CORT

When I was at the Cortech factory indonesia, I saw a guitar that took me by surprise and they said, oh, that's our premi Not only is there a court guitar that is $3,000, the last run of they've made some upgrades to it and put it at $3,000. So in case you're wondering, is t No, they still make the guitars we know that are between $100, $200, $300, $400, $500, $600, but they've added a new upper tier of guitars. And I probably shouldn't be shocked considering we know because Ola Stranberg told us in the podcast that they make the Trutemper mint Stranberg edition, w But to be honest, $3,000 is a different league of guitar and I just don't know if a court guitar can even be taken seriously. So instead of mocking it, I'm going to take a look at it. Maybe at the end we'll understand it a little better. And with that being said, let's get into the geeky stuff. So what are we talking about? We're talking about the court KX700TT. Let's talk about the features because there's a ton of them. First, we'll start with the bridge. The bridge is a Scholler-Honest bridge. First of all, it's built really, really well and it's easy to adjust. Only has one adjustment screw per saddle to raise and lower them. Adjusting the intonation in the back is extremely easy with an Allen wrench, but then looking at it from the back and how it kind of bolts into the back of the guitar and how the brass plate for the strings go through. From there, we're going to go to obviously to Fishman Fluence pickups. These are pickups that have tons of different sounds, including coil splitting, a vintage and modern sounds and we'll get into that. Then we're talking about a premi The neck is going to be a five-piece roasted quarter son maple neck. So it's going to be maple walnut maple. We have a volute here. We have locking tuning keys. Then we have an Indian Rosewood fretboard with 24 true temperament frets, we'll get into that and L It also features a graph tech nut and it comes with a deluxe gig bag. So obviously the way these true temperament frets are made is the frets come pre-made and pre-rolled. What they do is they route the pattern into the fretboard and then they glue them into place. First the fact that they're very thick and stainless steel and are very hard stainless steel, they're most But if the case happens, I can tell you exactly how they're going to do it. They're going to heat the frets w So they can refret these. It's more difficult than a standard refret in some cases, but not as difficult as other refrets in other cases because again anytime you're gluing in frets you're adding to the process. Concept is really simple. The idea is that a guitar is fundamentally flawed. When you In other words, every key has its own string. On a guitar, when you tune the guitar, you're basically tuning one string. However, they're putting the frets approximately where the notes go. True temperament is There are some flaws. First flaw is someone who's owned one of these true temperament guitars. I had the Strandberg one for a couple years is it's not the easiest t You start noticing that your guitar is slightly out of tune or their guitar is slightly out of tune from yours, especially chords. And the sad thing is because you're in tune and they're not and that doesn't matter because it has to be In other words, we all have to be in tune together. I really recommend that if you get true temperament, the other guitar player has true temperament. But if you're a solo artist doing your solo t Different tunings. You can do different tunings. Obviously, if it calibrates to E, it will calibrate to E flat. So what tunings can you do with the true temperament system? Well, drop D, E flat standard, D standard, open tunings wit Issues I've had with the true temperament system is open tunings with more than a whole step from standard and drop tunings The other t We have a spoke wheel truss rod with three dimensional look at t It looks just fantastic. A little speck of dust on there. Just look at that. So the first t Tuning up the guitar took 38. 1 seconds. Beautiful. Okay, let'see how they set t So we have the neck set at just a little bit of relief. We'll verify that here when I tilt the gauge on it and we'll see what that is. Checking out the action on the guitar. We have the action coming in at two millimeters off the 12th fret on the low E 1. 75 on the rest of the strings. The nut is cut perfectly. Let's do a sock test. Let'see how the fret ends are. One of the questions I got a lot last time was, How do you level them stuff? I've never done it. So I don't know. Hope one day not to have to ever figure out. Okay, and I'm going to go a little aggressive on t And we're going to call that, Okay, go here. Let's go to the bass side and the bass side's a five. That's absolutely five. Four and a half out of five is how we'll call it for the average of the two sides. So again, kind of what we expected. Let's check to see if there's any Here we go. T Okay, so no You can see that they have four screws with furls. So there's no back plate. They've rounded over here and they've rounded the edge, but they did not contour the edge. When you go here to do what we call the handshake, the angle of that is fantastic, but t If this was just a little rounded or smooth over at angle here, this would be a much more pleasing joint, especially for a guitar You can see it's a little bit, but it leaves it be a little bit more at angle coming t Let's do some measurements starting with the nut. We have the nut coming in at 42. 86 millimeters, w 687. The 12th fret, 52. 91 millimeters or basically 53 millimeters and 2. 083. Let's take a look at how they did the electronics. So very neatly done, 25k potentiometers, standard box switch here. I don't Obviously we have s It looks really nicely cleanly done. The back plate has foil, w As you can see from here, really nice flush. Basically executed beautifully. I mean it looks good as it should as t I'm not looking at the jack, I'm ass Looking at your electronics, you have the two Fishman h You have a three-way switch here. Your coil split will verify all t Essentially a vintage in a modern mode, vol Weight-wise we have the guitar coming in at 7. 25 pounds or 3. 31 kilograms. Let's play this thing, go through some of the features because that's really where the show starts and then I'll do the s Okay, so to start t We're going to be running the clean channel with a little bit of reverb, through a cabinet with a cream back in it, mic'd up with a Sennheiser E609 and then a room mic. Between the combination of the True Temperament frets, t Okay, so one of the questions that I'm going to leave my mic on for t So let's go here. As you can see, the frets do not stop you from doing any kind of bends, vibrato, anything One t It's kind of you feel on the side of your finger. It causes no discomfort, pain, or even I want to say it doesn't distract you in any way. You just kind of notice it's there. And I feel I just thought, oh, that's a little different. And then it took moments to get used to it. Some may never get used to it. I just don't know. I just, I'm just telling you, I never had a problem with them. Okay, so now what I want to do is I'm switc T And I'll have a little boost pedal in front of it. I'm using a Torus Servo boost pedal in front of it. And with a little bit of delay and reverb. So what I'm going to do now is switch to the T So how about some pros and cons? A little s One of the cons was the Rosewood fretboard. I don'think they should do True Temperament frets on fretboards that are not a phenolic resin or The frets are fine. Of course, the frets are not the only t And if t So those are the cons. What are the pros? Well, the pros are executed perfectly. It's a great guitar. And it just shows that basically great guitars are built everywhere. Do you think Quartz is crazy for making a premi By the way, I just want to one more time. That's not going to go away. They as a, if you watch the factory video I did, you'll clearly see that there's no way they're going to convert all the buildings to the Master Premi There's no logic to that. On that note, I t Until the next time, know your gear.