Review: Faith Blood Moon

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Faith guitars are built in Indonesia and designed by legendary British guitar maker, Patrick James Eggle.
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The guitar looks great, with a notable bold, wavy grain – yet even with figured maple binding and gold tuners. May guitars with these features end up look kitsch, but Faith maintains a classy look.

Faith calls it a Venus shape, an ‘OM/Auditorium’, based size-wise on Martin’s classic OM/000. It’s actually very slightly bigger than Martin’s OM/000, although in depth it’s noticeably deeper – closer to Taylor’s Grand Concert, with which it shares more spot-on dimensions.

If that depth gives an impression, played seated, of a bigger guitar, the mahogany neck reinforces that with quite a meaty profile and near-jumbo, electric- like frets as opposed to the smaller wires we find on numerous other acoustic brands.

To complement a very tidy build, we have a Shadow Nano-flex under-saddle pickup and side-mounted Faith-branded Shadow Performer Tuner preamp featuring volume, bass and treble rotaries, a push-button phase control to slightly alter bass response and importantly at higher volume reject feedback, plus a push-button for the on board tuner, with its micro-sized LED display.

It’s very accurate but not easy to see – bright LED’s aside – in low stage-level lighting. With spruce X-bracing designed by Patrick, and very tidily installed by the look and feel of it, hardwood tops like this always give us a different voice to that of spruce.

A little less wide perhaps in its frequency response, there’s also a subtle compression here as you strum hard with a pick, but that’s a positive: big open chords sound exactly that. There’s plenty of air at the bridge to make more delicate finger picking easy, too, although your thumb has to work quite hard to get those low strings driving.
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Top Wood Solid ‘AAA’ Grade Indonesian Trembesi
Back Wood Solid ‘AAA’ Grade Indonesian Trembesi
Side Wood Solid ‘AAA’ Grade Indonesian Trembesi
Binding Flamed Maple
Bracing Material Quarter-Sawn Spruce
Bracing Pattern Patrick James Eggle X-Brace Design
Rosette 5mm Abalone with Fibre Border
Neck Mahogany
Neck Finish Satin
Neck Joint Patrick James Eggle Bolt-On Design
Fingerboard Macassan Figured Ebony
Fingerboard Radius 16″
Fingerboard Inlays Mother of Pearl ‘F’ at 12th Fret
Machine Head Grover Rotomatic Gold
Trussrod 2 Way
Nut / Saddle TUSQ (PQ-6116)/(PQ-9110)
Nut Width Nut 43mm / String Spacing 55mm
Bridge Macassan Figured Ebony
Bridge Pins Macassan Figured Ebony with Abalone Dots
Finish Type Gloss Top / Gloss Back and Sides
Preamp / Pickup Shadow Performer Tuner Preamp / Shadow Nanoflex Pickup
Hardcase Included

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