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Old 08-01-2010, 10:51 PM
Steve Christens Steve Christens is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Twin Cities, MN, USA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tarpman View Post

BTW, I always felt MacNichols the road trips hurt CA more than helped, and more than one person at CA agreed with me. Same goes for the dealer setups Mike was offering. In truth there is not a whole lot you can do to a CA......

Huh? The only way the road trips hurt is if a manufacturer can't take criticism.

For those of us who don't live in LA or NY or maybe TN, MacNichol's road trips are the only way to sample many of these hard-to-find guitars. I took part in a road trip of the original Blackbird Super OM and was one of several who offered constructive criticism on the neck that Blackbird took to heart and used to change the design of the guitar. The redesigned OM is on the road now (coming to my house in September) and by all accounts they have a real winner on their hands. The response to Emerald guitars road trips has also been fantastic. I've had the opportunity to play one of their X5s and X10s, and eagerly await the short scale X7.

The quality of CA guitars was famously inconsistent, and inasmuch as more people got to see this, the road trips might well have hurt CA. But that's CA's fault for letting them out the door that way, not MacNichol's for letting people play them.

As for the setup comment - that's just silly. Every production guitar needs a setup to play at its best, and CAs were no different. True you couldn't adjust the relief, but you could take the action down from the typical 6.5/64" low E to whatever you wanted - and drop the action at the nut as well. The Podium in Minneapolis (hardly an inexperienced operation) makes a point of offering lifetime setups on all the guitars they sell (including CAs) - were they wrong too?
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