[hutchman]

After a lot of research and reading here and on other forums, I decided to take a chance on a Triple Single. I have read both good and bad, so it was a roll of the dice as far as I was concerned. I ordered it last Wednesday from Uncle Ikes early in the AM PDT and it was shipped by 1200 CDT the same day. Awesome shipping!

It arrived today and after opening it, I only found a couple of flaws, one most people would never notice and the other easily seen, but the location keeps it unnoticeable, so it was good so far.

I tuned it and notice the action was very low.........did I mention it was low......? It also appeared that the first fret was 3 or 4 thou lower than the second fret. This was causing both dead strings and sever rattling on the low E string. Since I am a noob, I had no idea what to do. Called Uncle Ikes and they said it sounded like had too much arch or bow (not sure which is correct) in the neck and could be taken care of with a professional set up.

They stated these cheaper guitars essentially have no set up from the factory and I guess they don't check them before they send them out. I was begining to think that I may have made a mistake, so I called the local shop and they said to bring it in Wednesday for a set up.

That was OK with me, but I wanted to play this thing. I decided to google "guitar setup" and immediately found a website that gave a step by step procedure to set one up. So being the curious person that I am, I decided to see if I could perform this setup myself. Two hours later, the guitar plays as good or better than my Epi Les Paul.

It is now everything I wanted with the twang that I have looked for over the last two years. The Les Paul just never tweaked me for country music.

This thing looks good, plays easy (for a noob anyway), and sounds exactly the way I wanted it to, and was very affordable. And as an added bonus, I learned something useful.

Thanks to you guys for all the info, even though most of it was gleaned by lurking!

Hutch