Takamine EG-531SC

Takamine G Series EG531SC guitar... has a lovely laquered black finish with some absolutely beautiful abalone detailing around the sound hole and also for the fret markers on the neck. It's also a cutaway, and the body looks quite appealing to the eye (or at least to mine). Tuners are also very good in comparison to a lot of other acoustic guitars on the market.

The guitar comes with a pre-amp as well (it's an acoustic/electric); a TK4NT, I believe. The pre-amp comes with adjustable EQ (treble, contour, bass) an in/out switch, mid-contour switch, and an EQ bypass switch (which for me comes in quite helpful at times). Of course it also comes with a gain control, along with a notch filter control. However, by far, the best feature on this pre-amp is the on-board tuner. While it doesn't have a signal bypass (you have to turn the gain control to 0 to tune while on stage), the tuner is quite accurate, and is really handy to have. It's not quite as accurate as say an actual tuner would be, but it is by far good enough quality to tune your instrument properly.

In summary, the guitar doesn't really have any "WOW" kind of features except for the tuner, but what the features it does have are high quality, and then I'll add a rating point for the tuner. It is REEEEALLLY handy.

Well, I play a lot of worship music for church, and that style is often times very acoustic-guitar driven. At times, songs require me to play anything from acoustic rock to folk. Obviously, getting a good sound is important. I guess I'll evaluate the sound based on how it sounds acoustically, and then how it sounds plugged in.

Acoustically, the instrument is beautiful. The sound may naturally be a tad trebly for some tastes, but I like that sort of sound, especially in the mids. I haven't tried it, but I'm sure that the sound would be reproduced nicely if you decided to mic the guitar itself with say a Shure SM-57. If you prefer a more bassy sound, you won't get it going simply acoustic, although maybe some of that could be attributed to the fact that my playing style doesn't really lend itself to a lot of bass sound. Be forewarned that the factory standard strings are pretty crappy, and you would be well advised to replace them with your favorites (I use Martins, and they provide the most lovely sound on this guitar). I also agree with the evaluation of someone on here... they said that this guitar is like a good pair of jeans. You need to break it in first. Trust me, I have owned the guitar a year now, and the sound does improve as you play it more.

Plugged in, this guitar has its downsides. I play a lot at school (in addition to church) for chapel services plugged into a direct box. The sound that the system gives really isn't true to the sound of the guitar acoustically. Our sound system is top-notch which leaves only the guitar to blame. The sound is just too tinny and airy for my taste. However, I have recently begun to plug into a small Marshall 15W amp that I own, and this greatly improves the sound of the guitar. It makes it sound much truer to it's acoustic tone.

A big plus for the sound plugged in are the electronics. I have been able to get a variety of sounds out of the guitar by messing with pre-amp settings. You should be able to get a sound that resembles what you are looking for.

Acoustically, I'd give the guitar a 9. With a system, I give it a 6. With the amp, maybe an 8.5.

As far as action goes, I thought this guitar was pretty nice. I felt that the action was just right (I had no buzzing problems), although my old guitar was a Jasmine, so anything would be an improvement on that guitar's extremely high action. The finish had no flaws straight out of the box, and looking inside the guitar, the wood has no flaws either. It is sanded nicely, with no flaws in the cuts or inside construction.

In addition, you will experience no tuning problems with this guitar. I can tune mine and pick it up a day or two later, and it will still be pretty much in tune. My style of music requires a lot of capoing, and that hasn't posed any problems either, even when I go as high as the 7th fret.

However, not everything is perfect on this guitar. My concern is with the on-board pre-amp. It seems a little loose. It's not so loose that it would fall out of the guitar if turned upside down (in fact, it wouldn't even move), but when I take the pre-amp out to replace a battery or something, I feel that the frame in which the pre-amp is placed in jiggles just a little too easily for my liking. It makes me a little nervous at times. But other than that, this is a nice guitar.

In my opinion, the Takamine G Series could be nicknamed the Timex of guitars... they take a lickin' and keep on tickin'. While I try to be as careful as possible with my instruments, this one is by far my most heavily-gigged and well-traveled instrument. It has seen its fair share of abuse. But that being said, the guitar has more than withstood the test. It does seem to scratch a little easily, but I guess that's more my fault than the guitar's. I have a friend who accidentally somehow rammed his G Series guitar into a stone wall, and it only left a small scratch, and still plays beautifully.

The hardware on this guitar is still as beautiful as the first day I received it, and the strap button/quarter-inch plug-in on the bottom of the guitar is definitely small enough to where you can easily put the strap on, but big enough so that your strap doesn't come off by accident.

The saddle is great. I think I have only broken one string at the saddle on this guitar... it is hard enough to be sturdy, but the material is still soft enough to be easy on your strings. I gig this guitar all the time without a back-up, and haven't regretted it yet.

I really have no complaints at all in respect to this guitar's reliability and durability. I give it a ten.

I did have to send the guitar back to get a new one (pick-up or wiring problem), but I didn't deal with Takamine customer service, so I couldn't really say. I suppose it would be nice if they had a licensed service center here in the Columbus area, as opposed to 2 hours away, but hey, that's life.

I won't lie... I haven't been playing guitar anywhere near long enough to call myself some sort of seasoned veteran, but I like to think that I have been playing enough to know when something is good, and when it isn't. This is a nice guitar. Don't buy this if you're looking for an extremely high quality guitar (you should look at Taylors, Gibsons, or some of the higher priced Takamines). But if you're looking for a quality acoustic/electric for some gigging and just to play around the house, I would really reccommend buying this guitar (or any other G Series guitar). You will not get a better guitar for the price paid. You won't be disappointed.

Korean made black cutaway dreadnought by Takamine. The 531SC is the brother of the 530SC which is the same guitar but with natural finish. This 531 is a solid spruce top, nato neck, white binding and a nice abalone pattern around the sound hole. It has a piezo transducer pickup, strap holder end jack, and above-average tuners. It has a built-in preamp with equilizers for Bass, Mid, and Treble, a Gain knob, an equalizer bypass button, a MID contour button, and an In/Out knob to control feedback.

I play mostly alternative rock like The Ocean Blue and Travis and this guitar suits me just fine. I am using it with a brand new Marshall AS50R Acoustic Amp which is a 50 watt, 2-channel with reverb and chorus and anti-feedback controls. That amp is nice, one of the only ones I can feed directly to a PA. Not that I have a PA, but still.... This guitar seems to get along with this amp very nicely, however I feel like between the guitar preamp and the amp, I should have a nice range of sounds, but it feels limited. The guitar's preamp equalizers don't do a whole lot, and I haven't yet found that sweet spot between the MID contour and the reverb and the chorus levels. I'm sure I will find it. But for a standard amplified dreadnought, it produces an above-average sound, nice and bright on the treble side with just enough rich bass. The frets seem a bit higher than my intro-level Fender dread, but the sound is comparable. As for the solid spruce top on this Takamine... compared to the cheap laminate on my Fender, it isn't that much of an improvement. I think the whole solid spruce top thing is a marketing gimmick, kind of like the number of megapixels in a digital camera. Solid spruce has its advantages, but I believe that it's just part of the total package. And some solid spruce is better than other solid spruce. Overall I am happy with the sound this produces. You aren't going to see a world of change over your intro guitar, but this is still a nice upgrade. It sounds fantastic plugged or unplugged, and with a little breaking in, I am already seeing this guitar sound better with age.

Guitar was set up a little high at the factory, but I have adjusted to it because I'm not ready to mess with the truss rod. I destroyed a guitar once by messing with that thing. The action is good, no fret buzzes. (Although the first one I bought did buzz, i brought it back and they couldn't fix it, so they gave me a new one, which is fine, so be careful.) I haven't noticed any problems with bridge yet as the other reviewer mentioned. I switched the d'addario strings it came with to some medium Dean Markley strings and noticed an instant improvement in playability and sound. There were no flaws that I could find in the finish. One of the bridge pin holes is too big though, and the low E kept popping out when I used the pin it came with. I bought some new pins which must be a tad fatter, and that fixed the problem. The wood and hardware look to be quality materials. When I bought this, it didn't become my favorite guitar very easily, it was a bit rigid to play, but I think it's just because I am so comfortable with my cheap fender. So I used it more and more, and it's starting to feel like it's mine now. I think that a guitar is like a pair of jeans, and needs to be worn in. At first I gravitated away from this guitar, but now that's turning around and it's sounding better and better. One thing i noticed is that the sound hole is much bigger than the one on my fender, but like an inch or more. Don't know what difference this makes though, the Takamine projects itself nicely.

Reliable and durable. Quality materials. The finish is a bit fragile compared to other guitars I've seen, but with a decent level of care, it will be fine. You can see every dust particle on it because of the glossy black finish, but that just means you dust it off more often. In fact I now dust all my instruments more often now that I see how dirty they really are. So that's a good thing. If performing live, i would only worry about breaking a string.

No need to deal with them. I exchanged it once with the store, since the first one had a bad fret buzz problem that couldn't be solved. Didn't pay attention to the warranty. Hope I never need to deal with any problems. Knock on solid spruce.

I like this guitar more and more. I even gave it its first dent from the coffee table the other day despite trying to handle it very carefully. So it's becoming my baby and I look forward to moving into the realm of acoustic-electric amplification and recording, and possibly gigging with this guitar. It really is one of the nicest looking acoustic guitars out there, just enough flair to give it it's own personality. The onboard tuner is great novel thing to have at your disposal, and it feels like a step up from my entry level Fender. I wish it had blown me away the second I got it home, but it is instead becoming a gentle giant, proving itself a bit more each time I play it. I am glad I purchased it, and among the main name brands out there in this price range and style, I believe it is an excellent value.

This is a Korean-made 6 string dreadnought acoustic guitar (marked "EG531SC" on the Takamine sticker inside the soundhole). It is a part of the Takamine "G Series" line of acoustics, G Series being their lower-priced line. I bought it new in November 2002. It has 20 frets and a single body cutaway to facilitate access to the body frets. It has a solid spruce top (hence the 'S' in "SC", the model number), Nato back and sides, and a rosewood fingerboard.

It is fitted with an undersaddle transducer pickup and TK4NT preamp. The TK4NT preamp has a gain control knob, a 3 band graphical equalizer (bass, mid, treble, +/- 12 dB) with an "EQ BYPASS" button, a notch filter knob with a bypass button (labeled "IN/OUT"), a "MID-CONTOUR" button, and a built-in chromatic tuner with an LED display. The guitar works well in active or passive mode, and the electronics have very low current drain on the 9 volt battery.

This guitar comes in one finish only, high-gloss solid black finish with white binding and an abalone rosette.

It has the typical acoustic guitar bridge, with six plastic pins holding the strings in the bridge just under the soundboard. The pickup fits under the saddle, which is also plastic. The saddle is a compensated saddle with a contoured edge and a set-back for the B string. Unfortunately, it is made from a soft plastic and it is easily damaged by the strings themselves, which I'll get into later.

I don't know what the neck is made of. It has an adjustable truss rod accessible from the soundhole. The frets are slightly higher than you'd expect. The nut is plastic. The tuners are chrome, sealed, and of a fair quality.

I use it for a lot of different styles, from country fingerpicking to Pixies-style punk rock strumming. It sounds great unplugged, but the pickup doesn't accurately reproduce the acoustic sound. Through an amp, it has quite a bit of high-midrange and treble, which usually need to be attenuated away in order to get a more natural sound. The graphical eq on the preamp doesn't help too much, as the width of the filter bands seems very narrow.

In recording, I've had the most success using a microphone (Shure SM-57) combined with a little of the direct signal for clarity. Though I haven't played it in an amplified performance setting, I would probably rely on the pickup for a performance, putting some equalization on the signal to normalize it a bit. As far as amplifiers, I've had good results running it through my Lab Series L6 bass amp (which I've also reviewed here at Harmony). The advanced EQ on the amp, combined with its 15" ported speaker, suit the guitar nicely.

A real stand-out feature on this guitar is the tuner. It is chromatic, which makes alternate tunings easy (not as easy as some tuners that have "open D" modes and such, but still really easy). It has a lighted (LED) display with A through G, and two LEDs for sharp and flat. It's pretty accurate, I've never had a problem with it.

Aside from the usage characteristics, this guitar has a nice full sound. In fingerpicking, it is very bright and trebly. In strumming, it has a fair amount of body, not a lot of bass but a nice sound. When really attacking the strings, you can get it to sound a lot like old Pixies riffing, think "Nimrod's Son" or "Surfer Rosa". The action can be set quite low, which makes it easier to play fast barre-chord riffs. This low action can be a problem, as I'll detail shortly.

When I bought the guitar, I was impressed by the very low action, high frets, and easy feeling to the guitar. It felt a lot more like an electric guitar than any of the other acoustics that I played that day. Of course, I was coming from a low-end Yamaha acoustic renowned for high action at the bridge side, so that impression was probably biased.

Over the first few months, the neck started bowing backward, as if it were set up for heavier-gauge strings than the extra light strings I had on it. I switched to heavier strings (.13 for the high E) and relieved some of the truss rod tension, and that cleared up the neck tension problem.

Unfortunately, the plastic saddle is a huge problem. The strings have worn down the grooves on the high and low E strings, making the action significantly lower on the E strings. In other words, I have a fret buzz problem. In order to fix it (it is now out of warranty), I will probably have to buy a saddle blank from Stewart Macdonald and custom fit it to the saddle slot. This is a little trickier than it should be because the saddle is uniquely fitted to the transducer. I anticipate much pain in getting it right. So much pain that I've been living with the fret buzz for half a year already, dreading the ordeal of fixing it.

The finish has a few dings in it after over a year of careful use. It's nothing terrible, but I expected the finish to be a little more durable than it is. The high gloss black finish shows smudges and dust extremely easily, so I have to clean it more than any other instrument I have.

Aside from the plastic saddle problem, It is a fine guitar, moderately priced, and easy to play.

The hardware is stury stuff, I don't have any complaints, and I don't expect any of the hardware to fail or wear out, with the exception of the awful plastic saddle, which is bugging the heck out of me now. The finish is more delicate than some of the acoustics out there with thick nitro-cellulose lacquer on them, so bringing it out live requires maybe a little more caution than usual. I have taken a little of the finish out around the soundhole (at the edge of the rosette, just before the black plastic pickguard starts), but it's not down to the bare wood, and I don't expect it to wear through any time soon.

After I fix the saddle, I think this will be the primary six string for performance, unless I buy a more expensive one (or build a fancy kit guitar).

I haven't dealt with Takamine, but from what I've read I wouldn't be dealing with them for warranty info, I'd be dealing with Guitar Center since that's where I bought it.

I wish I could just buy a replacement saddle from Takamine, but I can't do that, and I probably wouldn't want to since the saddle is cheap, soft plastic. So to get it fixed, I have to pay someone a chunk of cash to fix it or fix it myself. I'd rather fix it myself than pay someone to fix it, but I sure wish I didn't have to.

Overall, I'd recommend guitars in the Takamine G Series, since they are quality instruments at decent prices. When I was buying this guitar, I almost chose an Ibanez "Artwood" acoustic over this one, but the onboard electronics (and tuner) won out and I got the Takamine. Folks I know have bought other Takamine guitars (G Series and otherwise) and had no problems at all. I also own a used Takamine 12 string acoustic, which is fantastic. I would advise that if you are planning to buy a Takamine G Series, look for the "SC" models (i.e. EG531SC instead of EG531C), since those have a solid spruce soundboard.

Other than the saddle problem, which is really awful, it's a great guitar for the money. Other guitars have better preamps, but the preamp/tuner combo on this one is pretty good, and the acoustic sound is good.

You should also take a look at the Harmony ratings for the Takamine "EG-531C" acoustic guitar since it is identical to the SC model, just without the solid spruce top.