astro wrote:How do you find the Saga LP, quality wise? Is the neck nice? Are the stock parts good?
Myself, I built a Saga Tele kit. It needed a few tweaks, but it came out pretty nice.
honestly, i think it's kind of a cheap guitar. it was about $120 and i feel like that was a good price for it. that said, i happen to love cheap guitars. there's nothing wrong with messing with cheap guitars and it's a fun hobby to put kits and guitars together. it's good to experiment on things like this.
as you can imagine, all the parts were cheap parts, but not of such poor quality that you can't use them. they were all usable... i left in almost all the original hardware, so it is not a problem for me. that's the original bridge, tuners, etc. all i really changed was the pickups. not like a toys r us job. the tuners aren't amazing but they're sturdy enough. the neck is decent... it's kind of weird looking, but i'm not too picky and obviously i am not an expert on guitars... i'm not sure how it ranks. it's nothing special. i found the body binding to be ugly, so i just painted right over it.
it needed a setup absolutely - the frets had to be worked on and the nut had to be filed down before it was really playable. so keep that in mind if you are like me and are wary of messing with frets yourself... my main criticism is that the stock pickups were awful. i can't imagine anyone would want to keep those in. i wasn't expecting anything amazing, but these were super quiet and of really lousy quality.
i would not compare this kit to a high-end gibson, i would compare it to an epiphone... and even then, i think epiphones generally have better necks and stock pickups from my experience. but if you want to put together a kit and learn about this type of guitar, it's not a bad idea. i can't say it wasn't a lot of fun for me. if you want to get the most out of it, be prepared to at least buy new pickups. i wouldn't buy another one of these because i am not crazy about working on lp-style guitars - it's annoying to have to work around wood. i prefer having all the electronics in one place under an easy-to-remove pickguard.
