CHARVEL HENRIK DANHAGE SIGNATURE PROMOD SO-CAL STYLE 1

review
CHARVEL & EVH
90
GUITARIST FEBRUARY 2021
access to, the Floyd can be used in a highly
creative fashion. With less palaver than
restringing a Bigsby and then trying to
keep the lightest of wobbles in tune, the
Floyd is dead easy to set up and string –
so long as you have the right Allen key,
of course. Lock those strings at both the
saddle and nut and – after some judicious
string stretching – these things will stay
in tune with all but the slightest tweak of
those fine tuners. The cork-sniffing tone
gurus will have something to say about
that we expect, but far from being a ‘tone
drain’, on the right guitar there’s nothing
to touch it.
Irrespective of the artists behind these
models, what they actually do is almost
bookend Eddie’s stylistic journey, from the
These models possess
a huge amount of
mojo, both for their
intended purposes
and a lot more besides
rod adjustment wheel is at the end of
the neck, and the compound radius
fingerboard – similarly built for speed –
frankly looks as worn out as the body. But
there are some very nice touches, such
as the heavy fingerboard edge rounding.
Reverse headstock aside, this could once
have been a 50s Stratocaster that has been
extensively modded!
The zebra Seymour JB at the bridge will
be familiar to most of us, but it’s paired
with a DiMarzio Area 67, a hum-cancelling
‘single coil’. “Single coils in 1967 were
bright and very clean,” says DiMarzio,
“and, of course, they hummed. We’ve
captured the classic bright and clean
sound but totally eliminated the hum with
our patented Area technology. We’ve also
reduced magnet pull by 40 per cent for
improved sustain and clarity.”
This hot-rod modded vibe continues
to the controls – or lack of them. There’s
just a single volume control, with its
Stratocaster ‘Tone’ knob, of course. So
how do you select the pickups? Easy. That
single control has a push switch: down is
bridge; up is neck. Both on? Nope.
beat-up Frankenstein starting point style
of the Henrik Charvel, to the altogether
more considered and really very developed
Wolfgang. Aside from being made in
Fender’s Mexican factory, they share plenty.
Henrik Danhage Signature
Pro-Mod So-Cal Style 1
There’s nothing classy about the relic job
of this Charvel: by design, it looks like the
proverbial ‘I tied it to the bus and headed off
on tour’ level of relicing. It’s a nice weight,
and showcases a nicely jointed four-piece
spread of tightly striped ash, which is really
rather beautiful on the rib-cage contour, for
example – and another reminder of a wood
that we’re seeing in serious decline as far
as the USA is concerned. There’s a brutal
simplicity that was so much a part of Van
Halen’s original vision: bolt a neck to a body,
chuck on a wide-travel vibrato and a couple
of pickups, and the rest is down to you.
One area that’s more refined here is
the neck: slim in depth but with dual
graphite-rod reinforcement to hopefully
keep it straight as you cross the time
zones. If you need to tweak it, the truss
Contrasting the neck pickup,
the Charvel goes for the
classic Seymour Duncan JB
in the bridge position. The
Floyd Rose vibrato is slightly
tilted for standard up-bends
GIT468.rev_charvel.indd 90 17/12/2020 17:57