Cordoba C7-CE Cutaway Classical Acoustic-Electric Guitar

I have and play 13 guitars from Les Pauls to Strats to several higher end acoustics. I’ve also made several guitars, though not an acoustic. I bought this Cordoba to see if Spanish Guitar is for me. This Cordoba certainly looks good overall and the fit and finish generally looks nice. I don’t know if the strings are ideal for either the guitar or me because I haven’t tried changing them (yet).

What I do not like about this guitar is it does not produce a lot of volume. I can’t see playing this out side of my studio or living room. It may be a property of nylon strings, but 2 weeks on and the lower three strings (EAD) still go way out of tune overnight. Not as bad as when I first received it, but like nothing I have ever experienced with new strings. The three higher strings took only a day or so and now hold tune pretty well.

Overall, though, this is nice guitar and would be nice for a beginner or someone like me who has played for a while but wants to check out Spanish or Classical guitar. However, if you have played mid to higher end guitars of any type, or play outside the privacy of your bedroom, this may not be the price point or guitar for you.

Guitar came okay but the “carrying bag” was not packaged in the box. Reached out to Amazon to see if they could mail the missing part and mentioned they could not. Now I need to return the entire item because they could not ship out the correct items. Very inconvenient.

What a beautiful guitar to look at! What a beautiful mellow sound! Now the bad news: The top at the bridge had an excessive hump or bulge of 1/8 inch at the ends of a straight edge placed right behind the bridge which is unacceptable for a brand-new guitar. The combination of a weak bridge plate inside combined with the factory high tension strings is the most likely culprit. This condition will only get worse as time goes on. The action, due to this, was excessively high making playing difficult which would frustrate any beginner. To avoid a rebuild of the interior bridge plate and a neck reset in the future, I returned it. Sad. I had the same problem with a C5 some years ago.

Quality construction producing beautiful sound.

This seems to be a great classical guitar for intermediate players. After playing electric guitar for a few years, I began playing classical guitar 3 years ago. I started with a used Dean Espana solid cedar top guitar with D’Addario Pro Arte normal tension strings. I replaced the nut and saddle with bone ones, and tailored the saddle to optimize the intonation at the 12th fret.

I felt it was time to upgrade to the Cordoba C7. I debated whether to get cedar or spruce, and decided on spruce, in part because it was (for whatever reason) going at guitar center, musicians friend, and amazon for the exact same price, which was 30% less than normal. I understand that spruce guitars are supposed to be brighter sounding, with a less boomy bass.

The sound is as I thought, but only slightly so. The heavier Savarez Cristal Corum strings reduce the brightness, so for the very high frequencies, it is about the same as my cedar guitar, but the bass is less boomy and more controlled with the actual bass tone gong deeper, but not so loud. What I was most impressed with was the evenness of tone, the precise intonation up and down the neck — that’s good, because there really is no remedy to intonation issues beyond the basic 12th fret adjustment to the saddle. The build quality is amazing. I looks perfect and the setup was great just the way it was. I’m an engineer, and I love to fiddle with the mechanical details of my guitars, but in this case I have not made any adjustments to the saddle, nut, or truss rod. I’m really happy with it the way it is. I think when its time for a change, I may shoot for strings with a tension somewhere between the D’addario normal and Savarez high tension strings — more research required.