A Slice of 70s Chic?
Guild’s second wave of electric solidbodies were little more than cynical copies of Gibson’s SG. Yet how do the originals compare with Guild 2018? Dave Burrluck investigates…
We feature a lot of vintage beauties throughout our pages but most are them are certainly out of my budget. Like every other guitar player, I hanker after that glorious old Gibson, or fabulous Fender from the ‘golden age’ of the electric guitar but, yes, I might have to dream on. Yet step away from the classics and you might find other vintage slices of history at sub-£1,000 prices.
Researching this review, I did just that. A casual search for “Guild electrics for sale” brought up lots of current Newark St. models and the occasional semi from yesteryear. And then I found the model down from the S-100, the S-90, with twin full-size humbuckers on a ‘batwing’ scratchplate and two controls, instead of four. A round-trip to Suffolk later and I was the proud owner of my own slice of Guild history: a 1976 (according to Hans Moust’s
“Whether it’s the wood or age, this S-90 has a resonance that is pretty rare to find on a c£500 new-build”
The Guild Guitar Book) S-90 for around 20 per cent less that the advertised price of our reviewed S-100.
Like any 42-year-old it has some baggage. Aside from the wear, its nitro finish had a heavy layer of gunk (probably from various polishes and usual playing grime) that took a while to clean off but gradually the blue-y sheen was removed revealing a brighter, more translucent deep cherry. Although the pickups are original, someone has clearly fitted something different in its past – there’s an extra hole in the scratchplate between the two bass-side screws on both.
Yet the neat thing about these original Guild pickups and the new Newark St. repros, is that there’s a small tag strip under each which means you can simply unsolder the pickup lead at that point and not mess with actual control cavity. It makes pickup swaps (not least on semi-
hollow Starfires) very easy and I suspect that’s what was done here. Again, checking with the knowledgeable letstalkguild.com chaps, these are definitely the real deal with relatively low DCRs of 7.05 kohms (bridge) and 6.95 kohms (neck). The wiring looks unmolested, the Stackpole pots date to 1974, although the knobs are Gibson-style and the black switch cap would, I believe, have been chromed metal.
As ever, the big worry is the condition of the neck. Again the wide frets appear to be original but have been stoned pretty flat. The neck had quite a convex bow but the truss rod worked perfectly to allow a pretty straight 0.005-inch/0.127mm relief with 0.11s, my preferred choice on a 629mm (24.75-inch) scale like this. Size-wise, like Gibson’s ES-335’s in the later 60s, the neck is quite narrow – 41.24mm at the nut – but not over thin depth-wise, filling out from 21.1mm at the 1st fret to 23.7mm by the 12th. Interestingly, although we often comment on nut width it’s the string spacing that affects our fingers. Here it’s just half a millimetre (34.5mm) narrower at the nut than the majority of modern guitars we get to play – our new Guilds included – and widens out at bridge to 50.5mm, very much in original Gibson style.
The previous owner had pulled the screw poles of both humbuckers up quite high so I screwed them back down and raised the pickup heights – and tilted them slightly – to a more n0ormal setting. So just how does this thing sound and play?
It’s pretty light (3.25kg/7.15lb) but not neck heavy on a strap. That ‘extended’ neck feels more normal strapped on than it does sitting down and even though the position dots, on the face and side, stop at the 15th fret, high fret access – as with an SG – is dead easy. The low fret height does mean you have to really dig into big bends – if we were to use this seriously a re-fret would be on the cards – and the relatively narrow Fender-y neck feel won’t be for everyone, as good as it is for thumb-around positions.
But this ’76 S-90 drops right into the brighter, clean humbucker area that these guitars are known for. As we comment on p86, the new S-100 certainly doesn’t have the depth of a good single-cut, but this S-90 is extremely resonant and alive. Is that the wood? Its age? I can only guess, but there’s something good going on here that is pretty rare to find on a new-build £500 guitar. The contemporary S-100 has slightly more crispness and a more noticeably less lower-mid fullness; the S-90 sounds a little ‘hotter’ with a little more classic all-mahogany grind with a grittier amp and subtly more sparkle to the high end. Yes, the distant placement of the controls takes a little adjustment but it’s not a dealbreaker. The other thing that’s very obvious is how stable the ’76 is tuning-wise – not least with such a long neck.
For many, old is quite simply best and in this case, sonically, I’d agree. Playabilitywise it has character compared to the modern build, which remains a better player. However, a re-fret, while raising your investment, would narrow that so long as you like the thinner-width feel of the older guitar. But when a guitar sounds this good, that’s a compromise to live with.