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I got my latest new guitar today, a Chapman ML-2. I won't do a full review of it as there's plenty of information available on the Internet about this guitar and its stablemates. Go to Youtube and search for Chapman Guitars, or Rob Chapman. The videos that he and Lee Anderton do for Anderton's Music Store are very entertaining.
Anyway, this guitar ticked a lot of boxes of what I wanted in my next guitar. It's a hardtail (no whammy bar) with 24 frets and an ebony fingerboard. It has Chapman-designed pickups, which are a lot cheaper than well known brands. The design philosophy of this guitar was to have excellent basics - the body and neck in particular - and to use decent but not too expensive components that can be changed if someone wants (pickups, bridge and tuners, basically). It has two humbuckers, and a 3-position switch to select bridge, both or neck. The three knobs are 2 volumes and 1 tone, and the tone knob pulls up to coil tap the 'buckers (in the middle position, they are also out of phase when tapped).
The coil tap really expands the range of sounds that you can get from the guitar. On the two single-pickup positions, it thins out the sound and makes it a bit more acoustic. On the middle position, as it puts the pickups out of phase, it knocks out a lot of the bass tones, as you'd expect. This position is probably best with a lot more distortion / effects - I was trying the guitar out mainly with a clean tone to hear the instrument itself rather than the amp or effects.
I played the ML-2 and compared it with my other guitars, which are: a Fender Pawn Shop '72 (H-H), a Lag Arkane A100 (H-S-H) and a Brian May Special (S-S-S). I compared the bridge pickups on each guitar, and then the neck pickups. Each guitar is a bit different from the others, with the most different being the Brian May Special, probably because it has single coil pickups. The ML-2 is possibly the loudest of all four, especially on the neck pickup (and when not coil tapped - it's the only one of my guitars that has coil tapping, although the BM Special can do any combination of in / out of phase).
Unfortunately, I find it's virtually impossible to put the differences into words. The bridge pickup was maybe a little bit more twangy than my Fender, and the Fender was a little warmer on the neck. The ML-2 definitely does have a full and rich tone nonetheless.
If you really want to know the difference, I think there's no substitute for going into a guitar shop and trying it in comparison with other guitars (I did try one about 3 weeks ago). At the moment, they are only available from Anderton's in the UK (and somewhere in Sweden) so you'll have to go to Guildford! At the time of writing, Rob Chapman is in the US trying to find a retail channel, so maybe soon any US readers will have somewhere to try them out (there's one guy with a shop in Texas who has one and is willing to let people try it).
My guitar arrived almost bang in tune - I only had to tune 2 of the 6 strings. The intonation was perfect. The action is a matter of personal preference, but one thing I found unusual is the height of the TonePros bridge. It is higher off the body of the guitar than any of my others - in fact, I measured the height of the bottom E string from the body at 18mm, compared to between 11 and 13mm on my other three (and in fact only 9mm from the pickguard for my BM Special, as that is raised up from the body). No doubt related to that, the neck is slightly slanted where it meets the body, so that it tilts backwards towards the headstock. There's a photo in the following post to illustrate this.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, and I don't know whether this is standard on these guitars or if mine is a little different (I'll try to find out and update this post). I don't think it's a problem, but I think it's one factor that made me take a little time to get used to playing this guitar. It also makes the action noticeably higher on the high frets - I may try to adjust this down a little.
Again, related to the height of the bridge, the pickups are very high off the body (they are about 4 - 4.5mm away from the strings). Instead of having plastic or metal sides, they are bound around with black fabric, and I'm not sure if I like it that much. That's a very minor point, though, particularly as a lot of people change the pickups anyway.
The tuners are Grovers, nothing special like locking heads but perfectly good. The fretboard is ebony, as I mentioned, which was a big reason for buying this guitar. I don't know any other guitar at this price which has an ebony fretboard.
Finally, the finish and aesthetics of the guitar. The build quality looks excellent - no sharp edges, blemishes or gaps. The finish on the body is really beautiful. The wood is stained and then varnished, as far as I can tell, and the end result is spectacular. I chose the Black Cherry finish, which is obviously a dark red, and there's a band around the edge which is only varnished (it's covered when they do the staining), and that's a lovely, golden brown colour. A couple of my photos show the finish quite well, but in real life it is absolutely gorgeous. It reminds me a little bit of the finish on PRS guitars, but it's a lot less in your face because the colours are more subtle and the wood grain is closer. I think they have a unique and truly superb look - rather clean and natural, but very stylish.
That's it for now. I'll add photos in the next post, and I may update again later on when I've played it a bit more and got better used to it. For now, though, after my first evening with it, I am very happy with my purchase. One last detail - the price is £449, including a decent gig bag, which I think is a bargain for the quality. |
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25-11-2019 21:31:05
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