An amazing pro grade S style guitar for under $2500 CAD
Charvel MJ San Dimas Style 1 HSH FR M QM
I want to thank the good people at The Arts Music Store in Newmarket Ontario for arranging the short term availability of this guitar for review purposes.
Hello channel supporters! I hope that this article finds you well. As you’ve seen in the last bit, I’ve been working hard on providing deep reviews of guitars that have come from outside my normal comfort zone. I am no shredder by any sense, but there are folks who are, or are working their way there, and that kind of capability drives demand for flatter necks, usually higher output pickups and often some kind of very agile vibrato system. All good stuff, but I also want to find a guitar that can do more than that. I want something that can work for blues, for classic rock, for funk and yes, even for jazz. This requires us all to discard some misbeliefs some times, like the first time I heard wonderful jazz tones coming out of a Telecaster instead of a big hollow body. Since that time so many decades ago, Julian Lage continues to prove that with the right skill, you can make jazz with any guitar. In fairness though, I kinda suck at jazz too, so my jam is more classic rock and blues. So that’s what I wanted for this article. A really versatile guitar that can do it all, if you can, that delivers professional grade build and components, and still comes in under $2500 CAD MAP.
I found one, and it comes from outside my normal wheelhouse. Not a big surprise to me after my last review instrument, it’s a Charvel.
Charvel MJ San Dimas Style 1 HSH FR M QM
You may be asking WTF? Over the years we’ve seen PRS, Gibsons, Fenders, Epiphones, Squiers, most of the time, but in 2024 it’s been mostly Ibanez, a Jackson and recently Charvel. What’s going on?
Simply, I have been at this a long time and found that I had, with the exception of .strandberg and Emerald, I had put myself in a nice little box. It got comfortable, in fact a little too comfortable particularly as I found the costs of decent quality Fenders and Gibsons and all core PRS guitars to have achieved stratospheric levels of pricing. Are they good guitars? Some are, but some you’re really just paying for the logo and the guitars themselves are, to be somewhat harsh, underwhelming. In fairness though, while I have tried some PRS core instruments that didn’t force me to buy them, all of them have been superb. But I digress.
In order to get out of my box, and also to build some content for folks who love guitar but are not encumbered by AMEX Black cards, I began spending more time looking at guitars made overseas. This Charvel is no exception. It is one of the MJ series, which of course, means Made in Japan.
As you may have gathered, I was around when the phrase made in Japan sounded to most North Americans like “overseas crap”. Kind of where made in China stands for many people today. In today’s world, an instrument made in Japan is expected to be, and most often is, a superb piece of craft and skill, bringing incredible value to the owner that actually plays the instrument. I own MIJ Fenders that are amazing and a very old MIJ Ibanez double neck (the same one as played by John McLaughlin) that at over fifty years old is still incredible.
So this top line Charvel is an MJ version and I think it is killer. Let’s spend some time together so I can explain why I think this.
Secret Decoder Ring
One of the things that frustrates some players is guitar naming. Gibson for example has way more than 31 flavours of Les Paul, but every guitar player has a pretty decent idea of what the foundation should be like. Some Japanese builders use very complex and unintuitive naming that works brilliantly for inventory control and parts management and that makes no sense to us plain old players. Charvel bridges that gap really well in my opinion and while this may be minor, I see it as a great way to serve both the customer and the factory.
This guitar, the MJ San Dimas Style 1 HSH FR M QM tells the educated consumer and the factory exactly what it is.
MJ - Made in Japan
San Dimas - Body Style Family
Style 1 - Body Variant
HSH - Humbucker / Single Coil / Humbucker pickup configuration
FR - Floyd Rose or similar bridge and vibrato with locking nut
M - Maple fretboard
QM - Quilted Maple Top
As Received
As often happens, I am massively grateful to the fine team at The Arts Music Store in Newmarket, Ontario who really support the channel by arranging for gear for review purposes. I really couldn’t do a lot of my work without their support.
This guitar had been checked over, as a professional shop will do, despite my preference to get them fresh out of the box, but I was told that one of the things that they have found about the Charvels that come through the store, most of them are ready to go without any fixes required. You folks know that I am perhaps overly demanding of instrument makers and expect flawless products as the norm, and you also know that I have been disappointed often. This Charvel was in perfect stead when I picked it up, just like the green Charvel that I recently reviewed. That one was not a top line MJ model and the QC on it was superb. The out of the box quality on this model is equally excellent.
So what did I have to do? Stretch the strings and tune it. You cannot ask for better than that. A complete ready to play winner!
Specifications
The guitar I reviewed is the Caribbean Burst with the maple fingerboard, but you can also get it with a Pau Ferro fingerboard and a Midnight Glow paint job. Both are gorgeous, but it’s still winter as I write this so the Caribbean look got to me first. Canadian MAP for either model is $2479.99
I definitely have a love hate relationship with Floyd Rose systems and I really applaud Charvel’s decision to go with the Gotoh GE1996T system instead. It is so much better, in my opinion, than most Floyds that I have encountered, and this one impressed me so much as to order one in gold to replace the Floyd in my home built JEM. I also have a lot of respect for the designers in choosing proven pickups instead of deciding to try to wind their own. The Seymour Duncan pickups have great width and tonal range but don’t get all muddy as one often finds in some super-Strats. I also like that positions 2 and 4 come close to mimicking a Stratocaster and really like the mid position where you get the single coil middle and the full humbucker neck. That the truss rod can be easily adjusted with the heel mounted wheel should be standard on all guitars of this type. Neck tweaks should NEVER require that the neck come off. It’s 2024 not 1954 for goodness’ sake.
Play Time
My first play was in one of my recording areas, into an amp, that if it can, is serious work to get it to just work with a guitar. My old Parker Fly is the only guitar that is always just plug and go with my turquoise Tone King Gremlin. The Gremlin is a very simple design. While it includes the superb Tone King Iron Man attenuator, this little 5 watt beast will rip your head off if you are not careful. It is so well named. So it’s the first monster for any more expensive guitar to encounter. The pickups in the Charvel are pretty hot and getting a clean tone from the Gremlin meant really dialing down the guitar output and the amp’s volume control. It’s a lot like a really old Fender tweed in that its favourite place is overdrive. The Charvel sounded great in all five pickup positions, and when I switched to the Lead input on the Gremlin, it did what all good little Gremlins should do with a nice feed from a guitar. It started screaming in the most wonderful manner.
I use the Gremlin for this kind of testing because there is no grey area with it. A guitar either works through it or it doesn’t. The Gremlin also really detests pedals, especially any pedal that might think it can do a better overdrive sound than the Gremlin can do itself.
The next session was with an amp that is, shall we say, less of a little monster. It’s a Blackstar Club 40 Special Edition in cream with a custom speaker. The Blackstar is a three channel amp that offers easy switching although 96% of the time I just use the clean channel and add any desired dirt via pedals. It also has an effects loop and I prefer that means for modulation, delay and reverb, when possible. It also has a 5w mode which is capable of being quite loud, without compromising the tonality that it delivers in its native mode. This amp also has a DI out for feeding a desk, PA, or interface.
Audio Examples
For my recorded examples, I decided to use a recording board that consists entirely of Strymon pedals, that ends in a Strymon Iridium. I take a balanced set of stereo outputs from the Iridium and run them into stereo channels on the Clarett+ 8 Pre. No preamps are set and no post processing is done in the Clarett+ or in the Logic Pro recording. I set my sample rate to 96 KHz, but that gets dropped to 48 KHz on export to MP3 for this post.
Stereo Pair #1
Guitar into Strymon Compadre with compression and boost active then Timeline then Mobius then Bright Sky then Iridium set to Marshall w 4x12, Vol 8 Tone 10 Pos 4
Stereo Pair #2
Guitar into Strymon Compadre with compression and boost active then Sunset both sides then Volante in Drum mode with Sprint Reverb then Iridium set to Marshall w 4x12, Vol 10 Tone 10 Pos 1
Stereo Pair #3
Guitar into Strymon Compadre with compression and boost active then Volante in with Sprint Reverb then Iridium set to VOX w 2x12, Vol 8 Tone 10 Pos 3
Stereo Pair #4
Guitar into Strymon Compadre with compression and boost active then Iridium set to Deluxe Reverb w 1x12, Vol 10 Tone 10 Pos 2
I use this configuration of pedals and Iridium for practice a lot, often with good headphones or into a pair of Headrush FRFR powered speakers. The Compadre is always on. The compressor in the Compadre is one of my favourite compressor pedals because it is never squishy (in studio mode) and adds to the tone, and the boost is always on because even at neutral gain, it opens up every guitar that I have ever plugged into it. I know that some of the gear, like the Timeline and the Big Sky have been around for some time now, but they work all the time, although if I want the sound of a quality spring reverb, the spring algorithm in the Volante is superior to the one in the Big Sky.
Good To Go Kit
When getting started or even upgrading, there is often more to the success than just the guitar, so I have decided to include a Good To Go recommendation kit. For this guitar, here’s my kit list.
While I did my recorded examples using my Strymon board and a Strymon Iridium, if you are playing live, I am going to recommend a more traditional amplifier. This is, I think, a high end guitar, and thus I think it warrants a better tube amplifier. I would start with the Blackstar Club 40 III but if in the realm of the possible, a Mesa Boogie Mark V if you can find one, and a Mesa Boogie Mark VII if you cannot.
High quality guitar cable - 20ft or less. Good cables last and are quiet. Cheap cables are a horror show. Consult your sales professional for their recommendation but I like cables from Pig Hog, Ernie Ball, Digiflex and D’Addario. Avoid coiled cables, they look cool to some but are noise factories.
Gig Bag - This guitar comes with a really nice gig bag, so you are covered here.
Guitar Stand - Hercules make the best stands but you can often get a house brand that will hold the guitar when it is not in its case and you are not holding it
Guitar Strap - Every guitar needs a strap and every player, even sitting should use a strap. Gravity always works and a strap will save your guitar at some point. Lots of choices. Avoid fabric straps where the edges are sharp which hurts, Seat belt material is cheap, but the edges can be rough. I recommend real leather that has suede on the inside, which helps rein in instruments that are neck heavy. My favourite straps come from Walker and Williams.
Tuner - No guitar is complete without a tuner that goes with it all the time. Pedal tuners are great, but every player needs an in case tuner, and the Snark tuners are hard to beat. I prefer the cheaper models that take clock batteries as for the difference in price to the rechargeable unit, you can order a sheet of batteries from Amazon, or you may find a card of them in the shop from D’Addario priced very low.
String Changing Tool - The D’Addario tools are great. One tool has a string winder, a string cutter and a bridge pin puller. Every guitarist needs this as every guitarist should learn to change his or her own strings. It’s not hard, and that quality guitar shop might even offer a free session on how to do string changes efficiently that you can attend live. Also, there will be about a zillion YouTube videos on the subject.
Wrapping It Up
This is the second Charvel that I have played and reviewed. I am kicking myself for not trying a Charvel sooner. In both cases they are fantastic guitars for the money. I would take this Charvel over any hybrid Stratocaster any day of the week, and even though Charvel is a FMIC company, the build quality out of the box has been superior to anything that I have tried from the Fender USA factory in the last year and a half. I like my USA Ultra Strat, but had I been more open minded, I would have bought the Charvel. Were I in that position today, I would do the same thing. Despite the long naming, which is readily decodeable, in my player’s opinion, with a full week playing this guitar, I do not think it can be beat in its price point.
I want to thank the team at The Arts Music Store for their support in getting me a guitar for this review. They are great people and it is a great store. If you are not local, they have a good online presence and they ship Canada wide. If you are in the USA and want to get one of these Charvels, please contact my friend James Ridings at Sweetwater.
I’m not in a position to buy this guitar, however, once I sell a few from my collection that do not get played enough, I will be back to considering this guitar. It’s just so much fun and so easy to play, for any genre. Please subscribe to the channel if you have not done so, and send in comments or post a question. I read and respond to all. Please consider supporting the channel on Patreon via the button below. Thanks to all of you and I wish you peace and great health.
