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Faith guitars


leftybassman392
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Anybody know anything about them?

The reason I ask is that I've had a hankering for a nice parlour guitar for some years, and while in Manchester the other day I chanced on a shop called Forsyths on Deansgate, which happened to have a Mercury in the window. I was kind of tempted, but having been out of the loop on recent guitar developments I hadn't heard of them. The guy in the shop was very helpful, and let me try out one or two of their (unusually large stock of) Lefties. Unfortunately none of them were parlours.

The Faiths I looked at seemed very well made and were reasonably priced (around £900 for a top of the range model). Unless something truly cataclysmic happens in my life I won't be gigging it so it will be for personal use only.

Any information folks could impart will be gratefully received. While you're at it, I also liked the look of their Auden guitars. They don't seem to make a parlour model but again the ones I looked at seemed pretty good.

Anybody?

TIA

Edited by leftybassman392
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Thanks Skank. B&M are certainly the UK distributor but I hadn't realised they even had an in-house brand. Provenance seems to be very good with the involvement of Patrick James Eggle. My local PMT has a righty Mercury from the range I'm looking at for well under £800 so I'm optimistic about getting change from £850.

As luck would have it the window display at Forsyths had the Mercury sitting next to a PJE original parlour (a very plain, unadorned instrument with a cedar top at a whisker under £3k). For a brief moment I did actually think about getting a quote for a PJE lefty, but apparently he doesn't make acoustics any more. No, I didn't know that either. :huh:

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[quote name='leftybassman392' timestamp='1508235803' post='3390663']
Thanks Skank. B&M are certainly the UK distributor but I hadn't realised they even had an in-house brand. Provenance seems to be very good with the involvement of Patrick James Eggle. My local PMT has a righty Mercury from the range I'm looking at for well under £800 so I'm optimistic about getting change from £850.

As luck would have it the window display at Forsyths had the Mercury sitting next to a PJE original parlour (a very plain, unadorned instrument with a cedar top at a whisker under £3k). For a brief moment I did actually think about getting a quote for a PJE lefty, but apparently he doesn't make acoustics any more. No, I didn't know that either. :huh:
[/quote]

I haven't quite decided yet, but I have a Faith Neptune that I may decide to part with. It has recently been upgraded with Gotoh locking tuning keys too.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Collected from PMT Birmingham yesterday (which just happened to be hosting a trade fair at the time and was like Butlin's on a bad day). The guitar is fantastic; beautifully made from solid woods throughout, great sound, silky smooth action, deceptively simple but excellent active preamp included in the price (£769 all in, and IMHO an absolute steal: in all honesty I wouldn't have quibbled at a 4-figure price tag). I'll hopefully do a proper review at some point, with an outside chance of some AV. We'll see how that goes though so no promises at this stage. (If anybody in the general vicinity of Birmingham has access to a half-decent recording facility then I'd love to have a chat...)

More interestingly, Patrick James Eggle happened to be in attendance at the show and took a few minutes to have a chat with me about the guitar's background.

Like all Faith instruments, it's made in Indonesia by a small family concern to Patrick's own design using a combination (in this case) of top quality Engelmann spruce from the US and locally sourced tonewoods. Every instrument that comes into the country goes through Eggle's own quality control system at his base in Oswestry (part of the Barnes & Mullins' facility apparently - hence the in-house status of the guitars I would suggest), and quite frankly it shows. On visual inspection it looks absolutely flawless and is possessed of some lovely detailing that has been extremely well executed (the edge binding, partial cutaway of a type I've not seen before and - what looks like - a genuine MoP inlay around the soundhole being cases in point). The action is smooth & silky, and without resorting to the usual dairy-based clichees it feels lovely in the hands.

Suffice it to say that I'm looking forward to getting to know this guitar more than I can remember feeling for many years.

As a by-the-by, I bumped into an old Lefty bass-playing mate I haven't seen for a few years. I doubt you'll read this Dave, but it was great to catch up with you.

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A guitarist pal of mine has two Faiths. I couldn't tell you which models
But she recently bought a very dark wood model (think it's mahogany) Absolutely beautiful
Though I only dabble with guitar really, I could tell it is stunning.

When I asked her why she hadn't traded her old Faith in, she said she couldn't bear to part with it
That's also a lovely guitar too BTW

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