Technology Will Save Us ELECTRO GUITAR KIT / ELEKTRISCHE GITAAR BOX

Bought this as a Christmas present for my nephew and he was really excited about it. My brother and his wife less so, but uncles are meant to buy noisey presents for their nephews and nieces.As for build quality etc. I can't really comment as they had to go home before he built it. the body of the guitar and amp is made from cardboard so is probably not that sturdy but is easily recyclable. The pickup is made from fairly sturdy plastic so should be reusable on anything he decides to make into a guitar, or any other string instrument, in the future.

My 8tr old grandson enjoyed making this and plays it a lot.

Got this for our nephew's xmas present....he loved it and it was easy for him to learn to put together

Kids love itHours of fun

Good fun, niece loved it

Bought for my 5yr old niece who loves it! Easy to put together and hours of fun

Good for curious kids

My daughter and I quite enjoyed this set, and it tied in nicely to stuff she’d already been learning about sound vibrations and so on. It also provided a few minutes of fun and laughs around the theme of rocking out, composing music and so on. But while I’m 100% all behind science toys and getting children to experiment and make and build, ultimately we were both left a little unimpressed overall and after the initial build and test, this has been put on a shelf and doesn’t seem likely to come down again in a hurry.There’s a printed instruction sheet, sort of- it gives you the first three instructions then directs you to a website where you get the rest of it shown to you, so make sure you have a laptop or tablet handy. This turns out to be a plus because some of the stop-motion animated assembly instructions and short explanatory videos help explain and clarify things much better than simple plain text does. (As a side note though I was really surprised to see at least three spelling and grammar mistakes in the online instructions- I thought scientists were supposed to prize attention to detail?)The guitar itself is somewhat shonky though, as you’d probably expect from a guitar made from cardboard and elastic bands. For smaller hands it’s quite difficult to play because the ‘strings’ are close together. Although twelve tuning lines are shown, precision playing is extremely difficult, and the height and structure of the bridge means that while you get quite a nice pluck sound from an open string, as soon as you press the string down to change the note, the result is flat and dull. The amplifier is alright, and the sensor is decent enough, but it’s too sensitive to movement and gives off a loud deep sound even when gently tapped, making it feel more like a kick drum generator than a guitar pickup at times. The distortion button on the amp is a novelty, but a horrible-sounding one.The music generator app online is a nice idea, allowing you to layer up four different short sound recordings and create your own tune. However it’s rather limited in features- the loop length is fixed and can’t be adjusted, and depending on the device you’re running, when you’re recording a track it doesn’t filter out the existing tracks so you end up with looped and delayed echoes all over unless you’re very careful. On my Surface Pro 3 there was also a distinct delay between the visual sync and the sync of the played-back audio, making it nigh-on impossible to actually play something in time and convince my daughter I can actually write a song. If the guitar had still been proving fun by that stage, I would’ve sought out some different loop-recording software instead, because what’s provided is fine just for giving the basic idea, not for longevity or re-use.It’s good fun in the right way, but it’s very short-lived, a one-hit-wonder of a science toy, and quite expensive for what it is.