Under the hood

Remove the backplate of the Summit Classic P90 model and you’re in for a shock, not just from the bright creamy colour of the basswood but also the minimalist pots, each with its own circuit board (Godin VO-1 and TO-1), a 102 code (.001microfarad) treble bleed capacitor on the volume and 333 code (.033microfarad) tone cap – both similar small blue types. Minimalist is an understatement.

The Kingpin pickup is a regular-style ‘dog-ear’ P-90 (with a pretty juicy DCR of 8.23kohms) wedged between the usualstyle top cover and a bottom ring, like a humbucker’s mounting ring that follows the outline of dog-ear cover. It mounts via two bolts, which pass into threaded inserts in the body and mean the pickup is suspended, with springs providing the tension, allowing a considerable amount of height adjustment.

Under the scratchplate, you’ll find a large cavity for a neck pickup (approximately 92.7 by 43 by 19mm deep). It’s a little too big to use a standard humbucker ring, though just about deep enough for a short-leg humbucker if you suspend it from the pickguard (typically, a pickup cavity is routed deeper under those legs, though here the base is flat). Of course, that would mean cutting your own hole in the scratchplate, and at the time of writing we were still waiting to hear whether Godin actually offers a replacement pickup with a hole for a humbuckers, or single coil, pre-cut.

The Summit SG Matte Green has the same-style square mini-pots with PCBs; there are no treble bleed caps here but the same small blue 333 code caps on the tone controls. The pickups have brass baseplates but no ID, save for a simple ‘F’ (front) and ‘R’ (rear) stamped in. Again, at the time of writing, we were unable to confirm exactly where these pickups are made. The bridge pickup’s coils don’t look excessively stuffed, so we suspect the wire gauge is smaller than that used on the neck pickup, giving a higher DC resistance of 15.4kohms compared with the more classic reading of the neck (8.8kohms).