First Look : Epiphone Casino

Don’t get excited, this is not the long awaited US built version of the Casino, it’s the Casino that you can get today, built at the Epiphone factory in China. That makes for a really nice instrument at a price tag in the realm of affordable for more people.

Why a Casino? Some odd desire to try to be John Lennon? Nope. This purchase, and I did buy it, I blame on myself, but with significant influence from distant bud Mick Taylor of That Pedal Show. I do not do everything that Mick does, but he and Dan do influence me, in very positive ways. In a recent Vlog, Mick took viewers through his own Casino experience. He bought his used on eBay, whereas mine was brand new, sourced through my dear friend Peter Waldon at Cosmo Music in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Cosmo had two of the regular Casinos in natural in stock and he selected the nicest one and then had the techs do the initial set up for me. It came out of the box last night and was first played today as I like to let guitars acclimatize for a bit. Maybe pointless, but I do it anyway.

Initial Impressions

The new Casino before the recording phase. It’s leaning against the Victory The Viscount amp and you can see that I have yet to peel the plastic off the pickups or pick guard at this point

I like hollow body and semi-hollow guitars. They have a feel that is different from solid bodies and dedicated acoustics. The Casino does not have a centre block like a 335, but there is a support structure to keep the bridge downward pressure from causing issues. Be assured, it is much more lively acoustically than a 335 or 355.

The neck isn’t overly fat or overly skinny. In the context of the triumvirate of ursines, it is “just right”. Epiphone calls it the SlimTaper D. Ok that’s nice. Materials for the neck are solid mahogany with a pau ferro fingerboard with pearloid inlays. The top, back and sides are 5 play laminated maple with internal basswood bracings. This makes for a very lightweight and airy body. There are two Dogear P90T Classic pickups with nickel covers. The bridge is of the tuneomatic type and the tailpiece is the old style trapeze. Epiphone says that all the metal parts are nickel, which is a nice thing from my perspective. Nickel ages nicely, whereas chrome does not, in my opinion. There are two volume and two tone pots and a three way switch. The output jack is top mounted and as I play sitting as much as standing, I find this most convenient.

I was very surprised to discover that the strings neither felt or sounded like Gibson Brightwires, a string that leaves me underwhelmed, but instead are clearly marked as D’Addarios 10-46. They will get replaced with Curt Mangan Monels when due but it was a nice surprise not having to immediately change strings.

The only issue that I found was that the neck volume knob was a bit sloppy on its shaft, but that is easily fixed. Otherwise fit and finish is very good. Mick declared that the clear poly finish on his Casino would survive a nuclear blast. The finish on mine is the usual thick poly, but not as thick as others that I have seen. I have heard that the Epiphone factory has been working on their finish process as a few years ago, the finishes were extremely thick.

Mine is the natural finish, but if you want there is a Turquoise and a Vintage Sunburst available.

Pickups

Mick’s project was to replace the pickups in his Casino with something better sounding. His stock pickups sounded horrible through my studio monitors, like there was a shelf filter cutting the high end like a scythe. There was no openness and no presence. He used P90s from Lollar and the change in tone was massive. In fairness, he also replaced the factory pots and wiring loom with higher end kit, done in ‘50s wiring layout. I have had this mode done to many of my guitars and frankly wonder why companies ever changed it.

The stock pickups in my guitar sound fine. Not wonderful, but fine. As I was up early, I did all my initial play tests through my Kemper Profiler and listened through Focal headphones plugged into the Kemper. I tried the Casino with a variety of amps and cabs and found it good in most all clean amps, with a preference for a 65 Super Reverb and an AC 30 in the clean channel with no boost. They are still lacking the higher frequencies in my opinion, and given that the guitar plays nicely and was relatively cost-effective, I will at some point upgrade the controls and the pickups as Mick did, and given past positive experience with Lollar P90s, will probably go that route again. I will give Epiphone credit, these P90s sound a lot better than the P90 soap bars that came in my PRS SE Semi-Hollowbody Baritone. This just means that when the time comes, Lollar will get a twofer order.

I will give Epiphone credit for noise management. The pickups are very quiet unless you are running an overdrive or distortion at more than 50% or if you are too close to the amp.

Amplifier Performance

Playing into the Kemper with headphones is effortless. So the next step was playing through the Kemper, and then into my Universal Audio twin | x which is directly connected to Focal studio monitors. It was Peter Waldon who introduced me to Focal and if you have never heard them and appreciate high quality audio, you owe it to yourself to do so. They are not inexpensive, but you will hear stuff that you never knew was there before. I auditioned them with music I know well, Heavy Weather by Weather Report and I heard stuff that Jaco was playing that I had never heard before.

Back on topic. When going through the Kemper to the studio monitors, the sound was lovely, but even at desktop volumes, I could feel that feedback was near. Going up to room volume, I could control the appearance of feedback with the volume pot.

I then moved to an all tube solution with the guitar into a board built for my Victory The Viscount. If you are not familiar with The Viscount, this is a now discontinued combo that is basically The Duchess 40 in a small portable combo amp. It took me a while to get it where I wanted it to be, but now I use it for lots of stuff, although I find that it likes single coils, P90s and Gretsch pickups best.

With all the amp controls set to 5, except volume and reverb, both about 3, I plugged the Casino into this kit. The sound was a bit boring to be honest, still missing all the real high end. I can still hear above 16KHz so I miss the overtones and sibilance when they are not there. I found putting a clean boost in the chain, helped a bit, using the Diamond J-Drive Mk 3 boost side for this. When I wanted some dirt, I used the basic side of the Hudson Broadcast, nice but a bit boomy, then switched to a Wampler Tumnus Deluxe, which was lovely, and then finally back to the Diamond Boost and also the Overdrive side with the bright switch on. Playing the neck pickup only, it was really nice, and both together are good. Going back to clean, I found the neck really nice, both really nice but the bridge pickup alone is quite tinny and underwhelming. Normally I try to roll off the volume to about 8 but on this guitar, it sounds best with the pickups on 10.

What about feedback? If I let The Viscount go, which I did for a bit, feedback is pretty much guaranteed but still controllable via the volume pot. I find the lower notes will bring feedback on sooner, which gives a reasonable indication of the base resonant frequency of that 5 ply laminated maple body. I think that if the woods were solid, the guitar might actually be unusable at high volume.

Sample Sounds

Here are a couple of short samples for your potential interest. The first is both pickups, volume at 8 tone at 10 into the Kemper using a VOX AC30C2 patch into the regular input with the as profiled stock speakers. I have used the Kemper to add a basic compressor at unity gain with compression low and attack rather late to preserve dynamics and get a bit more sustain. Then I use the Kemper Legacy Reverb before outputting to the UA Twin X which feeds Logic Pro X. The Logic Pro X setup is a basic audio track with no plugins used, initially recorded as WAV then converted to MP3.

The second is the neck pickup, with the compressor off, and the Kemper Drive module on (it’s an amalgam of many drive pedals and quite pleasing) along with a 4:1 noise gate set at about 30% to deal with the background noise when the Kemper Drive is engaged. I keep the Legacy Reverb patch active. I rolled the tone off to about 6 on the guitar and left the volume pot at about 8.

Overall, I am happy with the Casino. It is different enough to keep and I can fix the wobbly knob as the pot is fine. I have to check more into that lame bridge pickup of course. It’s lacking in the bottom end, perhaps it is working as designed. Thanks for reading, until next time peace.