A common topic among new guitar owners is quality control, aka QC. We touched on this in our previous issue, but that was specifically about getting your new guitar to play and stay in tune. What happens if the guitar you’ve just acquired isn’t actually to specification and/or the sounds it’s supposed to make aren’t what you’re hearing?
Such an enquiry came from a player who’d purchased a Supro Tri Tone that was going for a good price, one of the later Indonesian-made reissues, not a relic from the vintage Valco years. He was enjoying the guitar, but there were a few quirks and he wondered if his guitar might have been mucked about with. He, too, had had some problems with tuning stability, which he’d fixed by slightly opening the nut’s string grooves on the bass (wound string) side, and fitting a new set of strings.
The odd thing was that although the guitar has volume controls – one for each of its three pickups and a master volume a tone control and that it was turned down a bit. Basically, he didn’t think he was hearing what he should be: a pair of Supro Vistatone humbucking-sized single coils at the neck and middle, and a Super Alnico single coil (think sort-of P-90 in a humbucking size) at the bridge. “Single coils? They sound like humbuckers!” To cut a lengthy email dialogue short, he dropped off the guitar.
