Product: Godin Kingpin
Price Paid: USD 650
Submitted
03/27/2009
at
11:32am
by
Bluford Birdsong
Features
:
8
2009 Model Wild Cherry Back and Sides. P-90 Pick up. Archtop guitar. Cosmetically perfect. Great Tuners, Great neck, very old school looking jazz box.
Sound
:
1
In the store this guitar sounded beautiful. I played it through a little 20 watt Roland cube. There were custmoers in and out, so it wasn't dead quite in the store, but I like it enough to buy it. Thick jazz sound, but still had an acoustic sound to it. I play only clean tones, jazz chord solos fingerstyle.
Unplugged, the sound was unremarkable. No projection. Not very acoustic sounding.
When I took it home however, the 60 cycle hum from the single p 90 pick up was unbearable. I tried on 5 different amps and three different rooms in the house. No success. I tried roland, cubes, fender tubese and even a marshall acoustic amp. Evrey time the hum was so loud that I had to choke off all treble just to hear the guitar. I use monster cables and understand that a p 90 is a single coil pick up, but there was no way that I could use this guitar in a quite environment, and certainly couldn't record with it. I know alll about room interference, and shielding and all of that, I even spent another $70 on an ebtech hum cancel switch with no success. I have many other single coil guitars, but each has a 5 way switch where I can find some relief. This jazz box just wasn't made that way. Look somewhere else if you want a clean sounding jazz box.
Action, Fit, & Finish
:
No Opinion
The guitar was beautiful to look at. I have owned several products by Godin, and all otheir work is supreb, and a great value. I ahve owned two la ptrie, and two seagull guitars. I always tell new players and friends that they are the best under 500 dollar guitars out there. Cosmetically this was one was dead perfect.
Reliability/Durability
:
3
Looks well built, built the pick up issue makes it unusable for my purposes.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
I have never had any dealing with the Godin company.
Overall Rating
:
2
I have been playing about 30 years. I won 8 guitars currently. They range from mexican and american strats and teles, to a 30 year old Martin to a hand made classical.
I admire Godin for trying to get a reasobly priced playable archtop onto the market. They missed the mark with this one however. If they would rework it with a mini humbucker, or floating humbucker, I woud take another luck. I had such high hopes for this guitar. I returned it 2 days after buyinh it.
