Color me intrigued, they may have a winner with this one. Seems like a (somewhat at least) faithfull update of the Old RD Artist. I look forward to hearing how it sounds.
I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm not entirely sure it is 100% "Artist" (speaking as an owner of a '79 RD Artist), but it's no "Standard" either. I guess it's more "Artist" than "Standard" and that's more than I expected. Colour me intrigued (but because I have one of the originals, it won't be high on my shopping list)
Agreed - it's active with cut/boost bass and treble controls (with the addition of 'parametric' knob whihc must be a frequency sweep); not bad. It would be unreasonable to expect the effects mode but I am surprised there's no bright mode (though I doubt that was popular - I certainly don't use it on my vintage one) cuz that woulda been easy.
I saw a couple complaints on facebook about the rosewood fingerboards, but I think they look good. I never liked the "all blond" look of the natural ones with maple boards, so that's an improvement to me. And I like the way it contrasts against the black versus an ebony board. With all that maple, I think rosewood is a good choice. Still don't like those "Grover" tuners they've been using. They stick out too far.
Vintage ones were maple/natural and rosewood for all all other colours as you are aware so this is legit IMHO. ... also a bit biased cuz I hate laquered maple boards.
The only thing I am not hot about is the pickups (big so even replacing them is a pain). Not a fan of the bridge but that's easy to swap out for a 3 point.