My guitar arrived with the high E string broken, and I replaced it immediately. I also set attached the leg-rest version of the attachable body rods. I plugged the guitar into a cigar-box amp and tuned it, then checked the sound and playability. The neck pickup had a good humbucker snarl and overdrove the amp nicely, so the basics of a usable travel guitar were definitely covered. But over the weeks I found a few problems, none large enough to make me regret the purchase, but definitely things new buyers should know about.

1) BRIDGE HEIGHT. The bridge on my Lestar is set too high. At the 12th fret, there is about 3.5 millimeters between fret and string – say, the height of 3 or 4 dimes. This is reasonable action for an acoustic guitar, but is clumsy for an electric guitar. The bridge is not adjustable, despite what the product literature says, so this problem may not be easy to fix. I did try adjusting the tension rod to see if I could get a slight amount of relief, but it appeared to have no effect whatsoever on the neck shape. Changing the neck tension is the wrong procedure when the problem is string height, anyway, so I reset the tension rod and am living with the excessive string height.

2) PICKUP NOISE. The neck pickup alone is completely quiet, as you expect from a humbucker, but both the bridge pickup and the center switch position (where neck and bridge sounds are mixed together) carry lots of electrical noise, like you would hear from an unshielded single-coil pickup.

3) PICKUP HEIGHT. The pickups are both set quite far below the strings. As a result, they do not produce as much signal as you would expect from big humbuckers. When I loosened the pickup screws, they did not raise the pickups. I think this can be fixed by getting some resilient sponge material, packing it beneath the pickups to help raise them, and adjusting the pickup screws to bring the pickups closer to the strings. Other online writers have said that the pickup screws are sometimes stripped or too short to let this work, but I don’t know first-hand yet. As well, fixing the bridge height problem (if that is possible) will bring the strings quite a bit closer to the pickups.

4) PICKUP SOUND QUALITY. The neck pickup is very characteristic of a humbucker: thick-sounding, with little treble content. The bridge pickup does not sound like a humbucker at all. It is much quieter than the neck pickup, and as thin and twangy as a Stratocaster or Telecaster single-coil sound. The bridge humbucker on my Les Paul has a beautiful combination of clarity and power, which is what I would prefer to hear on the Lestar as well. I don’t know if the bridge pickup is wired incorrectly (i.e., perhaps wired out-of-phase), is internally defective, or is meant to sound like a single-coil pickup. When I next remove the strings, I will open the bridge pickup area and investigate more thoroughly. If the pickup itself is the problem, I think I will swap it with the neck pickup, as I would prefer an effective humbucker pickup in the bridge rather than in the neck position.

5) VOLUME / TONE CONTROL PROBLEM. Many owners have written online about the problem with the factory volume and tone controls. When I got my guitar, the volume control had almost no “taper” in volume. From a volume control setting of “10″ down to about “2″, the volume stayed the same. Then in the small distance from “2″ to “1″, the volume went all the way from full volume to silence. There were weird interactions between the tone and volume controls as well, resulting in some very shrill and tinny sounds in certain settings. This problem appears in at least the first production run of the Lestar guitars, although I have heard rumors that the problem is supposed to be fixed in newer runs. The fix involves cutting or unsoldering one wire inside the guitar, and soldering it into a new place where it probably was meant to be soldered – there is a clear solder pad just waiting for a wire to be attached. There is a before-and-after electrical schematic of the fix at http://imgur.com/ML0Yy, and the “Notes” in the schematic give a URL to a video showing (sort of) the repair process.

If I had paid $300 for this guitar, I would be very unhappy with these problems. But I paid $88 plus shipping online, and I am happy to do some of these fixes myself and live with what I can’t fix. The guitar is pretty playable, although I can’t solo above the 12th or 14th fret until I do something about the bridge height – the strings are just too high off the fingerboard to play quickly. I am now using only the neck pickup, so I don’t experience the problem of pickup noise from the bridge pickup. It’s a bit muddy-sounding, but drives out a pretty strong blues / rock sound. I haven’t traveled with it yet, but if I do travel this will be the guitar I bring along.