Today I visited one of the remaining “local” stores I had not personally seen: 8th Street Music. They have a small retail store presence in Philadelphia, but sell many instruments on line both through e-bay and amazon.com. The bulk of their sales seems to come through on line sources, and they advertise themselves as the original internet music instrument retailer. Their history appears to support that claim.
So I went to the store because when I have looked for unusual guitars, like the Parker Fly or the Dean Soltero, their store always comes up as a dealer. I was unimpressed by the physical retail store, but I was impressed by the employees within. I had conversations with two of the workers, and mostly spent time with the second. He was able to find a Leslie West Standard, a one-pick-up version of the Soltero for which I have been searching. We talked about guitars, the local guitar market, the market for instruments in Philadelphia, and Dean guitars.
What I learned was that Dean has quality control issues, dealing with Dean is not easy, and the Dean sales representative was given much of the responsibility for the difficulty in selling their guitars. After playing the Dean, I decided that I liked the playability of the neck. But the guitar was poorly set up from the factory, and required some adjustments to the pickup, so it wouldn’t contact the high E string. The guitar was strung with 9’s, and while they certainly were easy to bend, the guitar had a thin tone that might have been caused by the strings. Or it might have been caused by the fact that it was a $600 single-pickup guitar. But I didn’t learn of the price until I was home, because nobody could find out how much it cost! I agree that Dean should provide their dealers with enough info that price should never be an unknown, but it was.
I plan to return to the store, perhaps next week. They have a Dean Soltero, American made, two pickups, in their NJ warehouse, and plan to get it to their store so I can play it. I’ll be interested in its tone, and hearing how much of a difference the second pickup makes in the variety of tones I can squeeze out of the Soltero. In the meantime, it was a nice way to spend an hour this morning. Its just a shame that parking in Philadelphia set me back $13.50 for 90 minutes. Ouch!
