Hi all,

I'm new here but I do qualify.  After having exhausted myself reading up on Eastman semis, I decided on the T59v amber but when I got to the store, they had just sold it. :-(

With another T59v being many weeks away, my gaze turned to a red T386 hanging up. Having it my hands for 45 mins, I could not leave the store without it.

NGD !  I played this guitar through various amps at home and, whereas it played beautifully and sounded great acoustically, I just could not bond with the Kent Armstrong pickups
which I found to be wooly in the neck and harsh in the bridge.

With 4 hours to spare and spurred on by the promise of better sounds amplified, I pulled out the existing humbuckers and replaced them with a set of Japanese Tom Holmes J450 /J455
pickups which I had in stock. I replaced the bridge pickup ring also with a DiMarzio tall ring and with black screws all round. The great thing is that the T386 has CTS pots as stock.

As the Holmes covers were nickel and the remaining hardware is chrome, I changed out the bridge to a Faber ABRM and also the stoptail with a Faber 59 stoptail with nickel locking steel studs.

I was unimpressed by the pick guard gaps around the pickup rings so I decided on a closer fitting Gibson long guard with the 60 degree bevel. All the replacement parts I used were in my parts drawer

Call me pedantic but the upgrades really please both my ears and my eyes.

What a wonderful guitar. If I had paid twice the money I did, I would still be delighted

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I played one of these long ago and remembered how much I liked Taylor cedar, but not Taylor so much.  This unblemished mahog/cedar 2007 GA5 came up for sale in recent times near me... brought it home below market value.  No cutaway, no elecs, no Taylor pickguard... most non-Taylor, Taylor I've ever put my hands on.  (Pickguard from LMII)

I spotted a birch wood back and sides guitar on ebay - I was intrigued. Do any of you guitar historians know whether it has ever been much used as a tone wood?

"I love this guitar". How many times have we all said that? I know I have waay too often only to sell or trade it away. Most of the time just for something new. Well...if I get rid of this guitar below I am just a plain ole idiot then. This one has a nice thicker neck profile then most T386 models I have recently owned and played. It has an ebony fret board too. Not sure how that happened but I'll take it. Put 11's on the guitar and didn't have to adjust the neck or the intonation. Absolute perfection with no tweaking required. Except for raising the action to taste. Swapped the pickups to Antiquities and is exceptional on every level. Yes I will say it again.....I LOVE THIS GUITAR!

It goes without saying that the bridge and bridge/top interface on an archtop makes a big difference in tone. I had some problems with the original wooden bridge on my ar403 while doing set-up and temporarily swapped it for a tune-o-matic, now I'm on-the-fence about whether going back to the wooden unit. I found it really changed the volume string-to-string (in a good way) and of-course intonation is now solved. Has anyone else changed to a TOM, and if so what are your experiences?

I finally received my T64 from MGS a couple weeks ago and decided to update it with ivory knobs and pup covers.  I've always liked this look on many Collings that I've seen and thought I'd share with you guys.

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Good forum, signing out for a few days - looks like there's something blowing in .....

... better get my umbrella.

I have now owned 5 Eastmans and I still have 4, counting the mando. They are beautifully crafted instruments, but the one consistent weakness, especially among the fancier instruments, is the occasional presence of wobbly purfling, or binding that is not perfectly aligned. There are some (very small) examples of this in my MX, my 805 mando, my OM, and my previous Pisano.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really complaining, I think this is the result of hand work. CNC wouldn’t do it, but then again, most top quality luthiers wouldn’t let it out of the shop, either. They’d redo it until it was perfect. I personally think it’s a very small price to pay for otherwise boutique quality instruments at factory production prices. Anybody else noticed this?

Hi,

My luthier just told me my 2014 E10D (that I just purchased recently) needs a neck reset if I want to make the action any lower without things buzzing..he said the neck prob got put in a few degrees off?????

This is the first time I've experienced this situation, is there any kind of Eastman warranty that would apply to this situation?

Thanks

UPDATE 9/13 @9:11pm eastern time
Pictures attached showing bridge and neck.  Neck pictures do not show dip though.

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My AC420 is mostly used as part of my worship ministry on Sunday mornings at church.  Being a hillbilly of sorts I always insisted on playing through a condenser mic for a "natural" tone.  Playing through a mic is great and I love doing it but there are headaches involved and I decided with this latest Eastman that I'd try something different.  I ordered a Prestige 330 pickup from JJB Electronics.  It's basically the same pickup as the K&k I used a while back in my trusty Seagull "stage guitar".  

The install was dead simple and I can't say enough about how the JJB reproduces my guitar's true acoustic tone.  It seems more feedback resistant than the K&k to boot.  It took some testing to decide on where to place the transducers for a balanced tone but the final result is nothing short of amazing.  My keyboard player didn't even realize the microphone was gone until he spotted the wire running into the end of my guitar.  None of us can hear the slightest change in the acoustic tone.  The biggest change I noticed was that my sound was consistent and clean through the PA and I didn't have the condenser mic picking up background noise and monitor wash.  

Now I'm on the search for the ultimate acoustic pre-amp.  Right now I'm using a Behringer V-tone, which is actually a nice unit despite being a Behringer.  If JJB ever gets their preamp back in stock I might just have to see what's up with them, though.

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