I got this guitar brand new for only 25 here on amazon. Was very happy about that. An excellent deal...if it worked. Unfortunately the guitar arrived and immediately out the box only the yellow and blue buttons worked. I tried continually reconnecting the neck eventually getting the green, red, yellow and orange buttons to work. That was the best I could do. I could never get all 5 buttons working at the same time. Clearly the detachable neck is built very poorly and the connections aren't being made
Whats more unfortunate about this other then the price, is the guitar could have been great. From what little I could play. The strum bar felt great, the buttons themselves felt great, the whammy bar was good, the star power worked as it should. I felt the size was fine. Maybe 15-20% smaller then the Les Paul Guitar Hero III official controller. But if all the buttons on these controllers don't work. It's worthless. So back to Amazon it goes. Just one problem but a big problem and it's too bad. I would have really liked this guitar if it fully worked.
EDIT (12/27/09) and updated rating:
I ended up buying the white and mahogany versions of this guitar. Both gave some trouble. My description of the mahogany version above in one case. In my case with the white guitar, the neck buttons were...tight. Its hard to explain but they felt like there was friction with the buttons and the plastic surrounding them. I decided to do someting I normally don't do. Try and repair them myself. I normally just return items with problems but the price was so good and the guitars if they worked right, would be very good guitars. So basically what I did with the white guitar, I had to open the neck. Take off the plastic board inside holding the buttons together. I then used a very light amount of white grease around the side of the holes where the buttons would pop out and then put a very light amount of that around the sides of the buttons. Not alot, just a little. Screwed everything backup. Then the buttons were perfect. So it was a friction problem. For the Mahogany...I was ready to return it but I didn't. To be honest, it looks awesome. But it was working terribly out of the box. For that I took a shot in the dark and used WD40 around the portion of the neck that inserts into the guitar. As it was very abrasive and out of the box I needed to practically jam it into the guitar. I made sure to not get any WD40 on the circuit or connector pins as that would be potentially damaging. This helped it slide in much easier and wouldn't you know...all the buttons worked perfect. So it was a connection problem induced by the abrasive neck. I raised my rating slightly, but not by much only because, they shouldn't give those problems out of the box. I shouldn't be expected to fix new items that should work perfect from the start. But these were so cheap. The Mahogany especially looks really nice. The white one is almost identical to the to the Guitar Hero III Wii White Les Paul. Maybe a little smaller. But be warned from my experience and other ratings on here, it seems like its a 50/50 if your gonna get a guitar that works properly out of the box or not and thats very poor.
