I was out screwing around on the bike today and decided to go check out the Music Man BFR 6 – this is the John Petrucci Family Reserve model and it’s supposed to be one hell of a nice guitar (better be for the price).
I had to get someone to unlock it off the wall so I could play it. I tried it through a Line-6 All Tube new-fangled whiz-mo amp that I wasn’t familiar with, but got the basics down fairly quick. The first thing that impressed me was the weight of the guitar. It didn’t feel light and cheap like a lot of electric “shredder” guitars and you could instantly see and feel the quality of craftsmanship.
The guitar has two jacks, 2 pickup selectors, and 3 volume pots. It’s a bit intimidating at first, but you can get the hang of it fairly quickly. One thing that was nice is that you can choose to use the peizo by itself (jack a) or use it with the humbuckers (jack-b). If you used jack b, you could further tweak the mix on the back of the guitar but it’s not convenient as you need a small screwdriver. Maybe this is good as a large pot could easily get manipulated. Even if you used it in combination with the humbuckers you could still use a selector switch that was peizo-only, humbuckers only, or a mix of the two. Whether the humbuckers were used with the peizo or not, you also had a three way selector for them – neck, bridge, or both. In other words you could squeeze a whole ton of variety of sounds out of the guitar by just altering what jack you were in and what pickups you wanted to hear. There are even more options with tone control, etc., but I didn’t mess with it much beyond what I just described because I didn’t know you could do that.
The next thing I really focused on was the comfort of the guitar, and it’s quite comfortable. The neck had a very slight relief from the factory and I thought the string height could be a tad more sorted out, but then again I’ve tweaked the hell out of my guitars so the strings are just high enough to not get fret buzz. I then strummed a bit on it with a clean channel on the amp just to get a feel for it. Very nice, very comfortable neck and bridge setup. The floating tremolo is pretty unique and is not even close to my Floyd Rose setup. I have to say I like this one better. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t have a locking nut like I would expect to see on most floating tremolos. Does it stay in tune?
The tuning was just barely off and I wanted to see what would happen if I went to a drop D. This is normally a pretty painful process on a Floyd Rose setup because all the strings will come out of tune if you start jacking with it. This guitar has locking tuners. I wasn’t familiar with these, but quickly realized the error of my ways when I unlocked one of the tuners and the string immediately lost all of its tension. WTF? Upon closer inspection the string had no wrap around the peg other than what was required to obtain the correct pitch. What I figured out, and what I confirmed from the guitar dood was that the locking tuner locks the string onto the peg meaning you don’t have to have a wrap. I’m not 100% sure, but this also may explain why the strings tended to stay in tune better when I dropped the E down to a D. Other than the one string I screwed up, the rest stayed fairly well tuned. The tuning keys themselves felt very solid as if the gearing mechanism was somehow tighter and engineered better than any other tuner I had ever tried (even better than some Grovers). After I got the guitar in a drop-D I changed channels on the amp and played around with some chunky sounds. This is what I wanted to hear – is the guitar “thin” sounding or “thick” sounding? To be honest I thought it was a tad thin, but not by much. Again, I played around with the combination of pickups and while I never got the guitar to sound as “fat” as a Les Paul I was pretty impressed with the sound.
Switching back to the clean channel I tried the peizo only. It was hard for me to say, and perhaps it was the amp, but I didn’t think it sounded as much like an acoustic as I was hoping. Still, it could have just been me not understanding the guitar well enough. I think Steve’s Schecter has a great clean / acoustic sound. Somehow I felt like I was failing to achieve this from the BFR 6. I think I’d really have to hear it on equipment I am more familiar with and then give it a back-to-back with Steve’s axe. Also, this peizo is active and if the battery is dead it doesn’t work.
Back to dirty. Re-tune the guitar so it’s not in a drop-D anymore. Dive the whammy….pull it sharp, whatever. Didn’t seem to effect the tuning of the guitar from what I could tell. I was still dealing with the string that I had jacked up. Guitar Dood came in and asked how I was doing and I showed him the jacked up string. He grabbed another guitar off the wall – same guitar, different finish. Now what I immediately noticed is that this newer one sounded thicker than the other one. I asked Guitar Dood if he could hear it. He said no. Then we went back and forth a few times and he finally said I was right and that he could hear it, but it was subtle. I agreed. It wasn’t much, but this was more the sound I wanted to get out of the axe. We couldn’t figure out why one sounded slightly thicker than the other. If you recall, I said that the guitar had push-pull tone pots that I wasn’t aware of. In retrospect, I would guess that the tone of the first guitar had been slightly tweaked and that the second guitar wasn’t. I don’t have a reasonable explanation beyond that unless the QC from the factory is bad and I seriously doubt that.
Conclusion – this is more guitar than I could ever play. It doesn’t quite get as thick as the Les Paul, but it has a great sound, is almost as thick, and is far more versatile than a Paul is. Fit and finish is top-notch. I find the tremolo system to be one of the best I have ever seen and I like the fact that you can change the tuning fairly quickly without having the whole guitar get out of whack. The biggest problem with it is that it’s $3,000 and while Guitar Dood said they could come down on the price that is still a lot of scratch for a guitar.
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