Burlap and Blues, The Blues Blog

Yes, it is time for another guitar review series. The AXL guitar is a guitar I have been wanting to review for some time. I have read other reviews about the AXL guitar and thought that it might be worth while to invest in an AXL guitar to see how good they really are.

I have had a change to do a pretty comprehensive evaluation of the guitar with a new set of strings and a set up and have a great deal of interesting things to say about it.

I first read about AXL guitars at their website. AXL Guitars had several very interesting headstock shapes and their "badwater" series of guitars had a neat distressed looking strat-style guitar for under $200. When I heard that EMac, BAB's newest member was looking for a trade for an AXL, I thought there was no better time than the present to do a review of the AXL SRO Marquee series guitar.

The first thing that I noticed about this guitar is the finish is pretty solid. This is not a guitar that would be easily dinged. It seems to polish out easy and has a pretty red glowing finish. The serial number is on a sticker which I thought was kind of weird. If someone wanted to change the serial number all they would need is a clear sticker and a printer and they could serialize it with any number that they wanted.

I played a few tunes on it the first night I got it and it played pretty well for a budget guitar ($169, which is $10 less than a comparable Squier Stratocaster H-S-S). I am not sure if the previous owner had ever done a setup on this guitar, but it seemed better set up than any Squier that I have played that had come right from the box.

I will be discussing the hardware on the guitar tommorow, and the rest of the week there will be recording clips comparing the AXL SRO Marquee to my Fender Strat.