Phostenix
Power User
Back story: My wife & I have been volunteering at a CPS shelter home for almost 2 years. Shelter homes are really the intake point in the CPS system. The girls are only there for a brief time (less than 3 months on average). Our house is girls 11-17 YO. There are typically 9 girls in the house.
One of the current girls owned guitars before she was taken from her home and she has no idea where the guitars ended up. One of the other girls had a guitar from a friend for a couple of weeks recently and this girl got to play again. Then the girl with the guitar got transferred out to a group home & the guitar went with her. So, our girl is bumming now, as you can imagine. She's very creative & I think it would be good for her to have a creative outlet through a guitar.
It just so happens that her birthday is in a couple of weeks, so I wanted to get a guitar for her (I got approval from the house manager to get one for her). She told me she prefers Les Paul style guitars to Strat style guitars, so I started searching for inexpensive LP copies. I ended up going with the Douglas Shadow Black from Rondo Music. $140 plus $23 for the gig bag. The bag is VERY nice. The guitar matches my expectations for a $140 LP copy. My only real issue is that they chamfered the ends of the frets a little too much and you can easily fall off the fret board with the high E string doing pulloffs & hammer-ons on a D chord. The guitar sounds surprisingly good, They have upgraded models with better woods, set neck, Alnico V pickups, etc., but this guitar actually has a good voice for clean to classic rock sounds (sorry, I'm not a metal guy, so I'm no guage of that). I spent a little time last night with it into my Trainwreck patch & was pretty impressed.
We'll see if I can keep a secret until her birthday.
Here's a pic:
Link to Rondo Music if you've never checked them out:
Douglas Shadow Black - RondoMusic.com
One of the current girls owned guitars before she was taken from her home and she has no idea where the guitars ended up. One of the other girls had a guitar from a friend for a couple of weeks recently and this girl got to play again. Then the girl with the guitar got transferred out to a group home & the guitar went with her. So, our girl is bumming now, as you can imagine. She's very creative & I think it would be good for her to have a creative outlet through a guitar.
It just so happens that her birthday is in a couple of weeks, so I wanted to get a guitar for her (I got approval from the house manager to get one for her). She told me she prefers Les Paul style guitars to Strat style guitars, so I started searching for inexpensive LP copies. I ended up going with the Douglas Shadow Black from Rondo Music. $140 plus $23 for the gig bag. The bag is VERY nice. The guitar matches my expectations for a $140 LP copy. My only real issue is that they chamfered the ends of the frets a little too much and you can easily fall off the fret board with the high E string doing pulloffs & hammer-ons on a D chord. The guitar sounds surprisingly good, They have upgraded models with better woods, set neck, Alnico V pickups, etc., but this guitar actually has a good voice for clean to classic rock sounds (sorry, I'm not a metal guy, so I'm no guage of that). I spent a little time last night with it into my Trainwreck patch & was pretty impressed.
We'll see if I can keep a secret until her birthday.
Here's a pic:
Link to Rondo Music if you've never checked them out:
Douglas Shadow Black - RondoMusic.com