Give a Penny, Take a Penny, But With Guitars

I am not having much luck in selling guitars.  As you may have noticed in my last few blog posts, I have had much better luck trading guitars.  My main goal was to sell four guitars.  So instead of being four guitars down, I am actually up one.

So I finally sold, not traded, an old Stratocaster I had.  Which meant that I immediately went and bought another guitar.  However, they don't make this kind of guitar anymore.  It's a Dean Icon.

Anyway, there's a funny story behind this.  The guy posted this for sale on Craigslist months ago.  I even posted a PSA on the Dean Guitars forum.  However, the owner would not ship at any price.  So month after month it languished on Craigslist.  Once I had the money, I bought it for $230.  He originally had it priced for $350 months ago.  He could have gotten that if he had only shipped it. 

This has nice Seymour Duncan pickups in it.  It has the standard 59/JB set.  What's really strange is that, I usually don't like the JB, but this one sounds fantastic.  I suspect the Alnico 5 magnet has been changed to an Alnico 8.  Namely since it's brighter, and has less compression.  I won't know until I open it up. 

For the time being I set her up, and put new strings on her.  I haven't gotten much time to play her, but I really like the neck.  It's actually pretty thin for a Dean neck.  Most of the time those things are like playing half a baseball bat.  This also has coil splitting.  I've never been a big fan of doing that, but I might find myself playing some ska song, and use it.  You never know.