My Christmas present to myself. Not that I seem to need much of an excuse to buy guitars.
This is an Indie 'shape' but rather unusually fitted with a Floyd Rose licensed tremolo instead of tune-o-matic and stop bar. It was listed by Indie as a 'custom shop' item but I'd say 'short run' is a more appropriate description given this used to be in their 'custom' UK range as far as I know and still appears in the US range. The other 'custom shop' models I have are noticeably different in some way to the standard/custom/extreme models.
Nonetheless it's very nicely finished item, with a deep carved maple top over the usual mahogany body and full neck binding. Somebody has put some real care into the finishing and setup, either at the factory or here in the UK. The Floyd is a good quality licensed affair, it's a shame it's not a Gotoh or Floyd original, but it's still well machined. Oddly they've chosen to fit locking machine heads even though it's got a locking nut. Still that'll make it dead easy to restring.
It has Indie's high output Alnico 5 DV8 pickups and having played it a bit in the last few days they seem better in this than in my other 'custom shop' guitars. Perhaps they changed the spec or manufacturer. Or it could just be the simple lack of active pre-amp and associated bypass switching, which I've not found very satisfactory in the others. I'm building up to rip this out of them. They're currently selling DV8s very cheaply on eBay and if I didn't have a massive pile of alternative pickups kicking around I'd be tempted to buy a couple of sets in.
I had been wondering about picking up one of the cheap 'Festivals' that are for sale regularly and attempting to fit a Floyd as a bit of a project, but thankfully this negates that as I'd never have got round to it.
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