X-180 Park Avenue Pics

Hi,

I had wanted to polish and spiff things up a bit, but I am not going to have time to do that for a bit, yet. So pics with minor grime and dust.

I feel somewhat shy about this. I get somewhat intimidated looking at all the beautiful pics here. (Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not covet. ......)

My X-180 is not as pretty as the X-170 I passed up, but there are things I like about it better - the neck profile in particular - quite a different feel - and maybe I am sick, but I don't mind the Fender/Guild PUPS either.

Anyway, here is a gallery at IMGUR: http://imgur.com/a/cJGSY

GAD said:

What? No PICS! Must... have... PICS!

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houseisland said:

Hi,

I had wanted to polish and spiff things up a bit, but I am not going to have time to do that for a bit, yet. So pics with minor grime and dust.

I feel somewhat shy about this. I get somewhat intimidated looking at all the beautiful pics here. (Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not covet. ......)

My X-180 is not as pretty as the X-170 I passed up, but there are things I like about it better - the neck profile in particular - quite a different feel - and maybe I am sick, but I don't mind the Fender/Guild PUPS either.

Anyway, here is a gallery at IMGUR: http://imgur.com/a/cJGSY

Click to expand...

Looks very nice. And that record collection - WoW!

Very nice guitar, house! Great natural finish!

walrus

Sleeko said:

Looks very nice. And that record collection - WoW!

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Thanks. What you see is only a fraction of the collection and does not include the 78s. I am a lucky man in that the spousal unit shares my enthusiasm here. Now if I could just get the same enthusiasm worked up about guitars. Working on it. But .... happy wife .... happy life.

walrus said:

Very nice guitar, house! Great natural finish!

walrus

Click to expand...

Thanks. There is something quite strange with the top. The pictures do not do it justice as it is at its best. The flame comes and goes in intensity with changes in the light condition. The effect can be quite startling. I can open the case at different times of day and sometimes it is as if the gypsies have stolen my guitar and left some plain or astonishingly beautiful changeling in its place. My daughter's boyfriend was over last night and wanted to see the guitar. I opened the case, and it decided to put on a flame show for him. Very weird.

Love to spin me some vinyl now . . .

I was wondering where you got those plastic sleeves for the records? I'd be interested in purchasing some. Thanks!

Very beautiful guitar! Congrats & enjoy!

mbuc said:

Very beautiful guitar! Congrats & enjoy!

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I am enjoying getting to know it as it is and considering how/if I will set it up differently. It has flat wound strings, and I have never really done much with flat wound strings before. They are very interesting in the lower register of the instrument, giving the guitar more of a pizzicato string bass or cello sound - I like it but it is not what I immediately think of when I think of guitar. Also the transition from the wound G to the unwound B and E seems more pronounced tonally than it would be with round wound strings. But hey, what do I know? The guitar came with several sets of new D'Addario Chromes, a bit light gauge for my general liking, lighter than what I use on most of my other guitars. We shall see. Waste not. Want not.

As I said above or in one of the X-180 threads, the action is too extremely low for me. It is perfectly fine if I play with a light gauge pick - fast and as smooth as butter - but I get fret rattle on the initial attack (as opposed to fret buzz which continues through the duration of the note) if I play in my heavy-handed finger style or with a heavier pick.

Sleeko said:

I was wondering where you got those plastic sleeves for the records? I'd be interested in purchasing some. Thanks!

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Mostly local shops. I also used to get things from a web vendor, Garage A Records, which always had a good selection of turntable, cartridge, and record gear, mostly at very reasonable prices. Unfortunately, the proprietor has retired and shut the business down. But there are lots of other web vendors. A 5 second Google search turns up this: http://www.sleevecityusa.com/record-sleeves-s/1828.htm

There is also The Needle Doctor, http://www.needledoctor.com/ - a very dangerous place, almost as dangerous as going into a cool guitar shop after getting your income tax refund check and while your wife is away visiting her mother. Stay away. I am not responsible here, OK?

Ah ha! Thanks very much

Classy! Looks very nice - the flame woke up for those pics! Is that a fairly chunky neck? It looks it.

Jeff Haddad said:

Classy! Looks very nice - the flame woke up for those pics! Is that a fairly chunky neck? It looks it.

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Well "chunky" is relative. I LOVE the baseball bat mahogany neck on my old-ish F-30. I LOVE the only somewhat slimmer sepelle neck on my Godin LG. I LOVE the mahogany baseball bats attached to some of my friends vintage Gibsons. Although, I would not say that I have large hands, I have fairly long fingers, and can generally negotiate my way around any neck. The only exception being a friend's vintage Telecaster which had a painfully shaped triangle of a neck profile - the only use for which I could see was transferring acoustic single note flat picking skills to an electric - you would die playing bar chords on it.

But yes .... I suppose chunky might describe the X-180 neck for some people. More of a tall Capital C profile (less cursive than the font used here) than a a short capital D profile like the X-170 I looked at. Nice (for me).

I used to into shops and would check out the first generations of good Japanese archtops, Arias, Ibanezes, etc. They looked lovely but the necks were all wrong - ultra slim shred monster rocker guitar type necks - the target market was obviously not traditional players. The only one that got things right was a Yamaha something or other, but then it was a real guitar with a carved spruce top and a real guitar price tag - the same dollars could have got me a nice used real American archtop - what was the point?

Anyway, enough rambling. Yes, chunky, I suppose but in this relative respect so was the X-170.

I like the look of the maple neck. For me, a hog neck shouldn't go on a blonde maple body.