OK so everyone knows that I build some pretty nice guitars if I do say so myself, but with the move out here to Boise and the shop packed in a Mayflower wharehouse I'm not able to do much building or much of anything with my hands. So I've been spending time playing which feels really good, I'm very happy with how my work has stood up and play the snot out of my thin body guitar.
So this evening after working on some stuff at work most of the day I couldn't stand being cooped up anymore and we decided to head over to the guitar center and just do some snooping. Now I'm pretty bad about not liking Guitar Center because normally you have 12 year olds playing bad cover songs at really high decibels, I could certainly never work there as I'd be yelling for everyone to shutup at some point
. But they do get some pretty good stuff in and sunday evenings aren't too bad.
After drooling over the Les Pauls and PRS's for a while I ventured into the acoustic area, it was quiet and so I sat and played through alot of what they had with Michelle listening. I found some really odd things and a couple of scary ones, they had two Breedloves in there (surprising, as I have never seen them in there before), one was over a $1000 and sounded like the top was made of stiff cardboard, I mean it was just bad, yet there was a second breedlove that sounded quit good actually and not a lot of difference in the price.
I played a little of everything, tried one of the new entry level Ovations and put it right back
, played with a number of high and low priced ones. The scary part is that some of the cheaper ones actually sounded better than the expensive ones 
, there where some that to be honest the workmanship was pretty dang good on, especially when your looking at a guitar for under $400. Now I've been to Gryphon a number of times and the stuff that Frank has there is simply top notch, but most casual players aren't going to spend $10K for a Olson no matter how nice it is so Guitar Center fills a need.
What was a little disturbing was that some of the cheap stuff was so dang good, and it really got me to thinking about how I build and about doing things like making a cheaper line of guitars. In my playing around I ran across this little Fender GD0300, it had of all things what appears to be a curly maple top. It could be spruce but I've never seen spruce like that before, I was intrigued because it's pretty stunning. They stained the top before finishing to make the curl POP, the sides and back are just standard Mahogany and the binding is standard white plastic, it has standard BWB purfling. The headstock is ebony and the rosette is just purfling circles, no fingerboard dots, it has just a little fender F at the 12th fret.
So I picked it up and played it for a while and it sounded GOOOOOOD, very bright and open, I noticed that the X brace has a wood cap, the neck is nice and skinny and I couldn't put it down. So after about 20 minutes I just bought the dang thing, here's the kicker....
It only cost me $249!!! that's a killer price for such a nice little guitar, sure it needs some polish and when the shop is back up I'll spend some time in the wheel with it, but for that price the fit and finish are really good and it's a great little players guitar. I'm going to spend some time playing it and doing some looking around in the inside to see what they did to make it sound like that, it has standard nickel sealed tuners, it was made in China. But no matter it's still a great guitar, I intend on building something like this once the shop is back up.
So I didn't build it, but I did buy it, I took some quick snaps of it (sorry for the quality) to show it off, and if anyone knows anything about the top I'd be VERY interested to learn about it, it seems VERY thin around the rosette (I'll see if I can find my calipers and check it out) but I would really like to build some guitars like this, it just well POPS...
Here ya go:
Cheers... I'm off to play
-Paul-
