Luna Muse Nylon String Acoustic/Electric Guitar Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)UPDATE: see the results of my modifications at the end of this review.
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ORIGINAL REVIEW:
The price has gone up almost $100 since I bought mine, which surprises me a little. I will not critique the electronics except for the tuner(which works fine). My set-up is disassembled and it will require some serious space-engineering to set it up, so I'm just working with the unplugged guitar here. I may update the review in a month or two when I can say more about the pickup and EQ. Reviews I've read elsewhere say that the b-band pickup is good, and the plugged-in sound of the guitar is a "pro".
Some background: I've been playing for almost 30 years, always steel-string, some acoustic, some electric. I've owned may guitars, some of them quite good. I've never owned a guitar that didn't benefit from a bit of tweaking or modification. The last couple of years I've grown disaffected, I've hardly played at all. I've recently discovered rumba and flamenco, and I hope that the move to nylon will re-kindle my love of the instrument, as I challenge myself with some right-hand discipline, work with new music, and translate some of my older work to articulate on this type of instrument.
On to the review ...
Pros:
1)Absolutely the most beautiful guitar you will find for the money, even at this new, higher price($399 right now).
2)The built-in tuner works.
3)The frets are in the right places(intonation is accurate).
4)Contrary to reviews I've seen elsewhere, it holds a tune as well as the next nylon-string guitar.
5)The XLR jack right next to the standard 1/4" is a nice touch, and I will definitely take advantage of what I anticipate will be a quiter and more mechanically secure output once I'm set up for amplification and recording.
6)The unplugged tone, though not great, is not as bad as you might think.
Cons:
I'm not going to number these. Basically, most of the rest of this review will be a detailed criticism of the fundamental design and craftsmanship flaws that render this guitar an inappropriate choice for the serious player.
To begin with, the action is way, way high. I know that nylon generally needs higher action to avoid buzz, but this is absurd. If it were only the bridge saddle, I would rate this guitar 4 stars. As I said earlier, I've owned some good guitars, but I've never had one that couldn't benefit from a little tweaking, and if all I had to do were to file down the bridge saddle then I wouldn't complain(much). Problem is, it's also in the nut. Which is glued. And close inspection under good light reveals that there are some problems at the joint between the nut and the neck, which was filled with putty and stained to look okay.
Okay, so I have to file down into the grooves of the nut. Which will void the warranty, as explicitly stated in the literature that comes with the guitar. It's also a very tedious and error-prone task, and If I go too low, I'll have to crack out the whole nut and replace it, at which time I fully expect to be dismayed at the remains of whatever happened to make them fill around the base of the nut with putty in the first place. I'm going to do it anyway. This alone is a reason not to buy this guitar if you are a serious player.
Now, the height is also in the bridge saddle, and I'm okay with filing down the base of it. I know that if I accidentally go too low, I can shim it back up. I also know that the bridge saddle is easily removable/replaceable, and that tinkering with it will not void the warranty. BUT!!!--- close inspection reveals that the height of the wood which forms the receptacle for the saddle limits how much I can take it down. That is to say: no matter what I do, I can never get the action down to a really good level. The action is that high. If this were a strat with a bolt-on neck then I would shim the neck on the body side of the bolts. But it's not, and the neck is arrow-straight, so I can't get anything out with the truss rod.Still, by working at the nut and bridge saddle, I think I can cut the string height almost in half, and then it will at least be reasonable, though far from ideal.
Next problem: string spacing and neck width. `Specifically, the neck is wide, bu the strings are close together. I know wider necks are the norm for classical and flamenco guitars, along with *slightly* higher string action, but the reason for the wider neck is so that you can have wider string spacing, so that your fingers don't deaden the strings next to the ones you fret. On this guitar, there is a huge amount of wasted space on the fretboard above and below the strings. In fact, the frets themselves stop short of the edge of the fretboard. There is a light-colored wood trim that runs the length of the neck on either side of the fretboard, and looks almost as if it were added as an afterthought, without adjusting the frets and string spacing to match! Especially given the high strings, this guitar could definitely use an extra millimeter between the strings for playability. But no, I have the disadvantage of not being able to wrap my thumb around the top for the lazy G, without the advantage of extra space to help prevent inadvertent muting of adjacent string with my fretting fingers.
Now the last obvious major problem: The part of the fretboard that overlaps the neck, terminating at the sound-hole. There are actually two problems here. First, this is where you notice that the frets are terminated at a rather steep angle. This is nailbait. Trying to learn the flamenco triplet strum, I split my thumbnail and took off a huge chunk of my middle fingernail. Since there is so much wasted space at the edge of the fretboard, why not make the frets slope off gently, so you don't chip your nails strumming in this area? Similarly, where the neck ends, the points on the semi-circle around the sound-hole are very sharp, they should be rounded to something like a 1/8" radius. I've actually already chipped off bits of the tips of these points on both sides.
I'm a little perplexed by these problems, because the precision involved in crafting the the aesthetic aspects of this guitar, particularly the very nice and intricate crescent-moon-shaped Celtic knot inlay around the sound-hole, would make things like string height and spacing seem trivial by comparison. Go figure.
So I have to: file down into the grooves of the nut, file down the bridge saddle, file the edges of the frets over the body and file off the sharp corners of the end of the fretboard. All just to bring this guitar up to a reasonable state of non-hazardous playability. Warranty trashed. I could return it, but I'm not. I paid $302 for it here on Amazon, and think I basically got approximately my money's worth.
One thing that kind of bothers me, somehow symbolic, is that in the literature that comes with the guitar the woman who designed it is mentioned, "Yvonne de Villers, founder of Luna Guitars, is not a musician, but, neither was Leo Fender." Actually, yes he was. True, he wasn't a guitarist, he played saxophone, but he was, indeed, an amateur musician.
So, in summation, it's very pretty. If you just want a guitar to look good on a stand in your living room, and maybe take it up when you have company to pluck a little "Greensleeves" or "Yesterday" or "Hey Delilah"... well then, this guitar and the right bottle of wine might get you laid. But, if you have any inclination to serious musicianship, then even with a lot of tricky work, this guitar has built-in flaws and limitations and you should look elsewhere. This guitar seems to have been designed as a decoration, not a player's instrument.
I intend to update this review after the filing and after I electrify it. Wish me luck! If I can make it work, I'll be a guy in Charleston, SC, playing Spanish music on a Celtic-designed guitar that was "Hand crafted in China". And it will all have been worthwhile! Plus I really dig the whole lunar aesthetic thing.------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE:
Well, I did all the filing and hacking, and I must say that if the guitar had come to me like this, I would probably give it 5 stars.
I cut 3mm from the bottom of the bridge saddle. Actually, I accidentally too about 3.5mm, but the shimmed it back up. I'm a little worried about the effect of the shims on the tone through the pickup, but I haven't crossed that bridge(heh) yet, and if I find it's bad when I plug in, then I'll just buy a new bridge.
I used a needle file for the low-E notch in the nut, but I didn't have anything narrow enough for the rest of the notches, so I used a hack saw blade. I chose the depth by using feeler gauges and a putty knife to measure the clearance between the frets, added a couple of skinny feeler blades to the stack, and took down the notches until I touched the gauge stack. I took out a *lot* of nut.
I used a file to make the shoulders more shallow on those frets which sit on top of the body. I also rounded the two pointy corners of the fretboard where it terminates at the sound hole. I screwed up and made some minor scratches at the sound hole doing these two things. I don't have any specialized guitar tools, and I did all this on my living room floor.
I also put a Dunlop Herco Transparent Pickguard Set on it, since it was already starting to show some nail scuffs.
I restrung with: D'Addario EJ25B Nylon Classical Guitar Strings, Custom, which have a lot...Read more›

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