Alvarez Artist Series ABT60 Baritone Guitar Natural

Love the bass sound but is hard to play because of the long scale. I going give this guitar a try.

The ABT60 is a great sounding guitar that plays nicely when set up, but after six years, mine developed some structural issues. The front split at the glue seam and it developed some light buzzes on 1 & 2 that my luthier says will be hard to correct. (It's kept at the same humidity as three other higher end guitars that have no issue.) The tuners are pretty coarse and that makes tuning touchy, but it's stable once tuned. The Alvarez lifetime warranty proved useless because shipping it from the W coast to St Louis and back for repair would cost more than local repair and even though the Alvarez dealer has a guitar tech, they're not allowed to do warranty repairs. Its still a great value for a baritone and I'd buy it again.

This is a nice looking, well made instrument. I like the haunting sound of it. It opens up entirely new dimensions in my music. I am a picker, not a strummer and I did notice that there is a buzz in the low B string when I strummed. However, I think that is to be expected considering the weight of the string and the added length. One could probably get around that by going to different, lighter, strings but I don't want to mess a good thing up. For finger picking this set up is fine.

If you've been reviewing baritone acoustic guitars and are wondering if this one is worth it?! Just go ahead and get it.. you wont be disappointed. Don't let the cheaper price tag throw you off, its real quality and you'll be surprised by the sound and play-ability as I was! Mine right out of the box was set up prefect. Take it from a guy who already went through a ton of reviews and back and forth already.

I have to put the fault on Alvarez QC because it took 5 orders of the same guitar to get one without flaws. Yes, I had to order this 5 times. The 5th one was a keeper. Guitars 1 -4 had these problems: crooked tuning key, pickguard not on straight, binding dented, 2 guitars had finish cracks UNDER the lacquer, 1st 5 frets it would buzz. It DID take 5 times ordering this but the 5th guitar was perfect. No problems like was mentioned. The tuners & pickguard were on straight, no dents in the binding, no under lacquer cracks. It all passed my QC, which is the least I would find acceptable. This guitar can be tuned to A but that's as low as you can go before the strings start flubbing out. It really like B & you get the best tone & playability there. This thing has some awesome bass tones to it. It will challenge your normal way of thinking about playing guitar because of it sounding so low. It doesn't come with a case & most average jumbo cases WON'T fit. You need one with a lower bout of 17" wide. I call mine 'The Titanic' because of how huge it is. I opted for the non-pickup one because I'll mostly do recording with it. I have a few sound hole pickup I can use for live work. All in all, it's a great value if you get a good one. It's on par with the 10x more expensive T brand baritone. GC had it at a really low price & I was going to get 2, but that price drop is long gone. I'm never parting with my #5 because of all the trouble it took to get one that was right. Your mileage may vary.

First thing you need to know about these is they are SUPER JUMBO! not regular jumbo, like others. At the store we tried a regular jumbo case and the lower bout was too big. In fact, it's 17" across! Now that's a BIG ONE! So we found an acoustic bass case that would fit it with a little bit of room at the head-stock. - It came in the typical triangle box, inside another large box, with 'some' packing. I'm saying the way it was packed was very poor. They skimped on the paper stuffing. God forbid UPS let anything land on it. It WOULD NOT survive! It had the usual white transparent bag all Pac-Rim's come in. The build quality was nearly flawless. The 3 BIGGEST flaws were: 2 dings in the binding where the neck joins the body. 2.) the pick guard was put on crooked and didn't match the curve of the sound hole trim. 3.) one of the machine tuners was installed noticeably crooked. The 1st two I could live with, but a visibly crooked tuner shouldn't be on a brand new guitar! Guess QC missed that one. Other than those 3 things, everything else was totally perfect (I got lucky). The neck was laser straight, the action completely perfect (3/32nd bass side - 5/64ths treble side). It needed NO neck adjustment at any tuning. - The D'Addario's they put on at the factory have a .070 for the low 'E'. and a .014 for high E. It wasn't 'that' hard to play it but you better have strong hands to deal with that piano wire for strings. With a solid spruce top, it sounded amazing. A week prior the Taylor rep was in at my local GC and had one of their Bari's. I had to tune it up to 'C' to get it to sound right. When tuned to 'A' the strings flopped about. - John Pierce has an 80/20 set I'm going to try. Martin's are P. Bronze and also coated like the D'Addario's. This will be an interesting instrument to challenge my guitar creativity. There's really nothing like it and you've got to play one to understand. So at the low price GC has them (no pickup) it should be something in your collection.