It’s actually stain and then some vintage cherry tinted lacquer on top as well. Various sand-through at the edges required touch-ups, and I thought the central join line quite prominent, so I added a couple of tinted lacquer coats to help blend the fixes and pull everything together. As always, the lacquer ends up darkening as it dries, so it’s darker than envisaged, though I’m not displeased at all and I like it a lot It’s just that it and the GSM should have been near-identical guitars, but the GSM has turned out a lot brighter.