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6 String Travel Guitar - Blackby Austin Bazaar Affiliate
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Features
- Strolling Trapezoidal Shape
- Full linings attaching top and back to sides
- Two crossbraces each on top and back
- Adjustable trussrod
- Color: Black
Product Description
This is a 6-stringed instrument (three courses) meant to be held and played like a mandolin or banjo, rather than on the lap. It has a diatonic dulcimer fretboard and is tuned similarly to most dulcimers, D-A-D. The first and second strings are strung as one course, tuned in unison to D. It uses standard dulcimer strings. It is well-built, with full linings attaching top and back to sides, two crossbraces each on top and back, and an adjustable trussrod. The sound is bright, with plenty of volume despite its compact size. The tone is somewhat like a mandolin. It is about 25 inches long overall; the body is just over 7 inches wide.Reviews
Backpacker Travel Guitar - Fake CloneThese look identical to many I see on Ebay and elsewhere. I picked up a couple real cheap (elsewhere), one natural blonde and the other black.
I bought them for house decoration with no illusion about getting any good sounds out of them. For house decoration purpose, they are fine. From a distance they look quite nice on a living room wall.
Tuning them up was problematic. You must move the small wooden bridge to get the scale to match up to the fret markings. I found that about equadistant from the bottom of the soundhole to the bottom of the guitar was about right.
As happens with many new stringed instruments, strings are not likely to stay tuned in the first hour or two after tuning. You might as well just get close and wait a couple of hours before any more fine tuning. After the wait, the guitars both stayed in tune fairly well.
The lacquer was slightly sloppy on the black one I bought and very sloppy on the natural one. After getting everything tuned reasonably well, I found the black one made some partially good sound. The natural one was just audibly hopeless.
Because of the low quality build you must play more precisely to get a good sound - maybe that's a good thing for casual practicing. These cheap guitars are a little louder than I expected and on the black one I could close-mike it about 9 inches from the sound hole with a Shure SM57 and actually get some useful, recordable sounds. To my surprise, because there is no bass to speak of, you can get a bright, jangly and very present sound that may prove useful in some recording mixes (black one only.)
Bottom line: good for decoration or a cheap present for your kids and if you're really lucky you might find one that makes some useful sounds.