Out of the box all very well packed in bubblewrap etc. Very nice finish. Intonation was very bad, hopelessly out of tune on 5th fret and sound pretty yuk. Changed the strings to my favourite ones (electric guitar 0.010 top) and hey-presto - as near perfect as I can tell! Lovely bright sound well balanced across all 6 strings with no need to adjust pups height. I lowered the action by one turn per string at bridge/saddle (my personal preference for action) and gave a small tweak on bridge intonation screws - got the octave perfect and string to string at 5th fret, well as near as I can hear. Don't touch the truss rod - looks properly set for fret board bow. I play through a Fender 25 bass amp (10 inch) to get nice sound. Don't expect same through cheap battery amp with 3 inch speaker, I've tried. I'm talking proper clean tones here, much more demanding than distorted. Tuned to A low i.e. same as normal guitar with capo on 5th fret, hence just use normal guitar strings. The 5 position switch works as standard strat with positions 2 and 4 giving some of that fender twang and also hum cancelling, so I assume the middle pup is reverse wound/polarity as it should be. One result of small size is that pups are close together so not so much differentiation of tone /sound as on a full size. Came with free jack lead. Just remember that like any (single coil) guitar the pick up height affects the tone, I prefer my pickups very low for a more mellow tone.
I bought this mainly to play melody lines of English ceilidh and folk music because the range of first finger position from low A to high C# matches most of all published music books in that genre. Hence wanting clean sound. I love it, it's great fun and nicely satisfying for melody lines. Chords sound fine as well to me, but being short scale you have to set your tuning accurately with a proper tuner. And for the price its amazing, and fine for me, then again - I'm not a pro. I don't see this as just a child's instrument. My star ratings apply after string change.
