If you are interested in digital guitar, check out the Digital Guitarist YouTube Channel. Subscribe here.
For the past year and a half, while I have been travelling a lot, I’ve been playing a new guitar (to me anyway), a Godin xTSA. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while, but have been too busy playing with it after aninitial response to it a year ago. I am just going to write about the electric guitar part of it today, keeping in mind it has an “acoustic” piezo pickup and a guitar synth controller built in (update: here’s the acoustic part and the synth part). I’ll write about each of those separately when I get a chance. In a way, the procrastination has been helpful, as I have had plenty of time to get to know the quirks and features — and there are a lot of both — of this excellent, reasonably priced guitar synth.
The Guitar
I had my eyes on Godin guitars for a while before playing one. They are quite nice in general and I like their philosophy of mass producing but hand finishing, and for the most part this allows them to make the best “bang for your buck” guitar on the market today, both their electrics and their acoustic counterparts, Seagull guitars, as well as a somewhat dizzying array of other brands they make.
The first thing to notice about the guitar is that the finish isgorgeous. I am partial to dark red guitars, and wanted the brandy sunburst one for a change but got a better deal on this black one because it had been used for demoing. I actually love the finish. It is a sort of dark brown on black tiger stripe sunburst that draws out the grain of the wood. The image does not really do it justice but I’m too busy to take new pics. OK, so it looks nice, but what does it do?
neck
I’ll go over the feel and playability first. It was pretty much set up right at the factory. The neck is wide enough for my fairly large hands, and it plays well. One problem is that the longways alignment seems ever so slightly off, so that I need to be careful when bending or using vibrato on the high E string or the string will go off the neck at my left hand finger, resulting in a dead note. Hopefully I can find a good luthier to fix this once I get back to Hawaii and have another guitar to play. As such, it is one of several minor flaws with an otherwise beautiful guitar. The neck is a bolt on, which I am not usually a fan of, because the double thickness of the wood gets in the way when playing the upper frets, and the xTSA is no exception. My old SG with the fitted neck and double cutaways plays above the 12th fret much better, but a bolt-on neck is one of the ways Godin is able to keep the cost down and still make a good solid guitar. It is held in much more firmly than say a fender bolt on, and considering that it is a single cutaway guitar, it still plays well up top. The reason for the playability is that it is not a Les Paul style guitar. I’ve never been a fan of LPs because of the weight. I realize that and a set of humbuckers is what gives them their particular sound, but I’m generally not fond of the sound either. The non-cutaway side of the xTSA is more streamlined and to my eye cooler looking than the round LP shape. The body is tapered in the back but flat on the front, so it feels comfortable to play while sitting or standing. It also weighs about half of a LP, falling in the range of a strat or SG as far as heft.
tuningidiosyncrasies
The strings attach to the one piece bridge/tailpiece through the body like on a hardtail strat, giving the guitar excellent sustain. The whammy bar is responsive and the tuning system keeps things reasonably well in tune for all but the most dive bomby whammies. At the other end, it has locking tuners. A word in the manual would have been nice, but once the thing is tuned, it stays in really well, at least in part because of the tuning locks. The tuners are branded as Godin, and are geared smoothly and encased somewhat like Grover tuners. So far so good, but tuning has a couple of problems.
First, if you are an aggressive right hand player, or lazy and don’t change the strings often, forget finishing a song if you break one at a gig. For some reason the string tensions in the bridge/tailpiece/whammy bar setup are all interdependent, so if one string breaks, everything goes out of tune by at least a half step, and because each string has its own tension, they all go out of tune differently. This same problem makes tuning a pain in general. I found the best system is to start with the low E, then tune the A, then go back and readjust the E, which will have gone flat from the tightening (or sharp from loosening) of the A, then the D, after which you need to return the E and A, and so on. It gets progressively less out of tune as you proceed toward the lighter strings because they exert less pressure and so changing them does not throw things out of whack as much. If you start on the lighter strings or tune them all before returning to the lower strings, you are in for a frustrating session of infinite tune up.
A second thing to watch for as far as tuning is that if you are a player who likes to rest your right palm behind the bridge to do mutes easily, you have to be hyperaware of the weight you put there, as it will raise the tuning with the slightest pressure. It is an easy and intuitive adjustment, but it is disconcerting to play one note and hear another come out, especially after going through all the tuning trouble.These are sorely poorly thought out design flaws, but you can adapt your playing to them to compensate, and that is in fact a worthwhile sacrifice, as in many other respects the xTSA is a blast to play. On the plus side, once you are in tune, the guitar stays in tune really well, and breaking a reasonably new string is pretty much of a rarity. Just make sure you have a fresh set on for gigs. The locking tuners seem to make new strings stay in tune better, so I don’t have to go through stretching them and playing for a day or two to break them in before they stay in tune well — they stay in tune as soon as you put them on, though I still give a new set a little stretch after tuning them the first time to get them settled in.
pickups
I am a big fan of the p90 gibson single coil sound. I generally don’t care for the “creaminess” of humbuckers, and feel that they lose a lot of the expressive potential that a good player can put into the tone with the right hand. I like the bite of hot single coils. Turning the volume back on the guitar a little usually yields the nice strat like “spanky” tones so good for rhythm guitar and bluesy stuff, and forget getting a good jangly sound out of a humbucker. I get something visceral (cheat: this is my p90 SG, not the xTSA)out of single coils tonewise that I just gets lost on humbuckers. Nonetheless, all my other electrics are single coils so I figured I’d try something new.
The xTSA has three Godin pickups made specifically for this guitar. They are probably outsourced from another manufacturer, but I like them fine once I got them set up. The neck and bridge positions are humbuckers, with a single coil in the middle. The controls are simple: One volume knob, one tone knob, and a five position strat-style switch that chooses neck only, neck + middle, middle only, middle+bridge, and bridge only. The neck humbucker is nice for super-saturated low-treble stuff (like at the 2:35 mark of this one). I seldom use the bridge humbucker by itself…it seems all bark and no bite to me, but that’s just how trebly humbuckers sound.
The real genius of this guitar is in the middle three settings, but only with some serious tweaking. The middle pickup is the single coil. From the factory, it was set too low for my taste. No matter the volume setting, it would not crank. Just clean, bright, strat-like tone, a little on the trebly side. I tried adjusting it upward, but the holes were drilled too deep, and the closest it got to the strings was still too far away to get any of the rougher single coil sounds. I took the pickup out and stuffed the wooden ends of two kitchen matches into each of the two screw holes and then screwed the pickup back in. This was just the ticket to raise the pickup enough and I got my single coil crank when the volume was up and the slinky sound when it was pulled back a bit. Whoever put the pickup in just drilled too deep, either by design or mistake. It is a bit harsher sounding than my SG and jaguar single coils, but it really comes into its own in the second and fourth positions, when combined with the humbuckers. That takes the harsh out, but still flavors the tone with the single coil bite. Listen to the “spanky” link above, or just about anything else I record where the electric guitar sound is featured. I love the sound of these two settings and use them a lot.
I’ve been pretty critical here. I’ve been playing a long time, and I’ve had a year to get to know the Godin. My other two main electric guitars are a late seventies SG with single coils and a pre-CBS Jaguar. I am traveling this past year and a half and have only carried the Godin with me. I really like the old guitars for different things, and occasionally miss them, but for the most part, the xTSA has been a blast. Once I figured out the problems (and there are still one or two more to cover when I talk about the acoustic and the synth portions), it has proven a quirky but excellent instrument, kind of like the Jaguar, but a hundred times more versatile. I’ll talk about the acoustic features and the synth part separately, but I want to emphasize that what I love about this guitar is the ability to mix all three to get an amazingly broad tonalpalette: synths with acoustic overtones and electric guitar grit, all mixable and switchable from the guitar, pretty much any sound I can imagine and more than a few I discovered rather than imagined. Not all of them are spacey either. Check out the “organ” in the “spanky” piece mentioned earlier. It is all played on the guitar. So to sum up, in spite of the flaws, this is a guitar that can hold its own in comparison to SGs and Fenders just as an electric. It has some flaws, but they are more than made up for by the tonalpalettethat the electric is only one component of.
On a final note, one of my justifications for getting another guitar was the travel, and I did not want to subject the oldsters toairplane baggage handling. I got an industrial, TSA- and baggage handler-proof SKB ATA Roto Electric Bass case (see first pic, above). You put your guitar in its own gig bag, then put the whole into the SKB. It is pretty indestructible. The outside is getting pretty battered, and it lost its wheels, which I am hoping SKB is going to replace, but the guitar comes through in pristine condition.
I’ll cover the acoustic part of the xTSA next. Meanwhile, don’t neglect these new tunes from rreplay, all played on the xTSA, if you want to get a feel for what it –and Eric and I — can do. And thanks again to Eric (the “ep” of rreplay) and Karen for putting me up while in Boston, and I hope moving is not stressing you out too much!