TAKAMINE & CRN-TS1

97
JUNE 2022 GUITARIST
TAKAMINE TC135SC & CRN-TS1
THE RIVALS
There’s a plentiful supply of slope-
shouldered dreads on the market, but if we’re
keeping within the price range of the CRN-
TS1, then Eastman’s E20SSv-SB (£1,769)
seems a good place to start. Martin’s
DSS-15M (£1,450) is an all-mahogany slope
dread if you want to mix your body woods
up a little. It’s worth looking at Yamaha’s
catalogue, too, as its A3M (£1,949) offers
a round-shouldered dread with a cutaway.
Other than that, prowling around Furch’s and
Auden’s backyards will yield results.
Nylon-string hybrid crossovers? Yamaha’s
NCX electro models were introduced in
2009 and revamped last year; the NCX5
(£1,786) features a narrower 48mm nut and
14-fret camber fingerboard. Furch’s GNC
2 (£1,099) delivers on that score, as does
Taylor’s 214ce-N (around £1,000), or if you
hunt about a little, a used Gibson Chet Atkins
could be yours for around the £2k mark.
2. A slot head with
three-a-side tuners is
one characteristic from
classical guitar tradition
retained here
1. The TC135SC’s CTP-3
preamp controls
are comprehensive
enough to allow all the
tone-tweaking you can
muster – it has a handy
built-in tuner, too
2
1
breed in nylon-strings that we began seeing
on these shores only a few years ago.
So, what exactly is a ‘crossover’ or ‘hybrid’
nylon-string? Well, imagine that you are
familiar with the acoustic guitar to the
point that you have very little trouble
adapting if called upon to play a couple
of acoustic numbers in your set – or just
a sing-song in the privacy of your own
home. The neck feels a little different but
familiar enough so your fingers don’t feel
abandoned in a totally new domain. So
all’s well. Traditionally, the same cannot
be said for a standard classical guitar. First,
there’s the width of the fingerboard to deal
with – the main issue for players who want
to delve into recreational Latin, bossa nova
or jazz and yearn for the sound created by
acolytes of Jobim and his contemporaries. It
may sound simple enough, but realistically,
that fingerboard width alone is quite a lot
to ask a dyed-in-the-wool electric player
to deal with.
So what if we did the ‘wolf in sheep’s
clothing’ bit and gave the nylon-string
guitar as many of the characteristics of a
steel-string acoustic as we could? There,
in essence at least, is your crossover
instrument: a slimmer fingerboard, perhaps
a slight camber thrown in for good measure
(instead of the flatter radius of a classical
guitar), and suddenly the fingers of the
happy strummer feel far more comfy and
familiar with their surroundings. A bit of
a lengthy explanation, perhaps, but we do
like to be thorough.
As this pair are both quite different,
we’ll take them one at a time and, seeing as
we’ve already said so much about it, let’s
begin with the nylon-string TC135SC. As
we’ve mentioned, many of the features
here will look neighbourly to a steel-string
acoustic player, but the lines of a traditional
classical guitar remain. In any case, the
spec certainly sounds very familiar. We
have a spruce top with rosewood back and
sides, and whereas you might have been
expecting cedar for the former, as many
classical guitars use this timber here, it
must be said that some flamenco guitars
have spruce tops. Unusual, perhaps, but
not significantly different. In fact, the most
striking departure from the classical norm
is the fact the TC135SC’s neck joins the
body at the 14th fret, as opposed to the more
accustomed 12th.
The nut measures in at 47.6mm instead of
the 50.8mm found on classical instruments,
and although this might not sound like
much of a reduction, remember that nylon
strings are thicker than steel and require a
little more clearance, and so this is probably
about as far as you can go before things get a
bit crowded at the busy end of the fretboard.
It’s actually trimmer than our Yamaha
Silent nylon-string in any case.
GIT485.rev_takamine.indd 97GIT485.rev_takamine.indd 97 12/04/2022 16:1112/04/2022 16:11