BFR-6 Second Impressions

My friend, Grasshopper, came over last night to jam a bit. He’s just getting into electric guitars so he brought over his new amp (a vox practice amp w/modeling), a new guitar (epiphone les paul), an acoustic amp, some harmonicas and some microphones. We didn’t jam nearly as much as we swapped guitars, played stuff through different amps and just experimented with different combinations of stuff.

I hadn’t played the new axe, yet, so that was one of the first things we did. We plugged it into my normal amp and listened to the humbuckers. We also swapped back and forth between it and the Les Paul. You can definitely hear a difference. I wouldn’t say it’s less “beefy” but it definitely has different tonal characteristics. We also tried the piezo on my normal settings and while it sounded great, you didn’t get that clean, acoustic sound out of it. Next, we plugged it into his acoustic amp and sure enough the piezo shined like a diamond in a goat’s ass. So then I had both amps going just to mess with things. I tell you what – the acoustic range of the guitar is incredible. I can see that I am going to have to start jacking with my rig again to get all the sounds out of it that are possible.

The other thing I noticed about it is that it’s just easy to play. That doesn’t mean I play it well, but it is immediately comfortable and it’s very responsive to anything you do to it. It feels just as comfortable, if not more-so, as my Les Paul that I’ve been playing for longer than I care to admit. I can tell that tuning it is not quite as quick as my ‘Paul since it has a floating bridge, but it still tunes up pretty quick. I even switched to some drop-D tunings and went back and forth without too much effort. Again, not quite as fast as the ‘Paul, but not nothing like the nightmare my old Floyd Rose tremolo was. I can’t quite tell if it stays in tune as well as I want. I had the window open so the room temps were fluctuating and, like I said, I was intentionally jacking with the tuning quite a bit. I’m going to jam on it some more tonight to see how it does.

I did find one thing I don’t like about it. When it’s plugged in I can’t set it on my usual guitar stand or it pinches the cable. If I set it on my tri-stand it’s fine since it sits up a little higher. That’s a pretty minor complaint.