Steinberger

I recently bought a new GT Pro and love how light an easy to play it is, but I was a little disappointed with the way it holds notes.

Sustain seems to drop off very quickly, after 2 or 3 seconds holding a note with a fair amount of vibrato also.

I raised the action a little incase the strings were fretting out a little, but seems to have made no difference.

I might be a little unfair comparing my other nice axe a Squire HM3 with my new $350 GT Pro, but their could be a setup issue or maybe it is just the way the Spirits play.

I have read comments that the steinys have very good sustain, may be referring to Synapses.

Would appreciate if anyone had some setup tips?

Well I have raised the action till it felt unplayable, lowered the pickups. Gone the other way, low action raised the pickups. Restrung with different guages, diff tunings. Corrected the intonation. Added brass string adapter (Really recommended!!) Adjusted truss as the neck was a little straight.

Nothing seemed to make any difference. I guess the natural sustain of the instrument is limited due to the body size?

Last throw of the dice I have removed all the stock pickups and just added a EMG 81 active pickup at the bridge. Well, the difference is amazing, the sustain now can ring out nicely into feedback. The EMGs are awesome.

Some of the higher note/higher strings still need vibrato to help it on, but it is a huge difference.

There is not much room in the electronics recess for the 9v battery, so I have removed 5 way switch and middle/neck pickups till I work out the best place to pack it all. If I do add an active neck pickup, I figure I can store the battery in the unused middle pickup recess.

The install with EMG solderless connections was fairly straight forward, just could not use the supplied output jack as it was too short, but the standard jack was stereo so it can be used, just need to solder on the 3 wires.