Dean Guitars Chafin Del Sol

see deanguitars.com for real details.

set neck, solid mahogany w/ flame maple top, grover tuners, trans blue finish, tune-o-matic ... essentially a semi-hollow double cutaway les paul. limited pickup controls, only master volume, tone, and p-u selector. seperate volume and tone wouldve been better. but its all quality.

i do mostly experimental, avant garde stuff. think marc ribot, keith rowe, derek bailey, keiji haino. so im all over the place, from subtle harmonics to prepared guitar, to fat chunky drone. this thing covers all my bases. everything about its build and design seems focused on big warm sounds. one of my amps is a little 10" 1954 magna electronics combo, everything sounds a little thin through this amp...except the chafin. its kinda like the guitar itself has tube electronics. its just sweet. if you need twang, go somewhere else.

poor, just poor. out of the box the set up was bad, all sorts of buzz and whatnot. the build on this thing is faboo dont get me wrong, on a wood level it rocks, the most perfect neck join ive ever felt, beautifully balanced, impecable finish; but the hardware seemed slapped on, bridge all wrong, tuning keys not quite straight. but im killing all the gold hardware to replace it with chrome so id have to redo it anyway.

quality stuff, all of it. i would swear by this quitar. the neck doesnt get thicker the closer it gets to the body, like on most, so it feels a little odd on the high frets but it actually lends itself to easier bends and whatnot. dont bother with the hardcase they match with it! get a paul, or sg case (etc) the case they sent is a generic design solidbody case. its not fit, and since the neck arches back a bit, the guitar doesnt have any real support from the case from just under the heel to the headstock. step on the case and you could snap the neck off. but thats not the guitars fault.

erk, the place i ordered it from had tons of problems getting this guitar. "we make blue, give us a month" "we stopped making blue, but didnt tell anyone, and now we've starting making blue again, give us another month" "we dont have any, give us another month" "yeah we have them ill ship it tomorrow" totally inconsistant. it took me 4 months to get it.

ive been playing for about 14 years and on mostly cheap but functional guitars. when i went shopping for an upgrade i knew exactly what i wanted. i tried pauls, prs', hamers, shechters, fernandes' all costing at least a grand, and this guitar slayed me. for at least $400 less. it kicks ass. but it seems as though dean ignored the details. beautiful craftsmanship on the guitar itself, but slack in hardware assembly. and why couldnt they get a better fit case. and why not have the option of chrome hardware (gold on blue, yuk). it may not be perfect out of the box, but the sound is worth a little quick fix. its built like a tank and sounds like god.

The Chafin series of guitars were introduced in March of 2000. The Del Sol is a Korean made double cutaway semi-hollow with a mahogony body and laminated maple top. It also has a set mahogany neck with rosewood fingerboard, mother of pearl radiant sun inlays and 22 frets. The tuners are gold plated Grovers, the bridge is your basic Les Paul style Tune-O-Matic.

Electronics consist of neck and bridge Dean humbuckers that are controlled by a single tone and volume control and a three way selector switch.

My guitar has a transparent red finish that really shows off the figure of the flame maple top. Multi ply binding and gold hardware really add to the beauty of this guitar. It is really put together well.

The neck is 1 11/16" wide at the nut and the scale length is 24 3/4". The guitar came with a hard shell case.

I play pop, rock, a little alternative and I found this guitar works very well for some songs and not at all for others. The big, warm, round sound that you associate with jazz boxes makes this guitar seem out of place when you try to play straight ahead rock with it (no big surprise here). I was playing along with some Chris Isaak and REM the other night and found that this guitar really shines when playing rhythm.

I bought this guitar it hopes it would be the antithesis of my Steinberger GM4T and I wasn't disappointed. The Steinberger tends to have a very tight, dry, focused sound while the Del Sol has the warm rounded tones you expect from a semi-hollow body. I play the guitar through a Roland GP-100 processor and then through a Rocktron Velocity 150 power amp that drives two Rocktron velocity cabinets. I found that I could not use the same GP-100 patches for both guitars since the Del Sol is more bottom heavy as far as tone goes. A slight adjustment to the bass e.q. and a decrease in the chorus depth were all I really had to do in order to get the sound I was after. I'm still playing around with the chorus settings - it may turn out that chorus is one effect I'll want to use sparingly with a semi-hollow body.

As far as pickup settings, I found I like the middle setting the best (bridge and neck pickup simultaneously) and the neck pickup alone as my second choice. So far this guitar sounds much better played through a clean pre-amp setting than a distorted one.

Action was a little high, this is typical when a guitar comes from the factory. Pickup height is hard for me to evaluate - I haven't hit the strings hard enough yet to see if they scrape the pickup cover. Overall the workmanship was very good.

I'm seeing more and more guitars come from overseas these days with truly exceptional workmanship. Not like the old days (I'm 46 years old) when the low end guitars all had terribly high action, shitty intonation and warped necks - but hey, we played them anyway. I really appreciate a well made instrument now because I could never afford one when I was young.

The guitar has a very light feel to it and this makes it seem deceptively fragile. I find myself being very careful with it for fear of snapping off the neck. In reality it is put together very well - I'm sure I could play out with it but as I said before, I would probably bring two guitars since this one doesn't fit every niche.

The hardware seems top notch - I don't see where they skimped anywhere.

My communicative experiences with Dean have not been good. I base this on the fact that I have e-mailed them twice with questions and have never got a response. It's hard to evaulate customer support because I haven't had any problems, but based on my experience with the responsiveness of other companies, I'm going to rate Dean mediocre.

I've played for 30 years and have checked out my fair share of axes in various stores. This guitar fits a niche; if you appreciate jazz music, or are just looking for a guitar with that rich open sound that begs you to play scales through a clean amplifier, this is the guitar for you. For the money it delivers a lot of quality.

If the guitar were stolen I might buy another or, depending on availability, go with one of the Gibson 335 clones that are out there. There are alot of nice jazz boxes out there now for well under $1000.

If there was anything I could change about the guitar, it would be the way it laid against my body. My Steinberger has been shaped on the back of top side so that the guitar body tilts toward the player just enough so that when you lolok down at the neck, you see the fingerboard. The Del Sol faces ever so slightly away from the player and I found this took a little getting used to.