Raven RP-350

2000 model from Korea. PRS style greenburst flame maple over mahogany body. Mahogany neck, rosewood fret board. Beautiful finish! A real looker. Chrome hardware. I replaced with gold. Set neck. 2 hums, tun-o matic bridge and stop tailpiece. Awful no name tuners. Even after tightening, they'd slip!

I play extremely heavy metal to light jazz and this guitar covers the sounds nicely. I use a custom rack setup and this thing sounds great. Fantastic sustain. Factory pick ups were good and were actually wax potted! I put in a S. Duncan in the bridge anyways. I wanted MORE!!

The action out of the box sucked! Strings WAY to high, neck incorrectly adjusted, intonation way off. Crappy strings didn't help either. Pick ups were not set up either. I was very concerned about guitar when it first arrived, it played so bad. After I did a CORRECT setup, guitar plays, intonates and sounds great. Neck is a little narrow. Chrome hardware was O.K. Tuners were complete junk. I asked about gold hardware but never got a response. I ended up changing it all to better quality gold stuff anyways. It also looks MUCH better. HELLO!!

In it's original state, no way would or could I use it live. With the corrections listed, I would have full confidence in it now. Add straplocks though. Finish seems tough.

Limited lifetime warranty, we'll see. I bought new from a supposed distributor on EBAY that knew nothing about guitars. Have tried to contact ravenguitarswest as well with questions and received no response. Beware, a chain will probably buy these up soon!!

I've been playing over 20 years and have been buying, restoring, building, etc for over 10 years. I've gone through over a 100 guitars by now and I think I know good stuff when I see it. I currently own 15 guitars including Gibson's, Jackson's, old Ibanez, Moser, Cort, Charvels, Steinberger, etc. This is a really nice guitar at a fantastic price! I would have no problem reccommending these to my friends and have already done so! Don't miss out on a deal!

Korean manufacture. Made in 2000. First off, I think I should post a sort of disclaimer; I bought this guitar because I was quite frankly blown away by the quality of the Les Paul style guitar I bought a while back (see my review of the RM-2000) I will try to be as critical as I can even though I find that quite hard to do considering the value, dollar for dollar, these guitars are. Yes, there are plenty of custom guitars out there that are beautifully made, finished etc. but certainly not at this price point! (most of those guitars start at about 10 times the money. Once you compare, you'll begin to see why I say it's hard to be critical for the money!) I'm not a dealer, I'm a guitar player who used to work in a music store and watch kids walk out with pieces of junk that cost way more than these guitars do. If I didn't think these were a great value I wouldn't be taking the time (I type with one finger! LOL!!!)to write this! Believe me, I'd rather be PLAYING! But if you're a guitar player looking to get the most from your hard earned dollar, you should really check these guitars out.
The Raven RP350 is a solid mahogany bodied guitar with a two piece book-matched flame maple top with a single creme top binding. It has a 24 fret set neck with rosewood fingerboard with low medium wide frets and pearl dot inlays. It appears to be in the standard Gibson scale. It is in the PRS "style" and has great contouring of the top and a beautiful emerald green transparent finish (fading to black around the edges) over the flame maple top. The back, sides and neck have been sprayed solid black. It has two covered humbuckers set in plastic creme pickup surrounds, one volume and one tone control (with gold gibson style "bell" knobs), a three way pickup selector switch, a tunamatic style bridge and stop tailpiece and good quality sealed diecast tuners. All of the hardware is chrome or perhaps even nickle. It came with a neck adjustment wrench, a moulded cord and a limited lifetime warranty card.

My band writes and plays guitar oriented progressive rock/world fusion. I'm using this guitar in the studio for recording. I used it both straight through the board and with my amps (Fender) out in the main room, and both with effects and clean. It performed quite well. The pickups are reasonably voiced, though weighted a bit to the treble side as are most imported pickups. These pickups seem a bit brighter than the pickups on my RM-2000, but are good sounding and quite musical. If I had to be super critical, I would ask Raven to design a pickup with a little more mid-range but that's just what sounds good to my ear. The volume and tone controls worked smoothly and were quiet, and the tone control rolls off the treble extremely well. I was able to approximate a cool strat like clear tone with the tone control wide open and a decent LP tone with the treble about half rolled off. Since sound is the most subjective thing to musicians, what sounds good and works for me might not be what you're looking for. I can only tell you that I almost always swap out the pickups on my imported guitars (Epiphone's etc.) and I haven't HAD to do that with any of the Raven's I've bought. I honestly pulled it from the box and started to record with them.

The finish on this guitar is gorgeous. I've always been a sucker for a nice flame top and even though I don't know how thick the maple is-it is NOT a picture or veneer. Holding it to the light and turning it really shows the depth of the flame. The transparent emerald green color is really sharp looking and the clear coat is buffed to a glass-like luster. The factory setup was good. The intonation and action were both adjusted very well. I did have to tweak the truss rod to add a bit more relief because the neck was a bit TOO flat for me but this may simply have been temperature related because the guitar traveled from sunny California to damn near arctic New York! Again, you might LIKE a ruler flat board. The fretwork on this guitar was as good as (if not better)than on my RM-2000. All the fret-ends were nicely finished and the frets were solidly seated and crowned. My only REAL criticism is the quality of the STRINGS they put on their guitars. They certainly don't come close to the quality of these guitars! With all the obvious care that goes into the other details, it's hard to understand why they'd throw cheap strings on. A simple set of good quality strings made a GREAT improvement in tone and I'd suggest that if you do check out these guitars, not to judge the sound or playability before you change the strings! Hopefully, the new models will come with better ones. Overall, I'm once again amazed at the quality of woods, hardware and finish for so little money!

I see no reason why this guitar wouldn't stand up to just about anything you could throw at it. It's very solidly built with really well designed BIG strap buttons. I wouldn't worry for a second about gigging with it even without a back up. I don't think their "lifetime limited warranty" is a sales gimmick. I think these guys know how well they've built these guitars and are confident that there'll be very few who'll ever need to use it.

I bought this guitar from RAVENWESTGUITAR CO. (http://www.ravenwestguitars.com/) and they've been GREAT! Very friendly and helpful. I haven't had any problems but I know that if I do, they'll be there.

If I lost this guitar I wouldn't hesitate to buy another. I've got three Raven's now and the quality has been consistantly excellent!