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Monday, April 9, 2012

Godin 5th Avenue Jazz ... (Review)

Reviewed By: Sean McCormick
Street Price: $1,895.00 with case
Up-Grades: 
Stock

About: 
Godin 5th Avenue Jazz
Made in 2011, in Quebec Canadian. This guitar has a flame maple  laminate top and sides with a Canadian wild cherry core and a high-gloss custom polished finish. Classic f-holes, contoured high-gloss headstock, with a  floating pickguard and cream binding tied together with an ebony fingerboard.

Hardware:
An adjustable Tusq bridge by Graphtech with a custom tailpiece and high-ratio open geared nickel tuners.

Electronics:
A Godin Jazz mini-humbuckerwith with 1x volume, 1x tone (ebony knobs)
 
Sound Neck:
It's all Jazz; warm voicing with good projecting when acoustic and that lush hollow body tone you look for in an archtop.

Action, Fit & Finish:  
The action was a little low and had some buzz around the 12th- 14th. The tone knob had some crackle to it.

Reliability & Durability: 
I played it for about 20 minutes. String 4 had some slippage to it. The intonation was off a bit, but this could all be from store usage and a simple setup with new string would probably fix it up.

Impression:
My first impression was that I fell in love with the overall look of the guitar. It is sleek and has some sexy curves. Even with the setup issues it was a delight to play. It reminded me of an old porch guitar on steroids. With the thin neck and 24.84" (630 mm) scale with a 1.72" (43,7 mm) nut width; it was easy to hold an made me want to play.

My advice 
If you are buying your first achtop acoustic electric, I would recommend trying this one out. The 5th Ave base model starts with a street price of an unheard of $700 USD.

Contact
info@godinguitars.com  
Godin Guitars 
Montreal, Canada
godinguitars.com

Posted 04/2012