Yet another strangely cheap German 7 string [/eBay find]...

[zorn]

Not so strange after all...
...there are a lot of cheap chinese guitars floating around here.
Sometimes you'll get lucky, sometimes you don't!

I played a very nice chinese Epiphone Les Paul today.
3 years warrenty for 299 € (inluding free shipping).

Epiphone Lp Standard Plain Top Tr E-Gitarre

With new tuners, a different pickup in bridge position + better set intonation it would be a killer guitar.
Loved the bigsby and the neck pickup out of the box.

But of course do not expect stellar craftsmanship or attention to detail.

 

[7 Dying Trees]

OK, I had a guy come try out yesterday who had one of these.

Impressions:
- The neck is huge, baseball bat style, not for me, but it is solid, and isn't too bad.

- Finish on the neck is nice though, satin-like

- Pickups, well, what do you expect...Not great, not terrible, passable

- Bridge looks pretty decent

- Set neck one (the quilted top), access isn't too bad, not as good as an AANJ, and not as good as the old square heel UV's either, but, not terrible. Very much like a PRS set neck joint in terms of look.

- Weighs a ton, seriously heavy guitar, like les paul weight at least.

- Binding on the neck is very cool, not bad at all

- the logo upside down is still pretty gay though.


Overall, there seemsed to be a few issues with it staying in tune, but I reckon that if you were on a budget and knew a bit about woodworking that you could:

- reprofile the neck, there's enough do something good with it
- new pickups
- possibly replace the floating trem, but, like an old TRS I am sure you could block it off.

So I'd say if you were wanting to experiment with a 7string, and see what it's like then it's not bad at all for 150£ (well, more now, so possibly not), but also as a little project to screw around with, ie, reprofiling neck, electronics, etc etc, it could be a good test guitar to experiment on.

I would, however, upgrade if you were then serious about playing 7's. But as an ultra budget (and having spent 5-10 minutes on it, not really long enough, but hey) it's better by a mile than some of the shit that was around when i first started playing.