CHARVEL HENRIK DANHAGE SIGNATURE PROMOD SO-CAL STYLE 1

91
FEBRUARY 2021 GUITARIST
review
CHARVEL & EVH CHARVEL & EVH
EVH Limited Edition Wolfgang
Special Sassafras
If Henrik’s signature has the look of
something that was screwed together in
the backyard and might need some help
from The Repair Shop, the Wolfgang comes
across as, well, a proper guitar. It shares
the same Fender scale as the Charvel
signature, along with those graphite rods
and wheel truss rod adjustor, but the slightly
downsized body is going to look Les Paul-
size tiny on a tall frame.
You can clearly see the wood grain under
the very thin and quite textured satin black
finish (with its single cream edge binding)
and if asked we’d say it was ash, too. It’s
actually sassafras, a light and relatively soft
wood from Eastern USA. Fender believes
Leo Fender used it to make an undisclosed
number of Strats back in the 50s and it
recently appeared on the Fender Stories
Collection Eric Johnson 1954 ‘Virginia’
Stratocaster. Although it’s about 5mm
thinner in depth at the rim compared with
the 45mm-thick Charvel, the top’s arching
increases the overall depth to 50mm. But it’s
lighter than the ash-bodied Charvel on our
The classic EVH-style
‘Tone’ knob on the Henrik
Danhage Signature is
simply a master volume
but with a push-switch to
engage either pickup
UNDER THE HOOD We inspect the circuits of the Charvel and EVH
R
emoving the tight-fitting, recessed
backplate of the Wolfgang you’ll see a
considered, simple circuit that combines
an EVH/Bourns 500k volume pot with a 250k
tone pot. By design, the volume is lower fiction
(looser in use), the tone is higher friction. The
tone cap value is .022 microfarads and there’s
a treble bleed capacitor across the volume – a
TAD silver mica cap valued at 150 picofarads. The
cavity itself is screened with conductive paint,
while the cavity cover has foil shielding.
The Charvel’s more simple circuit is a lot
harder to access without removing the strings
then the scratchplate, which sits under the
fingerboard overhang. To be fair, though, there’s
not much to see! The push-push switched pot
is 500k audio taper as you’d expect, with a rat’s
nest of wires surrounding it. The actual switch
part of the pot here is a little loose, although that
doesn’t affect its function. What dismantling
the guitar allows us to see is that it’s routed for
an HSH configuration if you ever fancy giving
it your own signature by loading a different
scratchplate and pickups/controls.
The EVH humbuckers are Alnico II powered
with measured DCRs of 12.79kohms at the bridge
and 15.04k at the neck. Beyond that, there’s
little to add. Of course, the Charvel’s Seymour
Duncan JB is a legendary ’bucker: this Trembucker
(TB-4) version uses an Alnico V magnet with a
measured DCR of 17.07k. The DiMarzio Area 67,
as we explain, is a hum-cancelling design with
a measured DCR of 6.03k.
The Charvel’s body
rout means there’s
plenty of scope for
future modding
The Wolfgang circuit
includes a treble
bleed and different
friction pots
With just a single
switched pot,
the Charvel is as
simple as it gets
VIDEO DEMO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra
GIT468.rev_charvel.indd 91 17/12/2020 17:57