PROS
+ Looks great if you like mid-80s guitar aesthetics.
+ Great paint job, although a seam from one of the body pieces is fairly easy to spot for those who care.
+ Typical shredder neck: slim (~19 mm at 1st fret and ~21 mm at 12) and unmistakably D-shaped that some will love. Also the finish is satin and does not get sticky.
+ Compound radius and fine overall fret job enables minimum relief without too much buzzing/muffled notes on frets 1-7, although one does need a light touch.
+ Floyd Rose 1000 bridge holds tuning pretty well as expected.
+ Comes with a gig bag which is fine, although for the price a higher quality, more padded version would be better.
+ Pickups clean up nicely, which enables to bring some actual character to the tones.
CONS
- The pickups sound bland regardless of height. The J90C in the bridge has less character than the Duncan Distortion it is supposedly close to. It is neither full-sounding nor very articulate. Rolling down the volume does bring out some chime, especially to the neck pickup which otherwise sounds a bit flat as well.
- Pickups are not 4-conductor so there is no way to easily set up parallel/series or coil-splitting operation for a bit more versatility.
- A few frets were cut and rolled a bit too short, meaning you can easily slip off the fretboard in some areas when doing tapped arpeggios for instance. This affects the bass and treble sides, so unscrewing and moving the neck left/right will not necessarily provide a fix. Incidentally, this is the second FMIC guitar I have experienced this on recently, the other being a much cheaper CV 50s Strat.
- A couple tuners require to be turned quite a bit before they do anything (with the nut unlocked obviously).
- Unless it is fully decked back (and therefore far off the correct, flat angle), the Floyd is actually floating even though it is top mounted, so you can flutter and have a little bit of pull up range (~a minor 3rd on the G string) but you cannot install a D-Tuna without some kind of trem block. A somewhat similarly priced EVH Special would be a better choice for that use case, especially since it has better pickups, but the aesthetics are totally different and the carved top can be uncomfortable for some.
- Having the pickup toggle-switch in-between the volume and tone is not convenient at all, especially if you also keep the whammy bar fixed in this area.
CONCLUSION
Overall build quality is consistent with what one could expect for €1,100 nowadays, but certain design choices are simply not for me, namely the pickups which need to be swapped (therefore adding to the overall cost), and more importantly the top-mount yet floating Floyd which was a surprise.
