The two-piece bolt-on maple neck feels solid and slick. It's medium thickness with a C profile and angled headstock. On the business side of the neck, you'll find a spacious sheet of tightly grained rosewood, 22 medium-jumbo frets, and dot inlays. The oversized mother-of-pearl dot at the 12th fret is cut in the shape of the VW logo. The frets are nicely crowned and polished but could use a manicure at the edges. The GarageMaster uses a string-through-body with proprietary string retainer and tail piece. The tune-o-matic-style bridge is allen wrench adjustable and uses waferlike saddles for adjustability and sustain. Up top are enclosed die-cast tuners in a 3x3 arrangement. All the hardware on the GarageMaster is chrome-plated.
The wide neck and large-radius fretboard makes fingering easy, even for musicians with large hands. The satin-finished maple keeps behind-the-neck position changes quick and smooth. The edge of the neck drops off rather sharply, occasionally reminding you of the protruding fret ends. Imported guitars - the GarageMaster is made in China - can have wavy, or even notched, fret surfaces, but the entire fretboard on the GarageMaster is straight and smooth, making string bends and slides a breeze.
Though its unique body and headstock design are First Act characteristics, the real heart of this collaboration are the electronics. This guitar possesses the basic hardware of its peers: a three-way pickup selector switch on the upper bout, two pickups, and the volume and tone controls situated by the bridge near the output jack. To work with the VW's auxiliary audio input, First Act had to boost the guitar's output. It decided to wick some technology from its V-Stack modeling amplifier line to achieve this. A small analog amp-modeling circuit is housed under the lower pickguard amid the tone and volume controls. This preamp is powered by a standard nine-volt battery housed in a snap-open plastic compartment in the back of the guitar. Augmenting the normal volume and tone controls are three sliding switches. They control preamp on/off (with an adjacent blue LED to indicate status), tone shift (treble cut/boost), and choice of output-clean or distortion. A separate master volume knob controls output only when the preamp is engaged. The three knobs sport an aggressive knurling and have a deep-relief VW logo in the top.