Guild

104 Guitarist October 2013
Guild Starfire iV & X-175 Manhattan £1,006 & £862
ElEctrics
The Lewis Method
Fender’s VP of product marketing, Mike Lewis,
was instrumental in reviving Guild’s electric
guitar line. Here’s his take on things…
BACK IN January, we caught up with an
enthused Mike Lewis who talked and played
us through the new 2013 Guild instruments.
Here’s what he had to say: “There are two
different families,” Mike explained. “The
Patriarchs are US-made in the Guild
Custom Shop in Connecticut, and are built
to order. The Newark St Collection is kind of
spread across from the 50s up to 1970. A lot
of great music was written on these models
and recorded by various bands like The
Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, even
Buddy Guy played some Guilds during the
seventies. The arches, the shapes, are
exactly like the originals. There’s no corners
cut. We tooled up for all of it.”
We noticed that the X-175’s pickups don’t
sound much like P-90s, despite the look…
“The original pickups were made by Franz
in Europe, because Guild never made its
own pickups until much later. I bought
vintage examples of all of these guitars,
every single one, and also extra pickups and
things and we reverse engineered them and
replicated them exactly. Even the covers are
slightly transparent, you can see the pickup
under there.
“They are very single-coil sounding; they
don’t sound anything like regular P-90s.
The X-175 was designed to sound like a jazz
guitar, and it sure does. But you can also get
that ‘woman’ tone out of it if you set it just
right. The Manhattan comes with a plain G
string, and the bridge is compensated for a
plain G, but it also comes with another
saddle in the package, that’s compensated
for a wound G, in case you want to put
heavier strings on it.”
Similarly, Guild’s humbuckers are a little
different from the average PAF-style
pickups. It seems that these reissues
are pretty authentic recreations…
“Those pickups don’t sound like regular
humbuckers. There’s a different tone to
them. One thing we did differently from the
originals was we put bigger frets on it. A lot
of guys today don’t like those vintage-style
really low, skinny flat frets. And all of the
original models that we found, except for
the bass, had 7.25-inch (184mm) radiuses.
I’ve seen some others with 10-inch radiuses,
so we decided to make it 9.5 (241mm),
which is still kind of vintage-feeling, but it’s
sort of the threshold of where you can start
using tall frets; if it’s even more round it will
fret out when you play it.”
So, it’s the perfect radius for a tall, 6105-
type fret? “I would say these guitars are 95
per cent accurate to the originals, the other
five per cent – the radius, the bigger frets,
the adjust-o-matic on certain guitars – is
just to make it playable for today, and
repeatable and consistent. A lot of the old
ones were so inconsistent. It was really hard
to find a good one.”
GIT373.rev_guild.indd 104 9/5/13 11:47 AM