Slacker G wrote:Anyone here tried "Rondo" guitars? Some of the guys on the old Digitech forum bought them and really liked them. They said the craftsmanship was excellent and they were well set up right out of the box. A couple of the guys changed the pups but others were satisfied to leave them alone. Incredably low prices on guitars that play and sound really good. You can check out the finishes on them. Prices start at about $200 for the better ones.
I have considered buying a Start copy just for the parts.
http://www.rondomusic.com/
Rondo is the distributor, not the brand. The Agile series are actually quite good, and most of their models are built to the original specs of the originals- I bought two guitars from them a couple of years ago, an Agile AL2000 and a Douglas FXsomthing. The douglas guitar was an ibanez RG knockoff, and the Agile was a les-paul knockoff.
The douglas ($150) was basically a superstrat body, thinner than an ibanez and very lightweight (alder), has a beautiful finish, H/S/S pups, and a floyd rose "licensed" recessed locking tremolo. I generaly liked the single coil pups, but the humbucker sounded flat, so I replaced it with a dimarzio "steves special" which has nice balanced mids for beautiful cleans, and smooth OD/Dist. It sounded fantastic in this guitar. The guitar itself was cheap in some ways- The tremolo was absolute crap, the locking nuts stripped out from the hex wrench right away, so I replaced the screws, but then the better screws stripped the nut.. all cheap metal. The fine tuners also seized a lot, were hard to turn because of poor metalwork and lubrication. When locked, the guitar did stay in tune thru divebombs and such. The neck was straight, and played o.k. I never liked ibanez necks, and this guitar did a good job of replicating the flat/thin ibanez type well, so that's probably a personal preference more than a bad neck.. So anyways, I dismantled the guitar, ripped out the trem, and plan to rebuild it with a strat-styled neck, all new original floyd rose, and evans pups.. I love the body on this guitar, although the hardware was all crap, the body and electronics are all solid and suitable. It will be a great player someday. (my 4th profile pic is me playing the douglas (burgundy-ish finish).
The Agile ($200) did have some funky electronics issues, the pup switch was bad and the volume/ton knobs rub the surface of the guitar (not a big deal really). Other than that, the guitar itself is beautiful- the paintwork and binding are outstanding. The action is low, and the guitar is mahogany,; neck is straight, and yes, set up right out of the box. I had the pup switch replaced. The pickups were a little muddy to me, so I replaced the bridge picup with the dimarzio after yanking it out of the Douglas, but for whatever reason, they don't pair well and the pickup - while not muddy, just doesn't seem right. I plan to someday pull it and pop in a duncan JB and see how that sounds... the JB works well with heavier woods I believe.