Chinese Jazz Boxes

Chinese jazz boxes...that sounds both vaguely racist and kinda dirty at the same time. Either way, this is a thread about semi-hollow or hollow body electric guitars.

Unless some of you are fortunate in circumstance or situation to own some vintage large bodied electric guitar, some of which are highly valued and quite expensive, most of us I would imagine would be talking about the big box guitars made in Asia: in Japan, Korea, China and other exotic locales.

Myself, I was wanting one of these type of guitars for quite some time. The ones I would look at were usually expensive models like Gibson ES175 or Gibson Byrdland and similar. Those things are crazy expensive used, but they are really beautiful instruments.

I finally ran into a Chinese jazz box at the right price getting a Ibanez George Benson model. It's the smaller body one and not the high end Japanese model, but quite nice. It's a few years old.

It was setup for playing jazz with these really heavy flat wounds. It didn't sound good and the action was terrible with those. I got it down to round wound 11s and tuned it up half step down and it plays great. This guitar has a couple tweaks that are from Ibanez shredder guitars with the compound neck. Don't know that I have had one that it changed this much, but it really works when playing up around fret 12-14.

Few years back I also used to have a Hamer Echotone (335 copy). Ended up trading it off, but it was a good guitar.

I had a 90s Korean Epiphone Sheraton - pickups were bad, finish was thick and glassy but it was BEAUTIFULLY made and played so well.

Friend of mine has an Eastman ES-330, I loved playing it. Some kind of violin oil finish so it's sort of a strange looking relic but I can't imagine a Gibson being worth 3X as much.

Still cheap but hurry because they're getting discovered are the German ones from the 60s and 70s.

I have an Epi 339 pro. It's not my favorite guitar, but it's quite playable and sonically versatile (what with the coil-tapping).

I have it for situations where something semi-hollow is needed, or for when a double-humbucker sound is right.