Steven
May 22, 2009

Rating: 8/10

You can tell the value of a company by how well they handle problems and I have to say. JHS (the Vintage distributers) and Dolphin were both excellent. 10 gold stars for their books. Both have given outstanding rapid service. I can\'t praise them enough as we all know how dodgy buying anything over the internet can be.

First things first, I want things to do what they say they will do, this will become apparent as the review progresses
Secondly, this is my first electric guitar. I do have a few Acoustics and play in a folk/ceilidh band occasionally and a blues/jug band more often. Reviews of the AV3P were all good and on my limited budget the guitar was purchased and arrived next day from dolphin with no instructions.
Now, if I am presented with three knobs and a switch, I\'d like a sheet telling me what they are designed to do. After a weekend of messing about, I sort of worked it out and wasn’t impressed.
I managed to get the e-mail address of the product demonstrator at JHS and he (Gavin Coulson) was a star. He explained what they did and I realised they didn\'t do the intended things; roll control did nothing volume messed about with tone etc.
As a new to electric player, I make no assumptions on the operations of the controls. I did fiddle with them and got a decent sound, but they didn\'t seem to change the sound very much
The guitar was returned to Dolphin and a new one was sent same day. THAT is why I am so impressed with the companies. Fantastic service!

Now, onto the guitar.
It\'s not overly bulky or heavy. Compared to a dreadnought acoustic, it is positively tiny. The setup on the second guitar is fine and the action quite acceptable. It’s easy to play with little effort doing barre chords.
The toggle switch appears to be
Down = bridge
Middle = bridge and neck
Up = neck

The Volume pot is pretty much either on or off. The only adjustment between 0 and 2, after that the volume is full on.
The tone pot when in the OUT position has little effect
The tone pot when pushed in activates the middle pickup and has a wide range of tonal changes and really beefs up the sound
The roll control works on all the pickups and can go from a thin and twangy (single pick up?) to full and fat (humbucker?) so there are lots of different sound options.

This is so far a really good guitar for a first venture into electric as there are lots of options and playing styles it can accommodate…and it’s so very pretty. Only time will tell on the reliability but it feels pretty well made. I will be experimenting with strings as they wear out but the ones that come with it don’t feel the greatest but string choice is very personal.
It lost a couple of stars because the Volume is just on/off and the tone is limited without the middle pickup being selected. But it really is a good guitar

Are Guitar Players as a species afraid to ask what a guitar should do for fear of not being in the club? and then make do with the limited potential sounds they manage to get and assume that this must be what it does as they (we) are afraid to ask. Perhaps manufactures should be confident about their guitars and electrics and list what the options are so if we spend our hard earned on an instrument that looks a feels fantastic and also sounds good, we put up with it even though it’s only doing half the things they say it should do. Not all guitars are the same and the Vintage AV3P has this fantastic roll feature that didn’t work on the first guitar that was sent. If I was afraid to ask I would be missing out on some great sound options.

Thanks