NGD Rusti Guitars Lotus #1 headless

[DirtyPuma]

Dear forum members,

so far I used this forum only to inform myself about experiences on guitars / companies / builders. Today I decided to post this and it was not an easy decision for me. However, I wanted to provide some information to other members here myself instead of only "taking".

In 2019 I ordered a headless custom guitar from Rusti Guitars. After long waiting time we decided to go for a new prototype of his most recent headless design, the "Lotus". I had my specs pretty much set from the beginning and did not change much.

[…] Frets [were] stainless steel (Jumbo, semi-hemispherical fret ends), fretboard and neck (bolt-on) [were] made from flamed maple (4 thin Wenge stripes in the neck, 9-piece construction). Fretboard [featured] a Lotus-themed inlay and a faded fret-scalloping. Double-action truss rod and 2 carbon-fiber rods [were] incorporated within the neck.

Body [was] made out of highly-figured walnut with a flamed maple top and a Wenge middle-layer. The body [was] partly chambered to make up for the wood weight. The body, neck, and fretboard [were] satin-finished. The top [was] finished in a high-quality blue/natural burst. Cavity covers on the back [were] made from Aluminium and engraved with a Lotus theme and "#1".

Electronics [featured] a small 2-way killswitch, 3-way pickup selector, and push-pull volume knob (coil splitting). Bridge [was] a Sophia 2:92 tremolo bridge with the Global Tuner Pro. Furthermore, 2 stabilizer pins and Drop-Tuner [were] mounted on the guitar. Headpieces [were] ABM single headpieces. Nut [was] a Graphtech nut. Straps [could] be mounted via Dunlop Flush Straplocks.

Included [was] a Quantum Industries gigbag and a set of high-quality tools (screwdriver + allen keys). […]




Total price was 4 800 €, I paid 5 000 € just out of generosity.

Now, here comes the twist: That text actually comes from the description text when I sold that guitar off. After only a couple of months.

Why should I sell off this great looking guitar?

The guitar arrived at my address after a waiting time of 2 years and while I was very happy to finally receive this guitar and obviously hyped by the great looking images of it, it didn't take long until I got my first doubts about this purchase…

First thing I noticed when playing the guitar unplugged was the hefty weight, which was around 3.0 to 3.5 kg and quite a lot for what I expected it to be. I ordered the guitar to be "lightweight". Well, some people would still call it that, but for a headless 6-string this is not really lighweight in my opinion.

Next thing that popped up was the tremolo. It felt really odd. Pushing down and then letting it go up again felt as if there were 3 distinct phases. I exptected the stabilizer pins to have a certain impact on the trem feeling, but 2 kind of "hard" contact points of the tremolo? This was strange. Well I had a look at the inside and what did I find?



The tremolo was angled compared to the cavity. The builder tried to correct this by putting some small tape in front of one of the pins. However, it did not alleviate the problem. Furthermore, the tremolo was set up incorrectly from the start: The "global tuning wheel" of that trem is supposed to go in both directions. However the cavity was routed / the tremolo mounted in such a way that the tuning wheel was always at one end of the spectrum. Here you can see how the tremolo would be set up correctly (notice the small gap) at the zero point:



Totally unrelated to this, there was a strong buzz when fretting the A and D strings. Brought the guitar to a technician to get the neck relief checked. All fine. Actually, the 3rd fret was not level enough with the other frets or got loose. The technician was able to hammer it into place. The problem was much less distracting then.

I contacted the builder on the trem issues bu to no avail. Acc. to him "all was fine" and there were no flaws from his side. So, I contacted the CSL tremolo manufacturer. He told me how to take that trem apart, try this and that, but in the end I was not able to correct this. The trem manufacturer told me that this must be the fault of the guitar maker then…


This is just the start of the story, have to stop for now. I will continue this soon!

 

[ExMachina]

Well it looks good at least. Shame it was flawed.

 

[DirtyPuma]

Part 2:
As mentioned before, the tremolo was not working as expected (and also not as designed due to the incorrect mount / cavity route), so I decided to remove the stabilizer pins for good in order to make the global tuning wheel working as it was supposed to work (having the correct setting at the zero point, compare my last image in the initial post).

But this was just the start of issues I noticed in that guitar. There were recurring drops in sound volume when playing the guitar through an amp and there was no recognizable pattern behind this. So I went back to the guitar tech and had the electronic and pups (pups were humbuckers, "Oracle", handmade / designed and provided by the builder). They checked the guitar, but the issue did not pop up frequent enough to be much noticed in the short time at the shop. But eventually they were able to get the same issue when testing the guitar.

They found out that the issue was a mulfunctioning pickup-selector switch and decision was made to exchange it for a new selector switch. Fine, I thought. Guitar came back to me and issue was indeed not encountered again. Builder was confused how this could ever happen with such a quality switch as the one put into the guitar. However, it happened anyway and it seems the guitar was lacking quality control in that regard.

Well, next thing I noticed relatively quickly is that the guitar sounded very "dead" and I had to adjust any EQ to max settings to get at least a minimal kind of edginess out of the guitar. This meant, trebles had to be turned to the max. And even then the guitar sounded quite muffled via amp.

In order to remedy this issue I thought, "maybe the pups are just not my taste, so let's get something more modern into the guitar". I ordere a set of Bare Knuckle Ragnaroks and had them put into the guitar at the local tech. Sound did change for the better! Unfortunately, not enough to make the guitar any good. Still sounded nothing like an electric guitar should. Imagine you had a tone control which is always turned down all the way.

So, next experiment: I DI'ed the guitar into a preamp / audio interface and ran the input through a spectrum analyzer. I compared the results to what I got my Skervesen 8-string Astilla (also a headless guitar, Bare Knuckle pickups: Mule + Nailbomb). Rusti had the aforementioned Bare Knuckle Ragnaroks inside.

Summary for neck pickups of both guitars, E / A / D strings:


The results showed for all strings and both pickups that the Rusti was very boomy and had nearly no harmonics coming out of the guitar. This made the sound very dark / dead. Especially overdriven the guitar had no edge and palm mutes sounded like "crap" (sorry). What makes palm mutes sound great are the harmonics of them. Without them, you only get a boomy 100 Hz sound, no crispness, no bite, nothing. I even tried to amend this with aggressive EQ-ing and high distortion but it did not improve the matter. The guitar was somewhere seriously flawed and I did not know where or how.

I had the guitar tech also directly wire the pups to the output as a sort of experiment so any issue of the electronics should have been uncovered. However, there was not much of a difference, so I would attribute these tonal qualities to a poor guitar design / build.

Here are also some sound files with the two guitars EQ'ed exactly the same, same signal chain. Amp was a Suhr PT 15 IR, sound was taken via the line-out of the built-in IR. I tried to make the sound of the Rusti as "bright" as possible, this is the result and what it sounds like with another guitar:

Rusti:

Upload files for free - Rusti bridge.mp3 - ufile.io

Download Rusti bridge.mp3 for free from ufile.io instantly, no signup required and no popup ads

ufile.io

Skerv:

Upload files for free - Skerv bridge.mp3 - ufile.io

Download Skerv bridge.mp3 for free from ufile.io instantly, no signup required and no popup ads

ufile.io

I think you can hear my problem. But palm mutes was what was distracting me the most. For a modern guitar, this is a must.

In the end I also noticed a lot of other flaws regarding trem cavity design (trem was designed to be free-floating, but actually the trem base plate could not move freely due to cavity design, see images below), a lot of minor aesthetic imperfections (at a price point of 5 000 € this is not acceptable in my opinion). BTW, string action was ridiculously high for a modern guitar, and there was no possible way to adjust this. Neck relief was how it should be (not too much at all) and bridge could not be lowered any more (see images).




Continued in last part…

 

[DirtyPuma]

Part 3:




Final part of the story:
When confronting the builder with all of these flaws I was made fun of and he did not take any responsibility for this. BTW, the guitar was shipped first to some guy who created a demo video of the guitar upon request by the builder. I gave my OK for this and was told that there is no risk for me, only some more weeks (in the end 1 month) to wait for the guitar.

I wrote a small report, listing all the flaws I described here (some images with caption were taken from that) and told him that I will hand this over to my lawyer unless he is going to cooperate in some way. In the end he could NOT offer me to buy back the guitar at 80 % of the price (although close to mint). Although, he offered me to search for a buyer. I would still be the official seller of the guitar. Long story short, the builder just wanted to stay out of this as much as possible and pass over any responsibility.

I would never order any guitar from Rusti Guitars again. They might look good on these Instagram pics, but when having one in hand, I was not able to feel any quality or musicality due to all these flaws. Very negative experience.

While still having my Rusti lying around, I bought a new Suhr Custom Satin Flamed and the difference between the two guitars could not be bigger. The Suhr was 1 000 € less, but it was oozing a feeling of attention to detail and very good quality control. If anyone is interested in how these "semi-hemispherical frets" are: Don't get them, they only distract and make strings much more prone to slip away from the fretboard. There is no positive (only cosmetic) of this feature.

I hope my experience will help some potential reader to not waste 1 500 € (that's my loss in the end, not even taking the additional pickups and tech visits into account) on an Instagram guitar. When comparing my Skervesen to my Rusti, the Skervesen is fully functional, might have some very minor cosmetic flaws, but it just does the job and sounds good (+ lightweight).

Here is my Skervesen for comparison:



Many thanks for reading.

 

[NoodleFace]

Damn that's a pretty damning write up. Sorry you had to deal with this. On the surface it's a beautiful instrument

 

[DirtyPuma]

Damn that's a pretty damning write up. Sorry you had to deal with this. On the surface it's a beautiful instrument

I wished all of this would have turned out differently and it took me many days to realize the whole situation. If you pay that amount of money for a guitar and wait such a long time for it to be finished it is hard to acknowledge that it is not what it should be. So, in the end I would not recommend to order these guitars at all.

 

[tian]

I contacted the builder on the trem issues bu to no avail. Acc. to him "all was fine" and there were no flaws from his side.

From this point on I had little hope this was going to turn out well and yep, an unacceptable response all the way through for a 5k euro guitar.

And I ask this out of curiosity and sincerely, do you have any guitars that have survived that close of a forensic analysis?

 

[Giest]

From this point on I had little hope this was going to turn out well and yep, an unacceptable response all the way through for a 5k euro guitar.

And I ask this out of curiosity and sincerely, do you have any guitars that have survived that close of a forensic analysis?

Please tell me this isn't a serious question.

 

[tian]

Please tell me this isn't a serious question.

Is or isn't?

 

[AkiraSpectrum]

sorry to hear about your negative experience, that's horrible customer service for such an expensive instrument.

thank you for sharing.

 

[RobDobble6S7]

Respect for being extremely thorough and not only going through every issue but also posting well-photographed evidence of all of them.

 

[SpaceDock]

IMO the tremolo was the real problem and probably because they had never built this model before. After finding that problem it’s just a runaway calling out every single tiny issue that 99% of others would have ignored.

 

[DirtyPuma]

From this point on I had little hope this was going to turn out well and yep, an unacceptable response all the way through for a 5k euro guitar.

And I ask this out of curiosity and sincerely, do you have any guitars that have survived that close of a forensic analysis?

Yes, the Suhr I mentioned above is pretty much a perfect instrument. I could not point out any flaws on that guitar. Futhermore, from all I heard about this company I would expect great customer service. There is something called "warranty".

For the Skervesen I mentioned there were only some minor cosmetic defects which can happen during woodwork. There happened to be scratches on the single-string headpieces after shipment. However, they promised to switch them out during the free check-up after 1 year (shipment to the workshop and back for free) and so they did. Overall, it was good service from their side. Also, as mentioned, they offer this free check after oke year.

For the Rusti Guitars case here: they even wanted me to pay for the shipment in order to have the issues fixed...

I would not call my analysis here forensic. Most things were pretty obvious. But since I was close to handing this over to my lawyer, I had to document the problems correctly.

 

[DirtyPuma]

IMO the tremolo was the real problem and probably because they had never built this model before. After finding that problem it’s just a runaway calling out every single tiny issue that 99% of others would have ignored.

They are still building the guitar the same way. Actually, the guitar was 75 % of the time I "had" it with the tech. Greatest issue was the muffled sound, not the trem. Therefore, your assumption is incorrect.

 

[nickgray]

After finding that problem it’s just a runaway calling out every single tiny issue that 99% of others would have ignored.

5k euro though. I don't know, I think if the builder has the balls to build these fancy ass guitars, they'd better be pristine. Otherwise what's the point?

hyped by the great looking images of it

Honestly, this seems to be guitar manufacturing in general. Sell the pretty picture and the specs. Nobody's marketing attention to detail, QC, all sorts of little quirks done the right way.

 

[NoodleFace]

Yeah I mean for 5k I'd expect 0 issues, no matter how forensic the review is. If something happens during shipping that's whatever. But the crooked trem to me would be an instant fail

 

[MetalDaze]

In seeing similar stories posted, the main lesson is never buy the #1 of anything from a small builder.

 

[gunch]

The fact that skerv does that is nuts maybe I DO need to start saving for a raptor or 4ap

Sorry about the Rusti though I know they make very nice “looking” guitars

 

[Giest]

Is or isn't?

Do you NOT own guitars which would pass this kind of "forensic analysis"? At any price point? If not which ones and what was flawed?

 

[tian]

Do you NOT own guitars which would pass this kind of "forensic analysis"? At any price point? If not which ones and what was flawed?

Of the guitars I do not own, I'm sure there I'm sure there is something that meticulous but of the guitars I do own, nothing is that perfect but I don't expect them to be.

I was legitimately asking what guitars do meet the OP's standards because that would just be interesting to know. Most people describe guitars with lots of hand waving and generalities so it's nice to see well documented thoughts.