connaisseurs say that the quality of products lowered after he left. My guitar beeing from '92 could even be built by the man himself (nice thought even if it's only a dream) but it's definitly from the earlier Eggle period and I like it better than any later versions of the Berlin.

I e-mailed the company in september to ask what model of pick-ups was it based on the serial number. Seems to me a simple question but I'm still waiting for the answer. So either Patrick Eggle took his archive with him and they have no clue or I'm considered as a Patrick Eggle-the man customer and their relationship is so bad that they don't even want to talk to me! The warranty is 2 or 3 years from manufaction date so I'm way off but the store has a 24 months waranty anyway

I've been playing for 25 years, much too long for the skills I actually have but... The other solid bodies I've owned where a Gibson SG and an Ibanez Artist, both great axes but times change and so does the man and his preferences. The Eggle replaced the Ibanez for one main reason : the neck is a bit narrower and thicker on the Eggle and when I put may hand on it I instantly knew that that was it, love at first play! With the Ibanez I always had it like : I love the guitar but I wish the neck was a bit narrower and thicker. It's a very comfortable guitar, the way it rests on your body, the way your arm rests on the top, the general position, the weight (it's light) and it has a great design, in my opinion even better than a PRS. Until now I've only had stop tail guitars except on my Gibson 355 that has a Gibson trem : touch it once and you can retune. So I wasn't enthusiastic at first about buying an axe with tremolo but after 5 min. of trying to put it out of tune I was convinced by the Wilkinson: after extreme pushing and pulling Steve Vai stuff (not my style anyway), the G string was a bit out and the lower E very slightly out. The best is if the G string is slightly out, just one trem action the other direction and it's back in tune. And it doesn't have that bulky nut string locker. If you break a string it stays in tune and in combination with the Sperzel locking tuners replacing the broken string is fast and easy. And in lock position it feels like a stop tail, only probably less sustain. Something specific with the volume is that on most guitars if you turn the vol pot down, you loose high frequecies and your tone gets a bit muddyier, but on the Eggle you loose low frequecies and get a brighter tone! Annoying at first, I quickly realized that this way you cut through the mix better at lower (comping) volume and get the full fat tone for lines and solos. In combination with a pedal volume you get all possibilities. If it was stolen I would probably run around like a mad man to try to find the same model from the same period in the same colour. Lucky I was to find that combination and still new! Of course all these apreciations are based on personal preferences and will differ from person to person but I think that Eggle guitars deserve more fame and recognitions than they currently have.

Made in 1996 (I think), hand crafted in England, 22 frets, ebony fingerboard, with the most gorgeous green sunburst finish (even my girlfriend likes it), 2 humbuckers (Duncans, but I'm afraid I don't know any more than that), 5 way selector switch, tone & volume controls, coil taps for positions 2,3&4, passive electronics. It's kind of PRS-shaped, but it looks more curvy. Wilkinson locking trem (very impressive - it's like having a hardtail and an tremolo), Sperzel locking machine heads. The neck is wide (which I like - great for vibrato), and has a great feel to it. It came with a full Hiscox flight case, and when I registered the guitar, they sent me a box with guitar polishes, oils and cloths (now that's service).

My style is progressive (when I have good day), sometimes mindlessly heavy rock, and sometimes bluesy. Make no mistake, this hand made English beauty ROCKS. The bridge humbucker has so much kick that I hardly ever want to turn off overdrive - there is just so much oomph in this guitar that it's almost impossible to put down. I use it through my Marshall Valvestate (no other effects - if it's good enough for Angus, it's good enough for me). There's no noise when switching, there's no hum or fuzz or anything. There's total variety of sound, the coil taps making a great single coil sound. There's tons of sustain, and the sound is rich, deep and bright. No dislikes at all. It's as if someone wrote down everything I wanted from a guitar, painted it green and sold it to me.

The action when I got it was not too good. It took me a while to summon the courage to let anybody touch it, but my local music shop set it up for me (changing down from .10 to .9), adjusting the trem (which is a real arse of a thing to look after - it's so precise, if it's even slightly wrong, you get loads of problems). The pickups are nicely adjusted. The colour is fantastic, and the finish on it so so gorgeous that I can spend hours just looking at it... No flaws at all.

This guitar will take anything you care to fling at it - it's never let me down, and the locking Sperzel machine heads mean that changing strings takes a matter of moments (just pull it through, clamp it, snip the end, tune up, and a couple of full dive-bombs and you're away). Strap buttons are great. Dependable as my Dad (which is saying something). I'd happily gig with this guitar alone - nothing else could give me the feel of this anyway, and I can't afford another one.

Don't know - they seemed friendly, but I've not had any problems.

I've been playing about 4 years now. I've got a Fender Roadhouse strat, and I've played a whole load of other stuff (Jackson, Ibanez, Charvel, Fenix, Peavey, even Casio but that's another story). This is just the best guitar I've ever played in my life. It's no frills - no bird inlays, gold bits, or anything like that. It's all stock, as bought, but I wouldn't change anything. If I lost it (apart from beating myself over the head for being so stupid), I'd go straight to the Eggle factory in Birmingham and order the same again. I chose it because I saw it hanging up amongst hundreds of strats, les pauls, other Eggles, PRS and so on, and it yelled "BUY ME!" at me from the other side of the shop. So I did. I'd recommend Patrick Eggle to anyone - I even tried a PRS at the same time, and the Eggle just felt so right. However, this is a serious amount of money for a guitar, so you've got to be very sure that yours is as good as mine before you buy it. It won't suit everyone, but then I don't want a Les Paul and Jimmy Page does...

I love this English guitar because it is super versatile. It is way more versatile than my Strat Deluxe and also much more attractive. The body is like a more offset PRS shape, and is made of mahogany with a carved birds' eye quilted maple top finished in honeyburst, which goes from a darkish yellow colour at the edge to natural. The mahogany back is finished in natural (dark brown). It it supremely beautiful. The mahogany neck is capped with a black ebony fingerboard, perfectly inlaid with abalone shell dots, which to me look like planets. It has 24 medium frets, which could do with a dress. The 3+3 headstock, which is like a more curvy PRS design is capped with quilted maple and is finished in the same hue as the body. It is home to 6 nickel Sperzel locking tuners, which are great because you don't have to wind the strings! Just stick them through, lock them in and clip them off. It has two humbuckers, which are both Seymour Duncans', a '59 and a Custom, both of which are coil tappable via the push/pull tone pot. It has Wilkinson trem, which is the best non-locking trem I have ever played.(Never goes out of tune)

I play mostly rock and blues and occasionly jazz, and this guitar is perfect for all styles. The custom produces great high-octane rock sounds, and the single-coil settings produce great SRV and Clapton blues tones. The neck 'bucker with the tone rolled off a bit creates a great Wes Montgomery tone. I play with a Fender Hot-Rod Deluxe Amp, which is a 40 watt all valve 1 x 12 combo (see me review), and it cannot produce a single bad sound

Mine was immaculate when I got it. Action was perfect, the strings were great. (happened to be my string of choice, D'addario 10's) As I have said, it could have done with a fret dress, but this doesn't affect the playability at all, just the looks. (I won't put 10 down to 9 just for that) The finish is flawless, except for a few dings courtesy of the last owner, and as I have said is exceptionaly beautiful.

I wouldn't know myself as I have only had it a week

I haven't had to contact them before but I will soon because mine came with no literature, and I would like some, and I would also like to find out if the small chip in it could be repaired. As the company consists of only 5 people, I'm sure customer support is very good.

This guitar is perfect! I had been looking for a new guitar for nearly a year and had tried many (Wolfgangs, Music Men, Ibanez, Jackson) before finaly settling on a PRS Standard, but along came this at a fraction of the cost and to me, is better than the PRS. I can't say enough good things about it! It will probably be my number one guitar for quite a while now, although I don't know how old it is. I love it!

OK This guitar has 24 Frets, Maple Leaf inlays, Gold hardware, Two Seymour Duncan humbuckers (with coil tap and "twintone"), and a Wilkinson Tremelo. It's finished in "Adriatic Burst" which is a nice blue/turquoise colour with a little flame (think PRS Artist III mellowed out a little). The twintone thing is a selector which uses the outside coil on each humbucker, wheras the coil tap uses the inside. It has a single volume control but annoyingly no tone control - you just use the Twintone/Standard/Coil Tap to get variation. The locking trem is great as are the sperzel locking machineheads, they all add greatly to the tuning stability. If it had a tone control it'd get 10, as that's my only real gripe.

I play mixtures between jazz/blues/r&b/classic rock and this guitar can do most of them fantastically. It is great for the jazzy warm clean sound and more than well endowed for blues/classic rock. It's not quite so good for tele-style r&b (e.g. Steve Cropper type stuff) as it's tough to get attack on a trem'd guitar. The Neck pickup is extremely smooth and very sensitive to dynamics, but the Bridge is slightly more compressed and bright. It's here that the lack of a tone control gets a bit annoying because I often find myself wanting to back off the tone for the treble pickup and then crank the tone when I get back to the rhythm pickup.
As for the on-board tone selections - the twintone has a more nasal honky sound which lends itself to jazzy leads more than distorted sounds (at which point it just tends to muddy things up) - wheras the coil tap does a passable imitation of a Strat. I used to play a Floyd-Rose strat (what a mistake that was...) and this beats it out of the water.
I play with a Mesa-Boogie V-Twin floor preamp and a Marshall 8080 (soon to be replaced) and, for what I want to do, this is an exquisite guitar - really sweet sounding. Again it's only the tone gripe that lets it down.
Another minor idiosyncracy is that the body seems to have a natural resonant frequency that coincides exactly with an A note (10th Fret B string in particular) so that particular note seems far more inclined to feedback - or turn into a harmonic (even when clean!) - quicker than it should. It's very bizarre and pretty inexplicable, but it's not much of a problem - actually it's been quite useful at times. (Foxing people by getting "controlled" feedback while playing cleanly and quietly is always fun...)

It came set up with 10-46 strings on it, with lowish frets and a nice low action. I've actually had to move the action up because I play a fair bit of slide guitar on it - and that is a lot easier with highish action. The intonation was perfect and the hardware flawless. The finish (as I said before) is wonderful - there really is nothing like hand-built english excellence... There is not a single poor-quality component here.

I am pretty careful with this guitar - it is a real art-piece but it sounds great too. I think it will all last except the volume pot (which I use a great deal to back off during solos and add even more to the dynamics available) which I suspect will need replacing every 12 months or so. This is OK - my strat needed a new one every 3 months - it just didn't last at all.
This is a superbly dependable guitar - it was expensive so it should be - and I don't take backups with me (partly 'coz I can't afford one) - if you break a string just kick into a drum solo and (thanks to the locking machineheads) you can change strings in about a minute.
It isn't as heavy as a Les Paul but it's significantly heavier than my strat was - hence the better sustain.

Patrick Eggle is a very small company (5 employees I think) so the amount of personality infused in buying a guitar is enormous. They were extremely friendly while I was ordering my guitar and seem to know just about all of their clients by name (which is always nice) - and are able to recall a great deal of their past orders! Once again - this is an expensive guitar and the service is correspondingly excellent - you get the feeling this is a project that they have all nurtured, loved and seen to fruition for a long time.

I've been at it for eight years now and this guitar is a real treat - I'll be keeping it for ever - probably supplementing it eventually with an SG for slide work and maybe a Tele to add a little variation to the gigs I play at. I don't really use the trem enough to make it worthwhile, but either way as trems go this has to be one of the best! I'd definitely buy again though. Heartily recommended... (Since they're hand made you can always ask them to put a tone in for yours)