Jackson SS1

For anybody who has ever wanted a slightly different strat shape with a shorter scale, this is what you have been looking for. To be honest, I think this guitar would have been a lot better if they would have left the horns normal sized. It would have looked a bit more normal to me, but I'm more of a traditionalist. The guitar features an ash body, a maple neck with a rosewood fretboard, 22 frets with dot inlays, a wilkinson style bridge, two humbuckers, one volume, one tone and a three way switch.

UTILIZATION

The guitar was put together decently, but man it was heavy. I'm not sure where they got this ash, but the guitar had to have been in the 8+ lb range. I have an issue with real heavy guitars. For one, I have a bad back, and standing up with these for awhile can be a real pain. The other is that I don't think they resonate quite as well. I feel they sound more vibrant when they're medium to lighter in weight. This isn't a rule, obviously. The Wilkinson bridge on this is very cool, and it happens to be one of my favorite style bridges out there that's not a dual locking bridge. The bad parts are that there was a small neck joint gap, the frets weren't as good as they could have been and the nut needed to be reshaped. The nut was the biggest issue as I kept going out of tune during bends thanks to it binding, and lubing it up is only a temporary solution.

SOUNDS

The guitar had stock pickups in it, and they were fairly uninspiring. They sounded like your average medium output humbuckers. The bridge pickup wasn't super high output, and it sounded fairly flat overall, but it didn't have any real character to it. I like my pickups to have some sort of uniqueness to them, and it's hard to explain. They lacked overall clarity, too. The neck pickup was much the same, but I was able to get some decent clean tones and decent lead tones out of it. If I were to keep this guitar, I'd swap them out for something else. I think a DiMarzio Breed set would suit this quite well. The extra midrange push should help even up the ash a bit.

OVERALL OPINION

The Wilkinson is the best part about this guitar, but there are a few issues about it that I couldn't get over. Not all of these will have that issue, and some of these will be real killer players. You basically have to take a chance when you buy one of these, but you're always taking a chance when buying guitars used. Just keep in mind that it may be hard to flip.