I Just Bought a $100 Guitar...And it's FANTASTIC!

welcome back to the channel you guys I hope you're having an awesome day today for this week's video we've got ourselves a hundred dollar guitar I ordered off eBay let's open it up take a look inside and see what a hundred bucks gets you [Music] now when I was first learning to play you could not get an instrument for a hundred bucks it just wasn't possible he had to spend like three to five hundred bucks to get like a good entry level and there was really no mid-range instruments available you had to buy something super expensive or pretty crappy thankfully times have changed so what we're gonna do is see what a hundred bucks gets you I haven't opened it up I haven't looked at it I haven't set it up nothing what we're gonna do is just open this thing up cold turkey and see what you get for a hundred bucks alright so here's what I ordered this is the Indio electric guitars and it's also labeled mono price and I only know them from like chief cables and stuff but maybe they're making guitars now I don't know I haven't read a single review on this I know nothing about this guitar I just ordered a totally cold turkey just to find out what a hundred bucks gets yeah so anyway let's open it up I do know that it should be a blue strat style guitar that's all I know so let's get the knife and open it up ok let's open it up oh man ok I was not expecting a gig bag at all well that's pretty sweet ok let's take a look closer look at that alright there was a little card in the bottom of the box and this is indeed made by monoprice because that's their support and tech numbers and they want you to leave a review and such so anyway we don't need that so gig bag here we go it actually feels decently padded to like some of the ones from Fender are worse than this okay so you got backpack straps no surprises there go carry handle here front pocket looks like the zipper is already split no it's not ok alright nothing in the big pocket zipper does feel cheap no surprises it's a hundred dollar guitar so anyway let's open it up and check it out smells weird ok here we go ok in the gig bag in the foam sleeve here we go we'll just take the oh okay comes with two allen keys for adjustment perfect and then just elastic on the top here sort of see a little bit of the blue through that the foam so we got the right color thankfully made in China okay awesome like I said I know nothing about this guitar at all I haven't done any research on it or anything I just like let's find a hundred dollar guitar and see what we got so I know nothing absolutely nothing about it cool so we get a little blue burst finish that's not too shabby let's take a closer look at it obviously I actually like the color which is pretty cool and then we've got some cardboard to protect a fingerboard I assume just underneath the strings the silikal patch Oh on a foam selector or like a little foam block over the selector cool 5-way switch volume tone tone pretty much a straight Stratocaster copy let's I'm gonna take the plastic off and everything and take a closer look now this is my favorite part of getting any new instrument here we go oh yeah so everything's just a little dirty in dusty and we need to wipe it down but let's take a closer look at some of the parts so the neck itself is a really nice satin finish so no high gloss here nothing to stick on so that's a pleasant surprise and as you can see the grain is really nice - I'll try to keep that in focus but yeah I'll bring it in a little bit look at the grain on that really nice grain so pleasantly surprised at that beautiful beautiful satin neck so hey so far thumbs up so here's a look at the front profile of the headstock obviously it's got that really interesting hook right here I think that might be a project for you know the jigsaw maybe a repro file that or something but anyway that's the look obviously to avoid copy infringement so you get the Indio classic branding to string trees just like a squire so you know this would be similar at least in my mind to a like a square bullet or affinity but we'll plug it in check out all the electronics all that stuff as well so there you go there's a front look at the front let's check out the back and here's the back side of the headstock obviously unbranded tuners for a hundred bucks you're not going to get name-brand tuners but we'll see how they hold you now on the front side the neck is a maple fingerboard with classic black dot inlays I think it looks really nice I'll try to get a close-up shot here for you guys I just need to move some stuff over so yeah the fingerboard is just a boat as beautiful as the back of the neck I'll try to see if we can get some of the wood grain there hopefully you guys can see that but anyway yeah it's a really nice piece of wood for the neck so you know color me surprised for that I was not expecting that for a hundred bucks now before we continue the tour of the guitar as I was looking at the bridge I'm like oh hey where's the whammy bar so it's not in the cardboard box it's not in the gig bag so they forgot to include the whammy bar now I do have a couple squire ones kicking around so I'm going to see if one of these fit now I have a creeping suspicion that problems like this are somewhat common on guitars of this price range okay not that not that one let's try the bigger size here looks more likely but there we go so square bar fits no problem probably made at the same plant okay cool well there you go problem solved but if you don't have Wyoming bars lying around I can see that being a little annoying now as you guys can see we've got a vintage six screw trim system very common on these lower end guitars a little bit of binding there I think I'm gonna have to back the screws off a little bit so I think we're gonna take it apart just see if we can get this thing working well well we're down here let's check out the neck let's see how straight this thing is or if we need to make some adjustments okay so there we go okay so Wow that's dead straight always not expecting that sorry I have to look at this without the camera but anyway yeah dead straight so normally if you needed to tighten up the truss rod there'd be an excess of relief in the middle of the neck and as you guys can see here this is the middle of the neck it is straight all the way through so I wasn't expecting that so as you guys can see the straightedge is touching the fingerboard all the way along so we don't need to make any adjustments at all to the truss rod all right let's pop the back cover off the trim system here see what we got inside now I really like the blue finish on this guitar boat what are we gonna find when we remove this cover is it going to be plywood is it going to be press board what do we get well I'm not sure because it's all painted anyway let's check it out okay so the parts definitely look you know kind of tinny and kind of cheap which is unsurprising so the claw right here you can tell just very very thin kind of coated metal doesn't look great and of course the block looks absolutely terrible so unsurprising now it might function totally fine we'll see but it definitely has that like ultra cheap crappy metal you know just quickly thrown in a mold and away you go so excuse me so anyway this looks super duper cheap on the inside let's keep looking at the guitar all right you guys let's take a quick look under the pick guard let's find out what kind of pickups are in here I'm assuming they're kind of like that Squire cheap ceramic pickups now we don't need to pull all the knobs off unless we were gonna swap out the electronics but let's do it anyway and the knobs feel just fine cheap plastic but you know what even the most expensive strats have cheap plastic nub so nothing too crazy now these look like they have indexing holes right here there's like a hole in the pit guard with like a little metal tab I'm assuming that's to keep the pot from spinning I don't know anyway let's pull it apart and find out now because the ground wire is so tight from the volume pot to the back of the tram I can't actually pull the pickguard all the way out which sucks if you wanted to like swap parts you'd have to cut and resaw yeah my assumption was right these are ceramic magnet pickups just like you would find in an entry-level Squire so there you go I'll try to get a shot of the pots so here's a peek at the rest of the electronics so of course you've got the small dime size pots in there hopefully you guys can see that and cheap electronics so no surprises there the pots are unbranded so not you know not Elfa pots or anything like that so bottom of the line but doesn't matter I don't know we'll plug it in and find out now just for curiosity's sake here is an official fender pickguard this one is the V mod pickups I used in our noiseless versus single coil shootout a while ago so anyway I'm just kind of curious yeah that looks like an exact clone so if a person did want to you know replace some parts on this guitar looks like the fender ones will match right up so good to know I suppose so what I'm gonna do in anticipation of trying to make this trim work I'm gonna back off all of these trim screws just by like I don't know just so they're up like a mil now on guitars like this you need to be very careful because screws and parts like this are likely to strip so make sure you get the right bit size for the screw and you keep appropriate downward pressure okay so you want to just try to minimize any chance of stripping so I'm just gonna back them all up because I could feel and sense some binding in there so okay so a little bit better there's a couple more I think I need to just back out a bit and of course Vlad some lubrication on them and stuff like that so okay that feels a little bit better all right now the last thing I really want to check out is the fingerboard radius now I haven't played a single note on this guitar yet but it strikes me as being flatter than your traditional Stratocaster so here's my radius gauge it's 9.5 I'll just see if I can slip it in here there we go well maybe not it might be a slight bit of space there try out by twelfth fret here the strings oh yeah definitely not okay so it's it's flatter than 9.5 up there you could really see what should we go with let's try 12 which would be like you know your typical Les Paul so for some reason down here the nine and a half looked a little bit Oh No that's much better okay I don't know if you guys can see that oops sorry I'll see if I can bring it up yeah I don't know if that'll show up but anyway that that's much tighter so I think we what we have here is a twelve inch radius I went online to try some to try to find some specs on this guitar and I couldn't find any so anyway so what you can expect out of this guitar should you you don't want to purchase as a backup guitar or as a first guitar or as just a fun take around guitar whatever 12 inch radius seems to be about right so there you go now right here is where most tuning issues happen on inexpensive instruments so this plastic not here probably will be like you know grabbing the string as I use the trim and won't allow the system to come back into tune so anyway it's pretty rough so I think in a future video I'll probably polish it up but what you can do right now is just take a mechanical pencil pencil in some graphite I'll clean that up after here so just pop the string out of the nut slot pencil and some graphite this is the the cheapest way to do it and really I shouldn't say it's only on cheap guitars seeing some Gibson's that are like brutal that should not happen but anyway it's kind of one of those final setup procedures that not all manufacturers do equally so on a guitar like this you can expect this to be very bad so I'll probably in the future video maybe just show you guys how I'll polish that up and clean it up but for now that's all we're going to do now the other thing I'll quickly mention is here because there's no skunk stripe on the back of the neck you can actually see the two pieces of maple so this is your fingerboard maple this is your neck maple and this there's nothing weird or wrong about this process at all it's totally fine tons of manufacturers do that but here you can really see the difference of color in the maple so other than that there you go frets overall you know SEMA actually okay like they seem polished up decently and I don't know once I start playing on it I'll be able to give you guys some better feedback but they're relatively small frets small skinny frets so anyway but overall they seem you know decently well made and and polished now on a cheap guitar like this they likely will wear out quite quickly so you know this is not the kind of guitar that somebody's gonna pick up and play like you know for hours every day you will wear the frets out right away but I think as a first instrument or as a backup you know certainly better than anything I ever had growing up alright so overall the fit and finish of this guitar is OK yeah it's not too bad obviously the plastics are all cheap and kind of roughly cut the trim system seems really cheap but again we're gonna test that out electronics very low-end and I should mention that I forgot to mention when I pulled it all apart there no shielding on the back of the pick guard no shielding on the inside of the cavity so you could be dealing with some excess noise I have shielding paint here from you know other projects that have done so that could be something you know a little bit of an upgrade and I think I have some some shielding tape that's like self adhesive so you can just cut it out so any way we could shield this a little bit better than it is so it could be noisy now I have no idea if you know your 5 voice which is hum cancelling in position 2 and 4 I'm hoping it's like a strap and it will be so at least you know you have those two positions body unknown would species and I couldn't find specs online it's light it's fine the contours are really nice like the tummy cut and the forearm contour everything seems okay I will say it seems like maybe they spent a little bit more of their money on the neck and I'm totally fine with that the satin finished neck beautiful profile nice carve up here by the nuts yeah everything looks great about it nice piece of wood as I previously mentioned frets seem good to one huge surprise on this guitar is the fretboard ends are like super rolled like really nice you know in previous videos I've talked about rolling the the fretboard it ends because you know most manufacturers don't roll them enough for what I like and this totally is I won't roll this anymore so huge surprise on the neck it feels super comfortable now the fret ends themselves as I run my thumb up and down not too bad nothing's cutting me nothing's poking me I think a polish with you know some SuperDuper light steel wall or sandpaper or something like that just to polish up the ends might do some good but I've had worse on you know big brand-name guitars so anyway neck gets a huge thumbs up for me so anyway let's tune it up plug it in let's continue the review are you guys so I'm plugged in with my Line six helix so that I can talk and play at the same time I do not have an isolation booth for my amp because I'm not fancy like that so here we go it just so it just worked out that this trim is slightly floating just from bringing the strings up to tangent kind of like scared to use it but anyway so volume works that's good tone works that's good now is this tone for the bridge pickup it is not okay so middle pickup yeah okay so the bottom tone controls for the middle pickup not my favorite but that's okay probably needs to be intimated I haven't done any of that so let's go to [Music] it is hum canceling in the middle okay so position four is definitely hum canceling so that's good to know [Music] so I sound a little out of tune already let's just do that now the tuning machines I let me grab my tuner the tuning machines feel not very good I'm just gonna say that similar to like a bullet no those ones are okay there we go good old third string and first string is way out so while I have the tuner on here let's test out the whammy a bit so I can still feel like grabbing a little weird once I get like right to the pickguard there's still a little I don't know something's catching I'll have to check that out that's surprisingly not way out of tune [Music] Oh crazy [Music] you [Music] that's really surprising considering how bad that knot looks so anyway I'm pressed with the tuning stability actually so you know as a new player or as a backup guitar hey you know that that's a big thumbs up there yeah I'm just gonna cut that off for now yeah so anyway overall first impressions pretty amazing for a hundred bucks now just for fun let's do a quick one-minute jam with our very expensive select strat here versus the old $100 in do classic here we go [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right you guys so here are my final thoughts on the indio classic well first of all I gotta say it's a heck of a guitar for a hundred bucks you get tons of guitar there's certainly some pluses and minuses which we will go through but overall I would say this is a really cool guitar I mean gig bag included everything for a hundred bucks much better than any hundred dollar guitar I ever played you know when I was learning so I would say perfect for a beginner or a backup guitar or if you don't have a strat style guitar in your collection there you go hundred bucks boom now I can't vouch for the quality control my guitar was pretty good overall but I would say you know someone else's might not be and that's I think the nature of the game and obviously I was missing the whammy bar out of mine so hey I don't know maybe they're not maybe they're not sold with whammy bar but they should be if they have a trim system so I think it was just missing let's go through the minuses first and then we'll talk about the positives I would say some minuses are the tram system certainly the block is just absolutely astonishingly bad kind of looks like it could crack on you in any moment I don't know if it will or not but definitely you know they didn't spend a lot of money back there ah the body is great like I said before light and I love the color the little blue burst that's really great uh what else is bad I guess the shielding could have definitely been a little bit better I think this will be a pretty noisy guitar pick up some great to me but I mean I like you know the ceramic pickups have never ever bothered me you could there's good tones to be had for sure so no problems there and although the pots are small unbranded dime size pots they all seem to work be working fine at least for now what has other negatives tuning machines they're bad they're pretty bad they're like Squire Bullitt bad some of them seem to work fine other ones are stiff you know you'll turn them a bit nothing that happened and then you know they'll go too far so definitely a weak spot on the tuning machines now positives is huge positive for the neck massive thumbs up from me those rolled fingerboard edges on both sides just make this neck super comfy and fretwork that doesn't suck which you know is surprising for $100 guitar that's great you get 22 frets which is nice and other than that I mean it balances well it plays well I don't know what else to say it feels great in the hand for me I think it was a good choice on them to spend most of their money on the neck maybe they had it you know maybe someone else was making their necks for them but anyway they did a good job and in terms of aesthetics not a huge fan of the hook and of course it says in do classic like it's a a well known classic brand it's kind of funny but anyway overall I would say this is a great great investment and I wouldn't hesitate to buy it again now this guitar could certainly benefit from a proper setup but considering I just unboxed it tore it all apart to see what it was like and then put it back together and played it I was pretty impressed I didn't adjust anything on this guitar and you know the bands weren't choking out and there was no fret buzz you know as I moved around the neck so that shows that there's no high or low frets so overall you know the playing experiences is pretty good so there you guys go proof that a hundred bucks gets you a decent playable guitar and I think the fact that Squire and strap parts are almost a guaranteed to bolt right up onto this thing means that if something goes wrong you know there's tons of parts available to fix it so let me know what you guys would like to see me do to the old in do classic maybe we can do some mods to it or maybe a set up series how to get like you know a good setup on a low-end guitar or something like that or maybe put expensive parts on a cheap guitar I don't know anyway if you guys have any ideas I'm totally open to it let me know in the comments below thanks so much for watching you guys be sure to subscribe to the channel by clicking right here the rest of my information will be on the screen or in the video description below have an awesome week take care

Channel: Darrell Braun Guitar

Views: 6,138,319

Rating: 4.8446875 out of 5

Keywords: cheap guitar pickups, darrell braun, guitar pickups, best strat pickups, best tele pickups, best jazz pickups, best pickups for blues, best pickups for metal, guitar comparison, american standard vs american professional strat, stratocaster vs telecaster, cheap vs expensive, cheap vs expensive guitars, cheap vs expensive pickups, best cheap guitar, cheap electric guitar, cheap acoustic guitar, indio classic guitar, cheap vs expensive guitar

Id: 9SCkJlLeIZE

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/NaToSpasoRalph]

Just buying a new guitar always feels good. Even after the wife has left you for your overspending on musical instruments