Sound Sample (788 kb MP3)

Review:

You're viewing a Crafter Mini RF40E travel guitar in tobacco sunburst finish.  This is one of two of these pleasant little guitars I sold on ebay. I wish now I'd kept one of them, but at the time I just had too many instruments and no space for them. Both were superb for the price I originally paid. ($80 each on the old Digi-bid auction site.)

This very well-made little guitars come with a passive piezo pickup under the bridge. They have volume and tone controls mounted in a plastic panel on the upper side. The have solid spruce tops and rosewood fingerboards on a mahogany neck.  The top is bound in off-white. The rosette and purfling have matching thin black and white layers.

The neck has an adjustable trussrod . The neck is 1-5/8 inches wide and has a radius fretboard with 18 frets. The neck joins the body at the 12-fret. The plastic bridge is fixed and compensated. It has sealed, chrome-plated tuners. These guitars like medium light Martin SP phosphor bronze strings.

This is a very compact guitar with a body shape reminiscent of the old 1920s parlor guitars, but it is a full 25-inch scale instrument. It measures 36 inches long overall, and 13-1/2 inches across the lower bout.

The back and sides of this Korean-made guitar are of fiberglass construction amazingly similar to Ovation/Applause guitars. There has been more than one back silhouette during various production runs of this guitar. I had one of each. This one has a rounded, slightly pear-shaped back that's deeper at the lower bout. The external texturing on the black fiberglass backs is absolutely identical to the Ovation acoustic/electric bass i owned at the time. Interestingly, even the oval orange label bears a striking resemblance to the Ovation label.

The basic tone is good, a little light on the low end as you might expect. They don't produce as much volume as a larger-bodied guitar, unless you plug them in. The piezo pickup picks up lots of fret noise unless you kill most of the treble. Click HERE to listen to an amateurish sound sample made by plugging the Crafter directly in to my computer's sound card.

©1989-2008 by Dennis Ecklund.

Your comments are cordially solicited. E-mail: info2@ecklunds.com