Amazing! The Charvel Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 1 HH FR E
This is my first time playing a Charvel guitar. Huge thanks to Fraser of The Arts Music Store for arranging this short term review model. I’ve known of Charvel for a long time, but it was another customer who suggested that I do a review. His perspective was that I would be very impressed. Let’s find out together. Again, I must thank the team at The Arts Music Store for coordinating access for this review.
Charvel Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 1 HH FR E
I could get writer’s cramp just typing that every time I want to refer to the guitar, so despite the fact that Charvel has a ton of different models, for this review, I will generally refer to this as the Charvel. The one Fraser arranged for me is as pictured, in lime green metallic and in my opinion it looks awesome. Decoding the naming is quite straight forward. It is from the Pro-Mod family with the San Dimas layout with two humbuckers, a Floyd Rose bridge and nut and an ebony fingerboard.
Out of the Box
The Charvel is terrific out of the box. There is no fret sprout and that matters to me because it means that the maple neck has been well dried as has the ebony fretboard and they did not shrink on the voyage from the factory. Charvel is one of the many divisions of Fender Musical Instruments Company, and I will say that the fit and finish of this guitar was far superior to the work on similarly priced Jackson guitars also owned by FMIC. I get the sense that the target audience is pretty close, and on the out of the box experience alone, the Charvel is a far ahead winner.
Charvel uses known components, and this is immediately evident in the bridge. It is a real Floyd Rose product, a model 1000 and holds tune far better, than any of the Floyd Rose clones that I have encountered over the last year or so. It also lays pretty flat and the micro tuners never interfered with my hand. The vibrato arm pushes in and then there is a locking collar. It fits well and there is no lash in the movement. While I am not a big fan of Floyd Rose and FR style bridges, I am much less of a fan of vibrato arms that have a lot of lash or flop about like a fish on a dock. This guitar was perfectly balanced right out of the box. The factory strings are nickel plated steel 009 - 042 and while I do not know who makes the strings, they don’t have that rough and unfinished feel of factory Fender strings. A new player can certainly be going on with these and not have to change them immediately. There is a single volume and single tone. The volume is a push pull pot and in the specs section you will find a graphic of what the three way switch does. I was so unaccustomed to a switch of this style not being a five way. I thought that there was something wrong until I read the documentation. RTFM.
The guitar is very well balanced, not unlike the Stratocaster that it looks like including the Fender licensed Stratocaster headstock. I always put a strap on every guitar because gravity always works, and I noticed that the strap lugs are large V shapes, which I like a lot. I’ve moved away from strap locks over the last few years for comfort reasons and these lugs require work to get the strap on, which means also work to get the strap off, as it should be. For the term of the evaluation, I used rubber lock washers to be sure, but it’s likely overkill on my part.
The pickups are labeled Seymour Duncan, another indication that the people at Charvel don’t believe that they have to make everything. As noted below, the bridge is a JB and the neck is a ‘59 and that combination is well proven by many, including myself, on other guitars. There are 22 jumbo frets and I cannot complain for the price but personally would have preferred stainless steel, especially given that so many guitars at low cost coming out of China are coming fitted with stainless steel frets these days..
Both the volume and tone pots are very smooth, the volume is definitely audio taper, and when you roll off the tone knob it doesn’t immediately descent into muck. The heavy knurled knobs are easy to manipulate, and the fitment makes it easy to pull up the volume knob for coil split when desired. Because of my playing style in regularly using the volume knob and the vibrato, I would personally prefer the volume pot be closer to the bridge pickup, but that’s my preference and can be assessed as picking nits.
The guitar sounds great. I plugged direct into my Kemper Stage and used it with a number of proven profiles and it did a fine job with all. I also plugged it into a number of amps directly as well as using chains created in Amplitube Max.
Specifications
Playing Experience
The guitar is extremely well balanced and quite lightweight coming in at just over seven pounds. The fingerboard radius is compound going from 12” to 16”. I am aware that a shorter radius is sometimes preferred to make barre chords easier, particularly in the first position, but in my opinion, with proper gauge strings and a good setup, an F Major barre will not be a problem for anyone. As you move up the neck and particularly if you tend to bend strings aggressively, the progressively flatter radius makes this both easy and in my experience eliminates the potential for fretting out a bend. Of course, this requires an excellent setup, which this instrument had out of the box.
The pickups have nice voicing, although I was less enamoured of the middle switch position which uses the inner coils only of the two humbuckers with the coil split off. There is a significant volume drop in this position. When the coil split is engaged you get the outer coils of the two humbuckers. The player who favours clean tones might like this variety, but I would prefer that the middle position did the normal boring two humbuckers together thing. Personal opinion only, listen to the pickup examples below the pickup selector chart.
In this short clip, you will hear an open chord on the Charvel into a Deluxe Reverb. The six examples are as follows;
No Coil Tap
Neck Position
Middle Position
Bridge Position
Coil Tap Engaged
Neck Position
Middle Position
Bridge Position
I also like that the headstock uses a string bar, instead of individual string trees to ensure a clean wind of strings onto the tuning posts. While I personally prefer locking tuners, these are Charvel branded regular tuning machines that are very smooth with no binding or grinding.
Amped Examples
The following examples were recorded direct to disk using a UA Apollo interface recording directly into Amplitube 5 MAX. There are five amplifiers used in the samples.
Fender Twin Reverb
VOX AC30
Soldano SLO-100
Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier
Bogner (model not specified, think it is an Uberschall)
This excellent playable instrument works well in multiple tonal landscapes and really excels in high gain situations. No additional effects or processing was done in Amplitube 5 MAX, and the individual tracks were collated in Logic Pro X with no processing done to them at all other than exporting the sequence to MIDI
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.
Charvel Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 1 HH FR E
Spark Amp OR a small tube combo or head and cabinet depending on your use cases. Of course a proper Profiler would be great as well, but I try to align performance amp costs with the cost of the guitar. I really liked it into my Soldano SLO Mini and PRS 2x12 Stealth cabinet, as well as with the PRS HDRX head into the same model cabinet, but I think you could do well with a mid tier Laney tube amp or a 5150. This is a hard rocking guitar, and for that you want power if you are playing gigs or in a studio.
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 - Hard cases are terrific until you actually want to take them anywhere. Unless you are in a band on the road, in which case a regular hard case won’t do the job, a well padded gig bag is ideal. In my experience, the Profile or house name bags are better built with more functionality than the guitar maker’s bag. Many guitars these days do not include a gig bag. Make sure that there are pockets for your tuner, any tools that came with the guitar, like the truss rod wrench, space for the whammy if the guitar has it, and a set of spare strings, and a string winder / trimmer.
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.
Floyd Rose Block - Changing strings on Floyd Rose style bridges is to be honest, a serious pain in the butt. I heartily recommend getting a Shredneck TremBlock from Solo Guitars at this link
Wrap Up
I really loved that I did not need to do ANYTHING to bring the Charvel into playability. This suggests a level of quality control and commitment to excellence that is, in my opinion, far too rare these days. In my opinion it hits the mark better than the Ibanez RG470 and the JIVA Jr. in a guitar for a similar market. With a MAP price of $1379.99 it’s really unbeatable in its class. I would definitely choose it over any Fender dual humbucker variant without question.
As regular channel attendees know, I have been focusing on more lower cost guitars for the last little while. The Charvel is the most expensive of the lot to be sure. I spent a lot of time with some Ibanez electrics that I thought were pretty decent, and one that was so horrible that I did not even think about writing a review. With work, they can all be fine instruments, but for clarity, this Charvel is the best new out of the box electric guitar that I have played in a very long time. I did, and still do think very highly of the Ibanez S521 that I reviewed, but given the amount of work required on every other model, I am starting to wonder if its excellence was an anomaly. It is considerably less money than the Charvel and still a great value, but there is enough in the Charvel (for my needs / wants) that would easily justify the higher price tag. That may not be a reasonable thing for some folks and I certainly understand that.
I already have a substantial number of guitars in my collection and this is one of the first that I have encountered new recently where I would consider selling a guitar that I like in order to fund its replacement with this Charvel. Do I need it? Heck no, but do I want it? Oh definitely! It really is that good.
As with any guitar purchase, you want to buy from a credible guitar shop who will check the guitar fully and fix any issues prior to delivery to you, and not try to charge you for stuff that they should be doing as a matter of course. If you are in Canada, I recommend The Arts Music Store, not because they support the channel by arranging for review product but because they don’t let guitars leave that aren’t ready for the player. In addition to the store in Newmarket, they ship Canada wide. If you are in the United States and want this Charvel, please call my buddy James Ridings at Sweetwater.
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