Tony Bacon and and Paul Colbert put three budget guitars on their laps and interview each other

KAWAI AQUARIUS AQ305 £149.50

What about that chunky neck?

Fat and round, with a walnut strip down the back, no fingerboard. The thing that makes it feel slightly odd is that the fretting area is flat — you'd normally expect a little bit of a camber, especially when you get down around the octave where it begins to get a bit thicker. Flat fingerboards usually have a thinner neck.

Does the flat fingerboard make it harder to play some things?

Nothing as such, but you're a bit more conscious of having a lump of wood in your hand,' specially when you slide up.

Elsewhere on the neck?

Frets are reasonably wide and low — a bit dirty where the polyurethane lacquer has been slapped on and it's crept up the side. For £150 I don't think it's a bad neck, but it'll take a little bit of getting used to.

How's the nut cut?

It's a little sticky. You might want to get in there with a bit of grease and loosen it up.

What about the controls — that looks like a pushbutton lightswitch near the two pots, doesn't it?

It's a coil-tap switch, and it's horrible because there's no way of telling by looking at it whether it's on or off. It's fast all right, but you'll never know where you are. The controls are smooth, but they have slick, curvy bits so you can't get a grip — OK at home or rehearsing, but on-stage and sweaty you'd find your hands slipping off them. One humbucker, uncovered, with Allen-keyed screws. The truss rod adjustment is absolutely impossible to get at without taking the neck off, that's really stupid. And I'd take the tacky Made In Japan sticker off the back pretty quickly.

How's the trem work?

Screws in and stops at about the right position, so you won't push it much further than that — when you unscrew it, it goes loose enough to drop down. It goes straight out of tune as soon as you try it, probably due very much to that sticky nut which you'd have to oil. There's no slots on the rounded saddles, so the strings can slide about on them quite a bit. A fairly average trem system.

And the sound?

Not a great deal of sustain, and in fact not a great deal of difference in tone between the tapped and the untapped position, just a bit thinner and less volume. An ordinary, workable tone. If it's going to be your first guitar you might want to consider paying a bit more for the option of two pickups so that you can get some wider sounds. This is definitely a Van Halen hero job, but not a bad start.

KAWAI AQUARIUS AS405 £185

Not quite a Strat layout, is it?

No, it has the usual copy trick of taking out the final tone control and putting the jack socket in there instead of the angled plate. The pickups are all straight; not with the angled bridge unit à la Strat. But it does have the five-way pickup selector for "out-of-phase" options.

More of a variety in tone than the last guitar?

Oh yes, although the phase positions are in fact a bit disappointing. The one good one that you should have between middle and tail seems to lose a great deal of its treble, so all that nice harmonic stuff that you'd want to cut through is going to sound dull when it should be sharp. Ironically for a Strat copy, it's actually got quite a nice jazzy tone on the bass pickup, although you'd need to play over the pickup itself to get the best out of it.

How does the trem compare with the last effort?

If anything it's worse, still goes out of tune immediately you use it. The neck's a bit more comfortable, though, but the slight bow in it could again only be corrected with the truss rod adjuster after removing the neck. The fingerboard is the slimmest piece of rosewood I've ever seen on a guitar — it's barely there at all, it's like someone's painted it on.

How do the works shape up?

Pickguard is basic one-piece plastic, pickups are all covered in black plastic. If you're looking for a first guitar with a bit more variety in sound, however, this is more like it. But I don't think it's been put together as well as the last one, for example.

VULCAN 8920 £105

How do the Vulcans relate to the Kawais?

They're cheaper, and are made in Korea — and yes, there is a difference. Let's see — it's got one of those really rounded trem covers that I haven't seen for ages, we'll have that off for a start. Very flat neck, again, lacquered, and it seems to be not particularly professionally inlaid with mother-of-marble markers. Frets are thinner, not quite so nice as the Kawai's.

How does the cross-section of the neck compare?

Somewhere between the two Kawais — it stays the same width at the octave. Some of these frets, though, are in a rough state, quite a few have got chips out of them, and they're really sticky — it's almost as if they have a coating, maybe glue, on them. I think you'd want to give the frets a good old scrape and clean before you sat down and played the guitar properly.

And what does the pickup selector offer on this one?

The "out-of-phase" position between the middle and the tail is actually more convincing on the middley stuff than the Kawai. But the pickups on this do in fact sound more Strat-like than those on the Kawai — probably because the body's heavier and thicker. So you get more of that honky, middley Strat sound; it's also a better visual copy, with the jack ferrule, the three pots, the slanted back pickup, and a better scratchplate, laminated black-white-black. So it's a better copy, but not constructed as well as the Kawais.

The truss rod is accessible this time, isn't it?

Yes, it's on a bullet at the correct end, on the headstock, so you can actually get at it for adjustments. All in all, there are definite signs of budget manufacture here. It's all right if you're intent on a lookalike Strat copy and haven't got much money, but it's not as good a guitar as the others we've looked at here. It's easy to unplug, however.

CONTACT: Stentor Music Co Ltd, (Contact Details).