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A few last minute comments
The tone of this guitar is much warmer than my MSA 12 string SuperSlide. I would describe the MSA tone as being about the same as a pedal steel guitar. The Excel has more of a vintage tone but
not as warm or full as the older guitars with real horseshoe pickups on them. The Excel spring spacing allows for easy and accurate bar slants and fairly easy string bends beyond the 3rd fret.
The intonation while not perfect due to the non-adjustable bridge is nevertheless very good and plenty good enough satify most any player. The guitar sits well on ones lap and is very comfortable
to play for many hours at one sitting. I plan on coverting this tuning over to a C6 tuning, E C A G E C A G/F (high to low) which allows an east retune to A6 tuning giving me the high 5th note back again
E C# A F# E C# A F# (high to low).
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I bought this Excel 8 String Jerry Byrd (JB) Frypan stel guitar used in 2011. It came with an unknown set of strings so I measured their gages and picked the closest
tuning I could find that would fit. This turned out to be an E7th tuning, not the C6 tuning I am familiar with. So I decided to play with it as is and the song and sound samples
recorded below are all done with the E7th tuning. The guitar was plugged into a Boss RV-5 set on hall reverb and then into a Fender blackface Vibro-Champ amp and mic'ed with a Shure
SM-57. In hindsight I wish I had thought to use the Princeton or Deluxe amps for a fuller tone. I also used a hollow Dunlop bar which has a mellower tone but a bit less
sustain than a standard bar. After I had recorded a
number of the tabs I discovered that I had bumped the tone control into the no treble position. So part way through the tabs I repositioned the tone control towards the treble setting
and the beautiful tone of this guitar came alive. This guitar comes with a faux horseshoe magnet pickup cover and a conventional 8 string pickup.
