CHARVEL GUTHRIE GOVAN SIGNATURE

95
JULY 2022 GUITARIST
CHARVEL GUTHRIE GOVAN SIGNATURE MJ SAN DIMAS SD24 CM
the work is very good and that includes
quite heavily rolled edges. In terms of setup,
things are set pretty low, too (approximately
1.3mm on both treble and bass sides at the
12th fret), with minimal relief. Overall,
straight out of the box, the playability is
superb and, as we said, tuning-wise it’s very
stable. Once again we rarely touched the
tuners during our sound test, which went
on for a considerable time.
As we found when we looked at the
previous GG signature, the sounds we hear
and explore here are very diverse, and
yet outside of the solo humbuckers every
other sound is a combination of single coils:
there’s a little honk to the funk in positions
2 and 4, while in position 3 we welcome
a Telecaster-style mix. The solo pickup
single-coil simulations are seamless and
really balanced with those mixes, with less
volume drop than you might experience
when faced with a standard coil-split. But
if you want an altogether different voice
then the full-coil humbuckers are there to
provide it: the bridge has a snarly, punchy
midrange clout, and the neck is thick but
well balanced, a gear or two above hot
UNDER THE HOOD
What clever tricks await us
inside the new GG?
T
he circuit here is a simple drive, and both volume
and tone pots are 500k CTS. The tone cap is valued
at .047 microfarads, while the volume control uses a
680 picofarads ceramic disc capacitor and a 150kohms resistor
in parallel in the usual position across the first two lugs of the
pot. A four-pole five-way lever switch provides the tricky coil
selection and mixing of the single coils, while the single-coil
simulations, switched simultaneously, are achieved by filtering
the screw coil of the bridge pickup and the slug coil of the neck
through a 0.1 microfarad capacitor with a 1.5k resistor in series
to ground filtering, effectively a low-pass filter.
Aside from the fact that the HSH pickups were designed
by ex-Fender guru Michael Frank-Braun and here are Korean-
made, we really don’t know any more about them, but the DCRs
certainly reflect what we hear: 14.69kohms at output for the
bridge humbucker and 9.81k for the neck.
And, as we discuss with Guthrie later on, you’ll find – rather
unusually – a strip of quite hard foam placed under the vibrato
springs when you remove the rear cover, and you can clearly
see the brass vibrato block.
Inside the Charvel you can
see the extra capacitors and
resistors for the simulated
single-coil voicings
With the rear cavity cover
removed you’ll see that foam
under the three springs and
the brass vibrato block
2. These Tele-style control
knobs also have clear
Luminlay numbers
around the bases. The
small toggle switch
introduces simulated
single-coil sounds, while
the volume control
features an e ective
treble bleed circuit that
retains clarity as you
drop the volume
GIT486.rev_charvel.indd 95GIT486.rev_charvel.indd 95 12/05/2022 13:5212/05/2022 13:52