GAS advice: Takamine FP360

I love my Takamine acoustic. The best entry-level acoustic around, in my opinion. Good, solid guitar.

I have 2 Tak A/Es (eg523sc-eg523sc12) and i love them. apparently Pete Townsend does as well.

i've seen that model at about 500 used several times. if it's in good shape i say buy it, if you change your mind you should be able to turn a profit.

I love my tak 12 string, great tone, lovely sweet sound to it

Thanks guys, that's just what I wanted to hear. I'm waiting for a response from the seller, but I gotta get my fiance from the airport this afternoon. What should I do if the guy selling the guitar calls and I can check it out today? Fiance at airport or new guitar? :? I could see this leading to a really bad problem... :twisted: Well, there will be other women :twisted: . No, bad Dave, veeeeerrrrry bad Dave!!! :wink:

Hopefully it will work out and I can get the guitar tomorrow... I'll let you know. I gotta get ready to go to the airport... or maaaayyyyybbbbeeee check out a guitar...

Dave

P.S. You guys do realize you're enablers don't you? Course, that's why I asked you for advice.

Your fiance can take a cab home from the airport, the tak doesn't know where you live yet :twisted:

:x I emailed the seller within an hour of him posting it on Craigslist and never heard back. Now the listing is gone, so I suppose is the Takamine. :evil: SOB could have at least told me he had sold it. Jerk.

Well, I'll keep looking, but I really liked the potential of that FP360. Thanks for your positive input.

Tele, good thing I didn't leave the fiancee waiting at the airport... then I'd have no girl and no Takamine either. :cry:

Dave

You dodged a bullet, my friend.

I own a 1990 Takamine FP360SC and it ain't worth $700 used. That's laughable. He'd was lucky to get $400!

The FP360SC is an ok guitar, for what it is. At the time it was wonderful. Today people take for granted how easy it is to get a decent acoustic sound through a PA by means of a pickup, but back in 1991 when I bought mine, brand new, it absolutely floored people at gigs and open mics. Guys who knew better, too. I bought mine specifically for an open mic when I worked at the Central Chicago GC. At cost, with a gig bag, I paid just over $600 out the door. New it would've sold for about $800, possibly less. (MSRP was around $1300 and they were an A-markup.) Acoustically, it was severely lacking in the bass response one would expect from a dreadnaught. More on that later.

I'd gladly sell you mine, but you should know it's been repaired. I had it in the back of a truck, half filled with PA gear and a tension bar broke loose on my round-the-corner drive back to our shop. A heavy cast rolled into the butt end, forcing the headstock into the back door of the truck. The headstock snapped off. It was my primary instrument and this was a particularly jagged break. As if that weren't bad enough, what I discovered over the next year was upsetting and eye-opening.

For a long time I put off having it repaired because I couldn't afford it. When I finally brought it to a luthier (Someone, I might add, who was tapped by Kaman to set up QC at their then brand new distribution center for Ovation, Takamine, etc.) he attempted to purchase a new neck for it. A simple enough repair for a skilled repairman and this guy is a great repairman with plenty of celebrity clients. They didn't want to sell him a new neck! They played their parts very close to the vest to keep Tak parts from ending up on other instruments. But the luthier in question was an authorized Takamine repairman for crying out loud!

He finally was able to use his contacts in the company to buy another FP360SC with a cracked top. He would remove the neck and use it on my instrument. I might add that they sent this guitar with most of the electronics gutted, to keep them from ending up in another brand of instrument. He steamed the neck. I didn't budge. He kept steaming it. He steamed the damn guitar for 3 days straight. Not one bit of movement. It was only when he went back to his contacts in the company to ask what was wrong that they told him (remember, he was already an authorized Tak repair service and had set up QC at their distribution point) they use(d ?) epoxy to adhere the neck to the body, the bridge to the top and other, normally glued parts! :mad: This explained why I'd spent most of that year being put off by Takamine when I attempted to ask about repair myself, as a salesman at MARS Nashville. I also discovered why this big dreadnaught guitar was so lacking, acoustically, in bass response despite some choice woods in its' construction. The amazing, Tak p'up system had 6 individual cylinders that connected the piezo strip to wiring that fed the preamp. I don't know the purpose of the cylinders. Perhaps they are magnetic p'ups blended with the piezo element. Regardless, the large amount of material they drilled out of the bridge to accomodate these cylinders severely limited the amount of bass transferred from string to the top.

That's when the luthier told me about Blueridge. His words; Chinese factory, well built, awful setup. But since he would buy the instrument direct I'd save money, he'd set it up and install an L.R. Baggs pickup system. I spent less than $500 total for the Blueridge and it is superior to the Tak in every way except one. It's not a cutaway, which I could've used for several songs. The acoustic sound is infinitely superior to the Takamine, before or after it was repaired. (In the end, when I worked at MARS the luthier there cut me a sweetheart deal to mend the neck joint with a new piece of wood. It isn't perfect, but he did a decent job and it looks good.

If you're still interested, make me an offer. I, for one, will never buy another Takamine after the way the company ignored all my requests, made my luthier jump through hoops to also be left in the dark and for the great difficulty in repairing their instruments. My experience now is I can find better, elsewhere, for less money.

YMMV