Xaviere XV600

[Ro3b]

What it is: a semi-hollow-body telecaster-shaped guitar. Mine is surf green with cream-colored P90 pickups and a maple fretboard. Unlike the standard thinline tele, this guitar is built more like a Gibson 335, i.e. separate sides, back, and top (all thin maple laminate) with a poplar block running down the middle. The maple neck bolts on and is a separate piece of wood from the fretboard; it has a high-gloss, vintagey-looking amber finish. The fretboard has a 12" radius and medium/jumbo frets (Jay says that vintage frets are only useful if you wear a beret). The string-through bridge has bent steel saddles. Knobs and switch feel nice and solid. The wiring looks well done to my untrained eye. The guitar came strung with .009s, aka The Strings That Rob Will Never Be Able To Play In Tune. I slapped a set of .010s on first thing.


What I love about it:

• The tones. The cleans are fat, but chimey. The neck pickup can achieve very nice jazz tones. The two pups together are almost pianolike. At higher gain levels, things turn loose and snarly; the guitar really starts to sound like it wants to hurt you. I haven't ever sat down and gotten to know what P90s are capable of before, and I've got to say I'm a convert. This is an incredibly versatile instrument with a vast vocabulary of sounds. I’m finding myself pushed into unfamiliar realms of knob-twiddling on my still-pretty-new Valvetronix amp. Right now I'm really feeling this guitar with the AC15 and AC30 models.
  
  
• The playability. The neck is very fits very nicely in my hand. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the most comfortable neck I've ever played. Jay says the neck was CAD/CAMed from a vintage guitar he owns, so no wonder. It's a little fatter than the Squier and Mighty Mite necks I'm used to. Very smooth and fast. The frets are medium/jumbo, and they're set and finished perfectly. Actually the whole setup job on this guitar was expertly done. All I had to do was lower the action a bit. I'd read somewhere that the bridges on these are set a little high for shipping, for reasons I can't fathom. Anyway, three-quarters of a turn of the allen key on each bridge saddle screw was all it took.
  
  
  There's no belly cut, which I like. It feels a little like holding an acoustic guitar. The instrument balances very nicely. I was afraid it would be neck-heavy, but it's not.
  
  
• How it looks. You've seen the pics. It's beautiful. I tend to like guitars that aren't copies of Les Pauls or stratocasters or whatever. This guitar is obviously a tele, but just as obviously not. Like a 1950s refrigerator designer had heard of a telecaster and decided to build one for himself. As I said, I'd really wanted the red sparkle finish at first, but the combination of surf green with cream pickups has really grown on me. It's very, very cool.
  

Flaws/Nitpicking:

• There's a bit of roughness on the inner edges of the f-hole. This is very common in factory-built instruments with f-holes; I don't like it, but it's to be expected.
  
  
• The inside of the guitar on the f-hole side is painted flat black, which makes for a nice look, but it's done sloppily. It looks almost like they stuck a brush through the f-hole after the top was put on. Not a big deal unless you look at the guitar really closely.
  
  
• I’ll probably eventually replace the white plastic nut. I’m not in a rush, though. It’s very well set up and doesn’t bind at all, and the guitar sounds just fine.

All in all, I'm tremendously satisfied with this instrument. At $179 it's an insane deal.