FIREFLY 338 - Super Cheap Semi-Hollowbody!! (Spalted Maple)

hey guys welcome back to the channel hope you're having a fantastic day today well we've got another entry in our affordable guitar series as you guys know this is a long-running series on the channel and today we're looking at a firefly [Music] [Applause] [Music] now if you've ever been on the hunt for a firefly guitar you can probably attest to the fact that they're not always easy to track down usually when they're in stock they fly off the shelves because number one they are super affordable and number two they have actually a pretty good reputation so anyway as of this review this guitar is currently in stock i will link to it in the video description below not sure how long that will last but like i said as of right now they are in stock so let's take a closer look at this guitar so this model is the firefly 338 and it's a semi-hollow design so you've got a center block that runs down here and your pickups your bridge your tailpiece everything is attached to solid wood in the center and then you've got hollow wings on either side and obviously we've got two f holes two pickups three-way switch two tones two volumes but really the show stopper is this spalted maple top it's not a finish you see on this style of guitar very often so it makes it very unique now if we kind of just give it a turn you can see we've got double bound body and on the back a really nice arched back just trying to catch it in various light for you guys kind of a deep cherry finish on the back binding around the the heel there and then when we come to the top you can see it's arched on the top as well all right so let's quickly hit up some specs now this is going to be pretty short because there's only two official specs listed for this guitar number one spalted maple top and number two it's got a bone nut which is actually fantastic for a guitar in this price range and will really help with tuning stability and that's it for the official specs so i'll go into some detail and look at this guitar but that's all they give you on the site now as for the rest of the guitar here's a look at the firefly headstock overall shape i think looks really nice kind of a nice classic look now in terms of the logo whether you like it or not that's kind of up to you for me don't really love it but you know that's neither here nor there now on the back side we've got sealed you know just basic tuning machine unbranded but we got the nice kind of classic buttons i think they look really nice now as i mentioned the one spec is we've got a bone nut which is great on a guitar like this you know for years and years fender and gibson you know on their highest end guitars wouldn't use bone nuts so thankfully you know this one has one and they seem to be coming back into fashion all the man-made materials that they tried just can't quite stand up to a good bone nut so there you go a tilt back on the headstock i should mention is pretty minimal definitely not the 17 degrees that you'd find on a gibson so that's also a plus in my opinion on the back side it looks like a one-piece maple neck now if you catch it in the right light so i'm just gonna look over on my monitor here i don't know if you can see it right there that's where the scarf joint is so there's a little scarf joint right there it's pretty hard to see in this light but there is one there it's kind of a semi-translucent neck there we go now on the body looks to be the same so it's probably laminated maple on the back sides and top with a spalted maple veneer now as i mentioned we've got two humbuckers we'll check those out in a second two pneumatic bridge stop tail piece classic right and then we've got two volumes two tones f holes really nice kind of semi-hollow resonance now as for the fingerboard material it has me a little stumped i'm not sure what it is it looks like rosewood from far away but when you zoom in it doesn't really have like the open pores and grain of rosewood so i think it's some sort of substitute but it looks pretty close right so let's plug in the 338 and check out some tones now after that i'll go through this entire guitar with a fine-tooth comb talk about the overall construction but for now let's plug it in and check it out all right you guys this is the first time i've ever plugged this guitar in let's just test out some basic clean tones and get a sense for what this guitar sounds like starting in the neck pickup [Music] so so i need to stretch out these strings a little bit we're going out of tune let's try the bridge now one of the things i noticed is even in the neck pickup it's got a really balanced sound and you know pretty good clarity even in the neck and the other thing i noticed is the front faces of these frets are very smooth [Applause] [Music] even way up high here you know there's no grittiness on the frets which you often find on you know kind of budget guitars so so far this thing plays really nice [Music] hey [Music] so i've got a really mid heavy distortion uh dialed in let's try it with the bridge [Music] now let's take some of those mids out sort of a little bit more of a scoop sound now [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey let's take the treble out see what that sounds like do the same thing on the bridge take the treble out of that pickup [Music] dial it back in so lots of variety in tone that's kind of with some crunchy overdrive and uh the firefly now i gotta think most people will not use a semi-hollow guitar with high gain but since we're testing things out let's give it a shot so i've gone over to channel 3 on the mezzobarba let's see how the firefly handles some pretty high [Music] gain [Music] all right that's enough of that i'd it can actually play it but i did notice um it's i don't know if it's microphonic but like with the f holes and everything in the high gain it really does pick up like a lot of noise so i wouldn't recommend it but anything from like clean bluesy overdrive some of the crunch tones that we just looked at and uh probably not heavy gain but you know if you want to experiment with it it can be a lot of fun especially if you start getting feedback with some of these guitars you can kind of control it by just the angle of you know how it is with your amp so you know i wouldn't recommend it but kind of fun all right so now let's tackle the overall construction even though this is a budget guitar we still want to know that it's well made so let's start with the positives number one let's take a close-up look at the bone nut now here i'm super happy you know the way the the string slots are cut and the way it matches up with the shoulders really nice for a guitar in this price range you can see a little bit of the stain bleed from the fingerboard to the knot where that meets just a little cosmetic thing but overall really well made next up let's take a close-up look at the fret ends now when we zoom in no surprises here par for the course for a guitar in this price range you can see a lot of tooling marks file marks on those fret ends now you know they actually feel pretty nice when you you know play the guitar so you never notice that they're really sharp but they're certainly not you know buffed and dressed you know like you'd see on something a little higher end next up let's move on to the body now i've got to say the binding that goes around the front face of the guitar is really beautiful and when i look at the edges there i can't see anything you know out of place i can't see you know any flaws in the finish or something where they had to sand down and then finish over none of that it all looks very very nice so that's great now when we look at the hardware itself and when we zoom in on the posts everything looks fantastic actually for a guitar in this price range if you look at the back tail piece you can just see one little sliver where you know when they're drilling you can just see some of the exposed wood just on that one post the rest are upright secure and look actually really really good and as for everything else the pots feel great the jack everything else looks really good and finally to wrap up the positives let's look at the f holes again very impressed very clean for a guitar in this price range i've seen much much worse on guitars that are many times more expensive than this so really impressed with the efforts all right so now let's tackle the downside as i mentioned on all these affordable guitars you're not going to end up with a perfect guitar that's the compromise you make for you know buying an affordable instrument but the key is do the positives outweigh the negatives and spoiler alert on this guitar uh the good vastly outweighs the bad just a few cosmetic issues on the bottom side of the nut right here you can see we've got some discoloration now that's on the bottom side so you don't see it but it's there and so there's slight discolorations on various parts of mostly kind of down by the neck probably some adhesive there that got finished over where the binding meets that the body here so we'll zoom in on that as you guys can see uh there's some parts that have been painted over that kind of thing so not like a clean kind of like razor finish where that binding meets the body you like to see that but again cosmetic and other than that you know a couple cosmetic things and that's about it you know so overall construction on this is surprisingly good and i think that does uh you know probably gives a fair representation of what a firefly is and why they're popular so you know the the the main aspects of this guitar very well built the downsides a few cosmetics and when you're talking about affordable guitars they're not all going to be the same but you know hopefully and i think the the firefly reputation is uh the good vastly outweighs the bad and in this case the bat is just a few cosmetic things so overall really nice guitar thanks so much for watching hope you guys enjoyed the demo if you did be sure to subscribe to the channel other than that all the information on this guitar and all my information will be down in the video description below have yourself a great day

Channel: Darrell Braun Guitar

Views: 170,843

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Id: ce1Q276u1dI

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020