My rant: can you break a guitar that's already ?broken"?

Sep 19, 2007 14:38 GMT  ·  By

Even though some players which are way more enthusiastic than I am will strongly disagree with me, I'll still say "NO" to the Centerfold. Should I be a little more permissive I'd say, "Not yet". So, what's the catch, you might be already asking. Well, it's all about a guitar that claims to be revolutionary because... it folds down. The Devillian's Centerfold is an electric flip and fold axe that is said to solve one of the potential problems encountered by players: carrying the guitar!

The Centerfold is handcrafted at a rate of 300 guitars per year and comes with Grover tuners and DiMarzio picks...and that's a good thing so far. DMs usually sound great and Grovers do a good job no matter how big your strings are. OK, they say the joint is made from aircraft super-strong aluminum, with a steel bolt keeping the neck in place when the Centerfold looks like a guitar.

They also say that the guitar retains an almost perfect tuning if no one plays with the tuners. That's OK also. What's friggin' not OK is the fact that you actually roll up the strings as you flip the guitar and (doh!), strings aren't made for this kind of things! You simply can't expect your flip-guitar to sound like my Jackson with Dean Markley steels after tearing it down a couple of times! Why? Again, because the damn strings are made to be tuned, played, then thrown away!

As for the rest of the engineering, Devillian claim that the sustain is "somewhere between a bolt-on and a glued neck"... hmm, that might be, if the joint is that tightly secured as you say. The manufacturer insists that the whole process is quite simple and even fast and they may be right. What's troubling me is what are the players going to do when things get a bit out of control: tuning problems, strings behaving weird intonation problems and the like... Devillian say such a thing won't happen, because this is an expensive guitar and such problems are out of question with expensive guitars... May I "LOL"? Any experienced guitar player knows that s**t can happen almost any time, that's why backup guitars are being hauled along with all the gear... As for the last part of my rant...some psycho-social view on the "big and nasty problem players have often faced"... carrying their guitars. If you're a serious player then you clearly agree with what comes "with the job": carrying a lot of gear with you, venue to venue, night after night, and no matter how much you would happen to hate this, it's the job, man! Even I got mad when switching from the cool and handy floor processor to the racks and all the wiring and differently powering up each component and so on... but it's the job!

So stop complaining about how unfortunate you are for having to carry a guitar with you just to make a neat impression on the blonde classmate: pick up a serious guitar and start rocking. And then you'll get the chicks, trust me!

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