You Can’t Always Get What You Want…

Ovation Celebrity Elite CSE-225

Anyone who knows me personally, knows that while I have a bad guitar disease, I have a special affliction when it comes to double neck guitars.

My first double neck is an Ibanez Artist 12/6 from the seventies. It is the Artist Wood series as played by John McLaughlin. It's a very well made instrument that sounds terrific and the only reason that I do not play it regularly is its weight, which is near twenty pounds so I can only wear it for a limited time. My second double neck was the one that I had always wanted. A Gibson ES-1275 in vintage cherry. Why? Jimmy Page. And Alex Lifeson. But at the time, I could only find one in cherry and while it has a newer build tailpiece than Pagey's, is a wonderful guitar. It sounds great and weighs less than my Ibanez. It too is a 12/6. My third double neck is a Gretsch Electromatic Baritone-Standard 6/6. A baritone is a wonderful sound, particularly for ambient and chordal music. I know many players like baritones for very heavy stuff, but that's not my personal thing. The Gretsch was quite inexpensive comparatively and has that Gretsch tone. Great fun.

The Missing

What has been missing has been an acoustic. I first say a multi-neck acoustic on the Plant - Page or Page - Plant video where Mr. Page had a triple neck Ovation, mandolin, 12 string and six string. Yes please! Never found one. I was aware that Ovation had done a 12/6 for Richie Sambora but it's just too much money to me, so about six months ago, I ordered the Ovation Celebrity 12/6.

Dead on Arrival

When the Ovation arrived, I went to the dealer where I had ordered it, where there had been a credit at the time, long since used on something else. It came in a nice hard case, quite large but well finished in fake black critter something and with a gold foil label proudly claiming Made In Indonesia. A very nice case with only minor alignment issues.

Removing the guitar from the case, it's ruby finish looked terrific. There was a minor scuff on lower back of the shallow bowl which polished out no problem. I put a strap on it, grabbed a tuner and sat down to play. In fairness to Ovation, those shallow bowls are built to be plugged in and I was playing it purely acoustically. After all, it is an acoustic guitar, right?

The 12 string neck sounded pretty good. The setup was not good but that is easily fixed. The sticker on the back of the headstock said Made in Korea which is typically indicative of very good build quality, and I must concur. Assembly and finish were excellent. The neck was smooth and reasonably fast, not too dissimilar from my 1990 Commemorative Legend Shallow Cutaway. The bass was missing to some extent and there was a definite midrange hump. This I put down to the shallow bowl and the very small sound holes which originally debuted decades ago on the high end Adamas guitars. The strings were called Adamas strings, gauges not published, but reasonable to play although I knew that they would be replaced in reasonable short order because they did not sound great.

The 6 string neck put me off pretty much right away. The setup was bad, the strings were dead dead dead, and there were issues with fret noise. Ok says me, I can fix this. So I removed the Adamas barbed wire pretending to be strings. I cleaned up the fretboard which was quite dirty for a new instrument, although some of that could have been dye that did not set fully. The frets were rough, and while I could do some work on the setup, there was nothing easy to do with the bridge because of the way the piezo was mounted to the saddle. I have to be fair to Ovation. I am no fan of under saddle piezo pickups. In fact, I don't like piezo pickups much at all, although by this point I still had not plugged the guitar in. After an hour of polishing frets with my StewMac fret polishing kit, the frets were finally smooth and shiny. I know that the guitar came from Korea but there was more corrosion on the frets than anyone should have to tolerate on a new guitar. In fairness, I picked the guitar up right out of the crate. That dealer will typically do a basic setup before a guitar leaves the shop and I did not leave them the time to do so. Still, I was now underwhelmed.

I mounted a set of D'Addario monel strings, a set that I know well and like. I would have gone with my new faves D'Addario XS but they were on back order and I wanted a 12 string set to match and could not find any. I did have a matching set of D'Addario XTs and would have gone there after playing the guitar for a month or so.

Six String Killer

Even with the new strings, the six string neck was a huge disappointment. No low end that I could hear while playing, top end gone and a really bitey midrange. Bitey like velociraptor bitey. Nothing pleasant. Guess it wasn't just the crappy Adam as strings.

Bending was still an issue even having dropped to 11s from the 12s that were on the guitar (unlabeled, I measured them myself) and above the 12th fret, the B and G strings would fret out. That sounded like uneven frets to me which for over

$2500 CAD, no one should have to deal with. I don't think a Plek machine can handle a double neck bowl back.

Worse that that was the neck selector switch. When I would play the six string neck, I would either raise the guitar or bend over it more, which would drive the end of the neck selector switch right into the right pectoral muscle. No matter where I put the selector switch I was getting stabbed. I decided at that moment that that switch would need changing to a MUCH smaller microswitch. Did anyone actually try playing one of these sitting down?

Pack It Up

I contacted my dealer who despite this being a "special order" (who stocks double necks? Apparently not even the distributor) agreed that I should not keep a guitar that I did not like and they arranged a refund. We did this within 8 days of pickup of the guitar and what went back was in better playing condition than what I received. This is the hallmark of a great

dealer, and why I am personally not a fan of buying a guitar over the Internet. The dealer treated me like a valued customer and made things right.

Conclusion

I wanted a double neck acoustic. There was only one in the marketplace that fit my use cases. It did not work out, and was in fact so disappointing that I would be reluctant to look at any Ovation product again. I was told that I would be happier with the Sambora version. I do not like paying extra for a sticker with a signature on it, and really there is not much difference between the two except a couple of grand. Both are laminated tops (yuck - should have seen that up front) both are lyrachord shallow bodies and both are designed to be plugged in. I never did plug in the Ovation that I bought. I have a simple process that has proven true is that a guitar, any guitar, that sounds bad acoustically, is never going to get better plugged in. The Ovation build quality was below par for a $2500 guitar. In fact it was not as good as some $500 guitars. I can only conclude that today’s Ovation is not the same Ovation that build Custom Legends for Glen Campbell. I am no Glen Campbell but this guitar didn’t achieve even the low bar of good enough.

Caveat emptor for me, and I am putting my quest for an acoustic double neck away on the shelf. Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.