GUILD ARISTOCRAT HH & P90 BOTH £795
CONTACT Selectron UK Ltd PHONE 01795 419460 WEB www.guildguitars.com
The Guild M-75 Aristocrat might not be a household name in terms of classic electric guitars, but over some 66 years it has been played by the likes of John Lee Hooker, Keith Richards, John Mayer and Annie Clark, to name but four. Even if you’ve never played an original from the 50s or 60s – which now command around $4k on the vintage market – the current Newark St Collection M-75 Aristocrat of the past seven years is a pretty tidy facsimile of the guitar that first appeared in 1954. It might have looked like Guild’s response to the Les Paul, but, as many of us have found, it is actually an evocative mini-archtop that’s just as useful for your jazz studies as it is for really rootsy Chicago electric blues and quite a bit more. Accurately classed as a “hollowbody with spruce braced top”, the Korean-made M-75 is built like an acoustic guitar with separate back, laminated sides and arched top, joined with kerfed linings: the laminate spruce top has two longitudinal braces; the back has a couple of transverse braces.
But while these two new versions of that original M-75 Aristocrat look very similar, pretty much everything has changed. We have the same outline and classic three-aside domed-top headstock but on the P90 model a more generic-looking tortie plastic pickguard replaces the usual style with its cartoon-ish ‘Guild’ under a small chevron seen on that M-75 and many others in the range. The top’s edge binding doesn’t have the inner black/white purfling stripe, either, and the HH model ditches the pickguard altogether.
Colour options are limited, too. The P90 comes in Vintage Sunburst, and the top’s bursting is very subtle – it looks more like a deep mahogany brown, pretty much the colour of the back, sides and neck, too. As well as an opaque Snow Crest White option, our HH model comes in Trans Black Burst and has a figured maple veneer top, hinting at a more contemporary style. Aside from the top, though, the rest of the guitar is opaque black. Hidden under these sombre but classy-looking glossy colours, the construction is all mahogany aside from that flame maple veneer.
Of course, it’s the weight that gives the game away, even if you’re wearing a blindfold. Our reference M-75 weighs in at just 2.46kg (5.4lb), while the P90 here is 3.45kg (7.59lb) and the HH a shade heavier
Strapping on either chambered Aristocrat feels great: the beefy bulk of a Les Paul but without the tonnage
at 3.52kg (7.74lb), reflecting the ‘chambered’ rather than hollow construction. What do we mean by chambered? Our new ’Crats start out with a solid chunk of mahogany that is routed out leaving the central section solid with plenty of air in the wings. You can easily see that if you peer into the rear control cavity of either, and you can also see that the separate top is mahogany, too. In fact, this chambered construction style here is closer to the Newark St Bluesbird, although both new models retain the depth of the M-75: 50mm at the rim with an overall depth of approximately 60mm. The Bluesbird is slimmer: 40mm at the rim and 49mm overall.
The actual Guild legend with its Chesterfield logo on the headstock appears to be simply silk-screened metallic paint in certain lights: gold on the P90 and silver on the HH to match the hardware’s plating. But move either in the light and they become more pearlescent, rather like one of those metallic-looking stamps on a bank note. The back of the headstock bears a simple GY-prefixed serial number with peel-off compliance and ‘Made in China’ stickers; our older M-75 has a KSG-prefixed serial number and ‘Handcrafted in Korea’ legend underneath. A final identifier is simply the maple stripe down the back of the M-75’s neck; you don’t see that through the slightly translucent finish of the P90 model, but you can clearly see the headstock splice and the additional heel stack. On closer inspection, the specs differ further with a flatter 305mm (12-inch) fingerboard radius on these new models as opposed to the slightly more rounded 240mm (9.5-inch) radius of the M-75.
Hardware is identical across both the new models, the obvious exception being the plating: gold on the P90, nickel on the Trans Black Burst HH (although, just to confuse things, its Snow Crest White
option comes with gold hardware). Their tuners are simple, open-backed and Grover Sta-Tite in style but have a Guild logo and metal ‘butterbean’ buttons; the tune-omatic bridge mounts into ferrules inset into the top. Again, this differs from the M-75 model: its tune-o-matic style bridge actually sits on metal feet and ‘floats’ (although we understand later models are pinned), more like an unpinned archtop bridge, while its tuners are stamped Grover with oval metal buttons.
Feel & Sounds
While that earlier M-75 is extremely light and feels it on a strap, both these new chambered Aristocrats feel much more Les Paul-like – although you’ll struggle to find ones in this weight range. Strapping on either feels great: the beefy bulk of a Les Paul but without the tonnage. But the combination of the chambering and that harp tailpiece give them a different response even before you plug in – a little more semi-like and acoustic-y than an
‘A bit different’ sums up these single-cuts that move away from the original ‘midget’ jazz hollowbody M-75
all-solid single-cut with a stud tailpiece but noticeably less acoustic-like than the hollow M-75.
The neck profiles are nicely done if a little generic-feeling: a perfectly good C that’s thinner in depth at the 1st fret, 21mm, than it actually feels, filling out to 23.3mm by the 10th fret and, in typical Guild style, the heel feels quite square and consequently a little bulky in higher positions. The frets are pretty beefy but not overly high