Cordoba 50r Review

History: Been playing 30 years with my tastes bouncing all over the place and have had too many good guitars to list here.

Purchase: Was looking to get back into classical and wanted a better instrument than the cheepo I had. Bought the 50r at a Guitar Center for $800. I liked the crispness and projection.

Pros: It does have a bright tone and the slim neck makes it a fast guitar. Since it is far easier to file down frets and nuts than to turn a soft action into a hard one, I wanted a guitar with a hard action. Sure, you can play around with different nuts but there is little you can do about the building up frets. It is hard for me to understand why some reviewers complain about the action of a guitar since this is such a personal preferance. I have yet to buy a guitar, regardless of the cost or style, that did not need tweeking for my style of play.



Cons: It is a terrible guitar to tune, and for whatever reason takes me a long time to do relative tuning. I changed the tuning machines (albsolutely the cheapest garbage that Cordoba could have put on a mid range instrument), and that helped a bit. I would have taken the guitar back after a few weeks, except I put a ding in it. Meanwhile, I purchased a Takamine TH5C cutaway and spent megabucks on a a guitar I picked up in Spain. It is grossly unfair to compare the instruments to the Cordoba because they cost so much more, but I also bought an Alvarez MC80 at half the price of the Cordoba for the abuse of travel, and it is a far better guitar. I now travel with the Cordoba.

50r Quality: This is my biggest gripe. Terrible tuning machines, uneven finish, sloppy glue application, really rough frets. Cordoba really needs to take a page from other manufacturers in terms of QC. I will end up giving this guitar away before the travel really kills it (as it would, in all fairness, any guitar) and buy myself one of the high end travel guitars like a Soloette or Miranda.

Cordoba Summary: Good sound, terrible QC.

Rating of this product: 2

This Cordoba Classical Guitars Review Submitted By: Tony

Date: 2005-10-28

Usefulness Rating: 4.19048 out of 5. 21 reader(s) voted.