Robin Custom Medley
Good Luck Struck! I won this guitar from Guitar Player Magazine a year or so after buying the Carvin DC150. That was so cool. It was billed as being worth $1200, and arrived with a beautiful fusia/pinkish-red metallic finish with a white binding (painted I think). The carved arch-top body and through-neck were mahogany as far as I could tell, and it had an ebony fretboard with sharkfin inlays. It had a Kahler Pro trem installed, and who knows what kind of pickups.
The disappointment was that when it arrived it was in awful shape. It was unplayable due to buzzing etc, and one of the pickups was dead. I talked to the folks at Robin, but they didn’t seem concerned and were not at all helpful. I suppose they were thinking “Whadda ya want for free, kid?” So…I took it to Doctor Bob, who did a wonderful job maintaining my Carvin, and he set it right. He also added some switching options. The guitar came with a S-S-H configuration and he added push-pull switches to the volume and tone controls so I could split the humbucker and run it out of phase. As with the Carvin, I never really found a use for this. It just sounded good at the time to have more options.
The Robin was a very comfortable guitar to play, although I never got used to the pointy reverse headstock. It also had a graphite nut and Bob suggested I didn’t need the locking nut, so eventually I removed it. He was right. A properly setup trem and guitar with a graphite nut and good tuners doesn’t really need the locking nut. Even heavy trem use didn’t throw that guitar out of tune.
The Robin did a nice job pulling off strat sounds in the neck position and the neck-middle position. I was never happy with the bridge pickup. I swapped it out for a Carvin, but still no good. This guitar was also a bitch to set up properly. I lost contact with Doctor Bob after he moved at one point and took the Robin to several different people at various times, but never with very satisfactory results.
I always expected the Robin would eventually become my main guitar because it was so nice to play, but that never happened. Sound-wise it never compared to the Carvin, so I carried it as a backup for years and eventually sold it. In my research prior to selling it I talked to the folks at Robin again (who were very helpful this time) and discovered that the guitar was not actually made by Robin in Texas as I had assumed. It was one of a series of guitars that were built for Robin in Japan. Still, it was a gorgeous guitar that was fun to play.