They Say This Is The Best Guitar For Under $200?

today we're gonna be checking out a firefly guitar so let's check this out there you go this is encased in styrofoam it has a basic cable this is the inexpensive guitar cable you see with a little allen wrench for the guitar so what we have here is a firefly that is set up like a gibson custom in other words it's double bound so we have binding on the front which looks fantastic binding is really good and of course bound neck and of course bound headstock you can see they have a gibson-esque style logo right here but of course not exactly like that says firefly love this headstock on the f that was a cool touch everything looks like mother of pearl and of course you have mother of pearl style block inlays what i also like besides the binding on the back of the body is that they don't have grover tuners but they're definitely grover-esque in other words these look exactly like the grover tuners and then again this has uh serial number and it says designed in back by jsn other interesting things to note is it has a mahogany body and a mahogany neck now we do not know if it's a scarf joint or what kind of neck construction it is underneath there because it's painted but we can check the mahogany body and the maple top so we will check that in the geeky stuff section of this video the other thing is it says it has triple a plus quality rosewood fretboard i'm not sure what that means either in reference to this but it's a rosewood fretboard says nickel strings and bone nut again we will check to make sure it's a bone nut in the geeky section of this video the other thing that's interesting is this guitar where i found it on this website was 189 96 so that's pretty darn cheap for this guitar but when i was looking at fireflies online i found used they go for more anywhere between 250 to 320 i was pretty shocked so basically what i'm trying to say is if you're looking for this brand of guitars do yourself a favor be a little savvy now again i'm not here to sell you the guitar i'm just trying to show you what i find and discover about this guitar in the review so use this information i would also look at peer reviews and also if you put your hands on one do that first before making a purchase so let's go ahead and tune the guitar up [Music] and tunes up fast so again it was a little flat a little about a half step flat so let's take a look at how it came set up out of the box so looking at the neck looks like if we push our thumb down at the last fret and the first fret tapping here the neck has a little bit of relief so the truss rod just tightened just a quarter turn that's what i would recommend to straight in the neck but this is doable impressive out of the box the setup out of the box was standard two millimeters off the 12th fret on the low e and exactly two millimeters off the 12th fret on the high e so this is a very standard setup now we're going to check the nut to see how these were slotted again very good you can see it's a little loose so again they're not cut too deep i'd like them a little lower for a better feel in action but realistically though not bad okay radius of the fretboard it's radiused at 16 inches so very flat fretboard not like a gibson les paul where it's about 12 inch radius fretboard this is 16. so very flat like you'd see on a ibanez or an esp okay so the carve on the neck is actually an interesting carve it's really unique it's a little bit like a c shape like a 59 les paul when i looked at the template but 60s les paul uh thickness but c-shaped more like a 59 so that's what it's like so players that think the less paul feels great but it's a little thick we'll probably love this shape i think it's really interesting uh and then let's take a measurement of the width of the nut so the nut is at 43.16 millimeters width at the nut and the 12th fret is at 53.15 millimeters or 53.15 millimeters at the 12th fret so interesting enough let's take a look at the thickness your first fret is at 23 23.1 millimeters thickness at the first fret and 24.53 millimeters at the 12th fret so let's take a look at these pickups the bridge pickup when i'm checking it is putting it at 9.35 k and your neck is sitting in at 7.66 k so again interesting exactly where you want to see these pickups at you want to see them in this range this is what you would see on an actual epiphone or gibson les paul now something to point out here is the fretboard is a little dry you can see right here that a little bit of hydration would help this it's got a chalky look to it or a powdery look to it so let's go ahead and put some lemon oil on this this is some fretboard conditioner you can see right here it's definitely darker more chocolatey looks healthier let's take a look at these pickups here's your neck pickup and you can see nothing marking here just marks it neck and of course the bridge is marked b for bridge and again nothing exciting there you can see here the cavities look like they were done well everything routed exactly like how a gibson is done or an epiphone let's look inside the cavity interesting these are some nice capacitors right here you have cf potentiometers these are actually pretty decent this is not your typical dime size alpha pots and again not your typical cheaper capacitors this is some better stuff now it's not shielded in the cavity we're going to double check that right now so as you can see i'm touching the cavity in different spots and obviously there's no shielding paint here so no shielding in here so that's something you definitely do get some shielding paint or tape shield that in there i bet you make a big difference but again everything else looks legit the wiring is not bad i mean this is impressive for the price point and just a quick note there's also no shielding on the back plate of the cavity so you would have to get some shielding tape on that as well other things to take notice too it's going to be hard in this lighting but you can see there's hazing in the paint this is from buffing they didn't buff it to the highest sheen something you would expect on a very expensive guitar inexpensive guitars especially black tend to have this issue so again not horrible but something you need to be aware of so let's go ahead and test the fret ends we're going to use the nylon sock test for this let's go ahead and a little bit of snagging right there look at that okay so pretty good i see some snags right here you can see them definitely where they caught underneath the funny thing about these frets is they feel really nice this is not bad if you've watched a lot of these videos you see where some frets will just shred this not only put holes in it but just make it look like it was just ripped apart i would definitely give this a three and a half out of five as good frets on this side let's go ahead and do that what i'm looking for when i'm looking at this is exactly where it's just either got a hole in it torn or you can see where it's pulled the threading out of this and again this looks pretty good again i'd give this a three out of five so very good for this price point i went ahead and i checked all the frets and they're level there was no high frets or dead spots and they definitely looked a little polished so again i don't know if that was done just for this video for this review for this guitar or if this is how they come but like i always say if this is the guitar they sent me you should get the same guitar because i don't ask for any special guitars on the channel to me it's actually worse when they kind of try to make a guitar perfect because now they've set the standard so don't accept anything less than this all right so like i said we would check to see what the wood on the guitar is made of as you can see here it's definitely not two pieces this is one continual piece of wood so there's no way that there's a maple cap the other thing is this is not color consistency or even the grain type i can see of mahogany this is not mahogany and then because this wasn't the mahogany maple cap combination i said let's check the neck so when i went over here and i went to the truss rod again definitely not mahogany this definitely looks like maple the body could actually be maple as well the guitar weighs in at about 9.2 pounds please understand i'm only looking at a very small piece but it doesn't look consistent with what i'm normally seeing the good news is i removed the nut and the nut is definitely bone that is great so you can see a little bit of glue right there we'll put it back but it's definitely a piece of bone so again uh maple neck bone nut the body again could be poplar basswood i don't know it i literally have to look at more of the wood to know but now we know what we have okay so let's go through the sound settings on the guitar i'm gonna start with a neck pickup running it through my fender 65 deluxe reverb mic with an sm57 here we go [Music] do [Applause] [Music] one thing i notice about the pickups is these pickups don't have a whole lot of harmonic overtone on them so what that means is is that my guess is that although they're wound correctly which is why we got great readings on the 9k and the 7k they're probably running some kind of ceramic magnet and that and that high powerful magnet is making them probably a little microphonic a little bit intense on the strings there's probably a lot of magnetic energy is what i'm trying to say and it's probably killing a little bit of stain and that's what i'm noticing on the guitar it sounds great feels great very happy with it i think if you were plugged into a modeling amp i think you would not notice anything you'd be very happy but if you're plugged into let's say like a class a 5 watt tube amp or an amp that's real sensitive to the input i think i think these pickups would be problematic they might even feedback but more importantly they're going to be really hard you're going to fight them now some players like that some players like to really work hard to get the note to hang around for a little while but these pickups in this guitar do not have a ton of sustain not a bad thing just giving you some input so now i have my three-minute dirty shirley mini head plugged in with akili caverns a little bit of reverb and delay running into a 212 vintage 30 cabinet with the sm57 and with a little more fire on the pickups they sound a little a little bit more sustained how they have more sustain i should say but um definitely seems a little bit of a fight like i feel like if i i feel like i'm still working a little hard to get the tones out but let's let's uh give it a try we'll start on the bridge pickup so next we go warms up a lot [Music] let's go to a higher output amp let's switch to the engel fireball 25 and see what that does [Music] [Music] so let's give some final thoughts this is a guitar that if you're a beginner absolutely perfect i don't know what you would worry about uh like i said maybe a light setup on the guitar but the setup and this guitar still puts at a fraction of the price of a lot of guitars in the market but the fact that they can give you so much guitar for the price now is impressive it's just an impressive thing there are definitely some modifications that i would recommend i would definitely start with those pickups the nut was cut well it's bone looks good tuning keys you can always improve those as well but these pickups were definitely the weak spot in this entire guitar the fact that the woods don't look like they're what they expect on the website 30 years ago you could have looked at a guitar at this price range comparatively speaking with inflation and we would have found a plywood body and all kinds of issues in the guitar so again it is a far cry from what they used to be the only negative i can find about this guitar is when i went on reverb there is a lot of used ones which means a lot of players are probably impulse buying these and then probably moving on as a modification platform the guitar seems legit as a beginner guitar also as well too or it's an affordable backup i think you're fine like i said would i use this for live gigging sure it seems pretty quality although like i said again those pickups are going to be the issue now before i go i'd like to thank the guys at firefly for sending the guitar out it takes a lot of guts to send a guitar to have an in-depth review like this and a lot of companies flat out tell me no they're not interested in having a guitar on the channel if this is what i'm going to do to it go through it like this so the companies that do i really want to thank them it really tells a lot about the company but more importantly if you bought one of these or after this video you buy one put a comment down below how your experience let me know and the other viewers know was it like this experience this video can only tell you about this one guitar not the entire line but comments down below definitely tell you about the company's consistency whether it be customer service build quality or just its application on design as always i want to thank you so much for your time till the next time know your gear today's viewer shout out goes out to jose thank you so much for supporting the channel and for reminding us that the left-handed guitar players need a little love too [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Phillip McKnight

Views: 618,646

Rating: 4.9264836 out of 5

Keywords: firefly guitars, firefly, harley benton, knowyourgear

Id: iH-4eT9qrDY

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021