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Post by leeophonic on Jun 25, 2019 22:15:18 GMT
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Post by Michael Messer on Jun 26, 2019 19:43:23 GMT
Lee, a couple of years ago I had the Supro lap steel in to review for Guitarist magazine and it was so bad that I was unable to review it. INMHO that just looks like a Supro Ozark, it has none of the components that make it an Ozark. In fact it was not possible to fit a set of strings bigger than 8 to 38 and even they would have been hard to fit.
Shine On
Michael
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Post by leeophonic on Jun 26, 2019 20:23:28 GMT
I remember the lap steel problem, I wonder who is advising this company as they are trying to tap into something without knowing what made them work well in the 1st place. Simplify things, do away with adjustable bridges on lap steels and buy a bigger drill for the strings might be a start.....
Lee
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Post by mretrain on May 27, 2022 14:18:43 GMT
I’m several years late, and it’s basically a moot point to even talk about this guitar since Supro killed their entire guitar line in 2021, but I recently came into a Supro Ozark reissue in a trade. I knew it existed beforehand, but information was scant, so in scouring Google I came across this forum (which I was also aware of, being the owner of a 1930 National Triolian—I had read posts, but hadn’t bothered to join).
I mostly stick to vintage guitars, and I’m not crazy about Chinese and Indonesian reissues, especially ones that deviate from the original designs in an attempt to “modernize” them, but I have to say that after playing it for a while, and especially at the relatively cheap price I paid for it, this little Ozark reissue kicks butt. The neck shape feels good, similar to old Supros but slimmer and also feels slightly wider, which suits me. The frets feel good. Tuners feel cheap, but work well enough and are smooth. The antique white finish looks great; I held it up to my well-preserved 1960 Dual Tone, and it was a near exact match.
That brings us to the pickup, which would be most people’s bone of contention with this thing, and rightly so. A wiser choice saleswise would have been to gin up a new rendition of the old Valco string-through pickup (let’s assume that Lollar and Mojo were too cost-prohibitive). However, I would much rather have the Lace Aluma 90 pickup (which they claimed they worked with Lace on to voice like the original Valco pickup) than some half-assed imported attempt at a sandwich pickup that’s but a pale imitation of the original. The Alumitone pickups are popular with steel players, and that makes sense because they have good output and articulation, and very little magnetic string pull, so therefore great sustain. I don’t know if Lace honestly worked with Supro to voice the Alumitone pickup like the original Valco, but in any case the pickup is well matched to the guitar and sounds great for slide—producing fat, but pointed and focused, tones.
Of course, it doesn’t have a giant chunk of magnesium running through the neck, which was a big contributing factor to the originals’ sustain and resonance, but I really don’t expect any modern factories to be doing a recreation of the Kord King neck. If you see one cheap, you should at least check it out.
There aren’t many demos on YouTube, and most of the ones out there are pretty bad, so I made a quick one with my phone. Not that this one’s great, but it at least captures the kind of slide tones it can produce. I don’t usually use quite that much distortion, but I was going for that dirty late ‘80s Cooder kind of sound, which is why people go for Supro Ozarks and Coodercasters in the first place, right? Unfortunately I’m not Cooder, but it is what it is.
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