It's a beautiful guitar, build quality it great, setup is almost perfect out of the box, and those blacktop FilterTrons sound amazing ! Got two of them in different colors, absolutely love them.
Sound is warm, rich, organic, plenty of dynamics. These blacktops retain that classic Gretsch sound but with more bite and more gain available. I play progressive rock with some heavier parts, leads, and some ambient parts with tons of delays and reverbs and stuff, and these pickups cover my use perfectly. With my amp on the clean channel pushed to 60/70% I can go from a nice warm clean to a punchy natural breakup just by varying my playing or moving the volumes on the guitar.
Also love the controls on these guitars, you get a master tone, a master volume, and then an individual volume for each pickup allowing you to mix both pickups to your liking. That's super useful to me and something I couldn't live without now.
For this particular model just be aware the colors in the pictures are a bit off when it comes to the pickguard and the body binding. The binding is a lot more "cream" than white, and the pickguard isn't white at all, it's a kind of metallic silver which doesn't really show in the pictures. Not what I was expecting from the pictures when I received it to be honest, I'm trying to find a replacement pickguard or considering painting the original one since I really don't like that silver. In the meantime I've simply removed the pickguard and it actually looks great like that !
