One of our favourite signature guitars from one of our favourite guitar players gets a more affordable Japanese makeover. How does it stack up?
CONTACT Fender Musical Instruments EMEA
PHONE 01342 331700
WEB www.charvel.com
What You Need To Know
1 Haven’t we seen this guitar before in a different colour?
Yes and no! The main difference with this latest Guthrie Govan signature from Charvel is that it is manfactured in Japan, which recalls where the brand was actually made from 1986 to 1991.
2 So it’s a copy of the USA model?
As Guthrie explains in our interview later on, this new model retains many of the US model’s features and is currently his ‘No 1’. It uses a basswood body with an ash veneer facing, and it’s quite a bit cheaper than the USA models, too.
3 This is clearly a guitar for Guthrie wannabees only, then?
That’s the interesting thing. Guthrie’s wide-ranging style–is there anything he can’t play?–means that he needs a guitar that can produce a very wide range of sounds, pristine cleans to very saturated and everything in between. His signature model is the epitome of workhorse.
Charvel has been owned by Fender Musical Instruments Corporation since 2002 and it’s been a good fit, sitting between the more-rock aimed Jackson line and the modern fringes of Fender, such as the Ultra range. In fact, if you simply consider Charvel to be the ‘modern’ Fender, you’re just about there.Another way to view the brand, particularly this latest Guthrie Govan signature, is a souped-up and pimped version of what once may have been a Stratocaster.
Whichever way you view it, the GG is built for pro-level use and, as Guthrie himself tells us, despite having another pair of US signatures, this more affordable Japanese-made model is actually his No 1 currently. If it’s good enough for Guthrie…
The guitar centres around a standard Fender scale length, but it has a 24-fret neck that sits on a lightly chamfered heel with a palm scoop on the back underneath the treble cutaway. As with numerous Charvels instruments, including the US GG signatures, the neck is caramelised (aka roasted) maple, rift-sawn, with dual carbon graphite rods either side of the two-way truss rod with its spoke wheel adjuster at the base of the neck. Frets are stainless steel and they’re big. There are numerous subtle changes compared with the existing USA models, too: the nut, for example, is Tusq XL (not bone), the locking tuners are by Gotoh, not Sperzel, but still retain staggered height posts, and the fingerboard inlays are simple ‘crème’ dots. As ever, the side dots are those glow-in-the-dark Luminlay types; the same fluorescent material
