Review of the Eastwood Sidejack
The Eastwood Sidejack is a made in China solid body guitar based on the iconic Semie Moseley designed Mosrite guitar made famous by the Ventures as well as more recent Mosrite guitarists like Ricky Wilson of the B-52’s and Johnny Ramone. (Eastwood has reissued the Johnny Ramone Model too).
The Sidejack has two P-90 pickups which sound very good not as gainy as the original Mosrite pickup but close in overall signal. It also comes with a Bigsby style tremolo which works as you would expect…………..very well. The tuners are Kluson clones which also are very good quality. A brief note on the P-90’s and the guitars sound in general. This guitar is a lot of guitar, well balanced but IMHO this guitar is a specialty guitar put a set of flat wounds on it that combined with it’s weight make this a perfect guitar for that Surf/Joe Maphis/Glen Campbell sound. That’s saying a lot because you cannot get that sound with a Strat, Tele, or a Les Paul. And with the current prices of Mosrites these days this makes this guitar a real must have for those guitarists wanting a varied array of different sounding axes.
I have owned several of these guitars and would say for the price (around $400 bucks) it’s a real good deal. Here are the deficiencies that I have seen with the Sidejacks the fretwork is consistent with most of the Chinese guitars I have played in the past few years okay but not great or even very good. The fret wire they use is quite good but the guitar will need some fret leveling for you discriminate players.
Update! The newer Eastwood that I have played from the recent shipping are better in quality across the board especially in the fretwork, a very discriminating player who I spun onto a Sidejack recently thought the guitar played great with a slight neck adjustment, and I agree.
The colors available are all very attractive and the set necks are solid as a rock. The rosewood boards are surprisingly high quality.
In closing I would say that the Eastwood side jack is with me on every trio gig I do, I capo it and play my bluegrassy tunes with it (w/ a slab of delay).
I love the Sidejack !!!!