NGD: Xaviere XV-890HSS

[duhvoodooman***]

Impressed by what I saw in Progrmr's thread about his new Xaviere XV-890HH, I went ahead and purchased the same guitar but in a H-S-S pickup configuration. Went with purple, which is my favorite color. Always wanted a purple gee-tar! Anyway, I just took delivery of the guitar this morning. I had it sent to my work address, since the delivery required a signature and that's hit or miss at home.

While I don't have anything to plug it into here, my first impression is one of total amazement for how they can sell a guitar like this for $239. The finish is flawless, including the full binding around body, neck and headstock. The controls have a good solid feel to them. The set-up on the guitar, including the FR, is right on the money--nice, low action with no apparent buzzing, spot-on (to my ear) intonation, and the guitar was almost perfectly in tune right out of the carton. A few tweaks of the FR fine tuners and it was ready to go. They even appear to have pre-stretched the strings, 'cuz I worked the trem pretty hard both sharp & flat a couple of times, and it stayed right in tune. The neck feels great--a little on the slim side but not excessively so, by any means. About the only thing that doesn't impress me much is the depth of the flame on the maple cap, but then again you don't expect a PRS "10 Top" on a $239 guitar.

Obviously I need to hear how it sounds through an amp and give it some respectable amount of playing time before I get too excited about it, but so far, I'm quite impressed.

Yeah, I know--"pics or it's an old, refinished Daisy Rock." These two from the GFS product page will have to do for now:

[progrmr]

Awesome - yea, I'd like some real pics and your impressions of the pickups!

[duhvoodooman***]

I was out of the house most of the evening, but got a chance to plug the guitar in and play through it briefly. My first impression of the pickups is that they are good, not great. The humbucker is appropriately hot for this type of guitar, and seems to have good clarity. I really need to play through it with various levels of distortion, which I was not able to do last night. The single coils also have good clarity and are fairly bright sounding. I was quite surprised at how much effect shifting the neck pickup back to accommodate the 24 frets has on its tone--definitely less of that typical roundness you get from a Strat neck p'up. But I guess that's to be expected. Again, these are VERY preliminary impressions, as I only had a few minutes to fool around with the guitar.

I also found that while the guitar was in tune relative to itself, it was tuned down about 1/2 of a tone. I was not able to get the guitar up to to standard A440 tuning before the fine tuners ran out of travel. Loosening the string locks at the nut, I tuned up to pitch with the headstock tuners, but this created a new problem--the greater string tension caused the FR base plate to be angled up, no longer parallel to the body. OK, no problem, just need to tighten up the trem claw. Except the trem claw was already screwed pretty much all the way in. So I had to add a 4th spring to the trem, and go through the iterative process of tuning the guitar to A440 pitch and adjusting the trem claw/spring tension to keep the FR base parallel to the body. Took about half an hour to get it pretty much dead on, but such is the reality of doing the initial set-up on a Floyd Rose guitar. I was fortunate to have extra trem springs on hand--GFS should probably include a couple of extras with this guitar.

EDIT: Turns out there's a better/faster way to do the trem spring/tuning adjustment. You loosen the trem claw until the FR plate tilts up, then pull it down and block the trem block in place so that the FR plate is parallel to the body. A wedge-shaped piece of wood would be good for this. Now that the trem can't move upward, you go ahead and tune the guitar close to exact pitch with the headstock tuners and then lock the strings at the nut. Once this is done, you slowly re-tighten the trem claw until the the block falls out. Carefully done, you should then be very close to your desired tuning and be able to use the FR fine-tuners to get it "perfect". Good video showing this method here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNNAVzS3cS4

[Commodore 64***]

Is there a hardtail version of that?

[duhvoodooman***]

Yes--the string-thru hardtail version is called the XV-895HSS, and goes for $219: http://store.guitarfetish.com/Xavier...ple_c_381.html
Comes with a quilted maple top. Nice looking guitar:

[Commodore 64***]

OH man. $220? That is tempting me badly.

[sunvalleylaw]

Congrats DVM!

[Tig***]

Happy new guitar day, DVM!

[duhvoodooman***]

A few pix below.

Got a chance to play the guitar a bit more last evening. Definitely liking the bridge humbucker setting the best, with medium overdrive to outright wailing distortion. The guitar plays very easily--love this neck. I'll stick with one of my Strats when I want that nice, round neck single coil tone, but this is a rocker on the humbucker. Now I need to learn me a couple of those EVH dive bomb tricks!