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(More customer reviews)The Vortex X is the entry level "V" body guitar from Fernandes guitars. It features an alder body, bolt-on maple neck, rosewood fret board, and 24 jumbo frets. The bridge is a tune O matic with stop tail piece. Pickups are in the form of 2 Fernandes high output humbuckers.
Quality is pretty good for such a low price guitar. The body being solid alder gives it a nice bright tone. If you really look close you can see where the different pieces of the body are joined, but you have to look close. The neck is hard maple with a scarf joint at the headstock. It is finished in a low gloss varnish. I know that is supposed to help your hand glide, but I've always felt it looks cheap. The hardware is of decent quality. The tuners bring it up to pitch well and hold a tune fine. I wouldn't put them in the same class as Grover, Schaller, etc. but I've seen a lot worse. The bridge seems to be made well. All hardware is black chrome. It gives the guitar a higher end look. Time will tell how it will hold up.
The rosewood board is of average quality. It was crying out for moisture, so I gave it some lemon oil, which made it look a lot better. The fret board is bound in white plastic, a nice touch, although it is bright white, not bone colored. Inlays are your standard fake pearl dots. I find the jumbo frets a delight. They have the sharp edges typical of lower end guitars. I usually end up filing and polishing them to make playing more comfortable on these lower end units. The 2 hum bucking pickups are quite hot. They sound good to my ear, with fairly warm tones. I do notice a little muddiness when using both pickups together. Volume and tone pots are not as progressive as I would like and the selector switch will give you an audible tick when shifting between positions. I also think the system needs better grounding. I get a bad buzz under distortion that goes away when I touch the pots or input jack. That will be remedied soon enough.
Playability is quite good. I am able to keep the action fairly low without fret buzzing. I would not say the action can be taken ultra low, but it is very playable. My overall impression of the neck is that of a Jackson or maybe an old ESP. It's a thicker neck, but quick playing. The alder body does not have enough heft to naturally balance with the neck. If I play it with a strap and let my arm off the body it will tend to nose dive. I've experienced that with other V bodies too. The only solution I guess is to make the body from ash or mahogany or the like. Or hang weight from the back strap button.
Overall I am impressed with this little V. Considering you can pick one up for around $300or less, it really is a good bang for your buck. If I were to improve it, I would slap a set of EMG pickups in it, put on some top notch tuners, and replace the switchgear with better quality stuff. I probably won't do any of that because it is a decent guitar as it is. It is not a $1000 guitar, but it is well worth the asking price. The official stats are bellow.
*Alder body
*Maple, bolt-on neck
*Rosewood fingerboard
*25-1/2" scale
*24 jumbo frets (2 octaves on each string)
*16" radius
*Center dot inlays
*Composite 1-5/8" nut
*High-output bridge humbucker
*High-output neck humbucker
*3-way toggle switch, 1 Volume, 1 Tone
*Die-cast tuning gears
*Tune-o-matic-style bridge with stopbar tailpiece
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