Traded my Sound to Earth A model on a sweet looking satin MT with ivroid binding. It should be here by next wednesday.

My OM2H will have some company from Baja Oklahoma

Way to go! Excellent choice!

Just echoing my congrats from the Mandolin Cafe. You're going to love it.

OK I fudged a bit.

I said I was getting a sunburst MT with ivroid binding.

Well this one does have ivroid but no burst.

Oh well.

Sweet! You're gonna love it. The MT will hold it's own with just about any mando!

Well the Pee Pee dance has started. The box is here and the case is out of the box but I'm waiting for it to acclimate.

I wonder if the color is actually what's represented in the phot. Most blond MT's that I have seen are much less tinted.

shadco: you're gonna love that thing. i regret selling my MT. if you don't love it, please sell it to me. i've been told that the blonde MT is no longer offered. marymary will be getting the very last new one sometime soon.

OK then
The top and headstock are gloss. I wasn't expecting the headstock to be gloss too.

It is better looking in person than the pics. The color is darker than the other blond MT's I've seen almost a vintage tint for lack of better terms. Fit and finish is impeccable and I can't believe they used that wood for an MT.

One of the main reasons I looked to switch so quickly was the time I spent playing a friend's Barnes which has a rediused fretboard, I also felt the cutaway fret board would help as the sweet spot on my Weber seemed to be right at the 24th fret. I find the playbility to be exactly what I had hoped and I'm not clicking away on the fretboard anymore.

Setup seems perfect and for whatever reason the string tension seems a lot less which may be a function of the radius. Whatever it is I find the bluegrass chop chords much easier to fret than on the Weber.

The dreaded Collings deep v neck profile seems to fit me perfectly but then I started out placing the center of the neck in the vicinity of the bottom knuckle on my thumb.

The strings look like they've spent some time in a humid environment almost like 80/20s but they are supposed to be J74's this doesn't really surprise me as I think this one sat around the dealer for some period of time. Why it sat I don't know but there's value in cruising the inventory of all the dealers on the Collings dealer list. Whoppee!

Tone is good in the limited amount of time I've had to wank away late at night. You can tell it's going to need to open up some but it really sounds great right out of the box.

You can tell by the pics that she is purty and it's the little things that Collings does that I really like, example the ivroid tuner buttons, and the clean uncluttered tailpiece.

Gripes?? If you can call it a gripe. The case is tighter than a ..., well let's just say it's tight and it isn't up to the standard of the case that came with my Collings OM2H. It's a basic tkl jobber with the standard tkl after frat party pukey smell.

But the mando smells fantastic just like my OM2H.

That's all for now.