Charvel Pro-mod San Dimas Style 2 Hh With Floyd Rose Reviews

The San Dimas lives again in a more versatile incarnation.

For a lot of aspiring shredders, the image of Warren DeMartini's Charvel San Dimas in Ratt'southward "Round and Circular" video—with its blood and skull graphic—was about every bit badass as you could make it 1984. That epitome helped cement the San Dimas' place as i of the must-accept axes of the shred era. But information technology was no flash in the pan. Three decades later, the San Dimas remains in production. This newest permutation is a Mexico-built Pro-Mod San Dimas Fashion 1 HH FR.

Not Merely Built for Speed
With its transparent, tobacco sunburst, quilted maple acme on an alder body, zebra humbuckers, and maple neck, the Pro-Modern version looks sharp, and a lot like an '80s shred child grown upward and keeping it classy in middle historic period. Rather more lurid solid colors like slime light-green and neon pinkish are also bachelor for permanent adolescents.

Information technology's apparent that a lot of careful idea went into the guitar'due south design and construction. The neck is reinforced with dual graphite truss rods for extra stability and features a convenient spoke wheel truss rod aligning where the cervix meets the body. It makes adjustments exceptionally like shooting fish in a barrel.

The test guitar arrived perfectly in tune, and the Floyd Rose double-locking tremolo system helped continue it in tune in spite of the fact that I subjected the instrument to fairly aggressive whammy abuse right out of the case. The vibrato was set up by the factory to go up a major 3rd on the G, D, and A strings. It's a very stable system, also, requiring only microscopic adjustments of the fine tuners—I never had to unlock the locking tuners—during my exam period. A difficult-tail option is too bachelor.

The tight low end makes Eddie Van Halen-style metal-boogie riffs and percussive djent-type rhythms sound equally tough and clear.

Rolled fretboard edges and a forearm contour on the body add to the axe's already comfortable profile. And thanks to the combination of low activeness, a great factory setup, and 12–16" chemical compound radius fretboard with 22 colossal frets, the San Dimas very plainly invites armada-fingered moves. But while many metal guitars are best suited for playing a lot of fast notes (and, indeed, lightning fast hammer-ons and pull-offs are a like shooting fish in a barrel on this bad male child), the San Dimas seems equally at dwelling for many other styles. Fifty-fifty though the guitar arrived strung with a .009 string ready, information technology never felt too plinky if I dug in for aggressive, aptitude dejection-rock licks.

Half-dozen-Pack Assault
For much of my fourth dimension with the San Dimas, I paired it with a Mesa/Boogie Tremoverb combo (using clean and dirty channels) too as Pro Co RAT and Paul Cochrane Timmy pedals for different shades of clay.

A pair of direct-mount Seymour Duncan pickups—a time-honored combo of JB in the bridge and '59 in the neck—offering a boatload of tone options. They are wired to a 3-mode selector switch, from which y'all tin select the bridge and neck pickups or the inner coils of each running in parallel. Coil splitting is performed via a push-pull volume command, and gives you lot the outer bridge coil, both pickups' outer coils in parallel, or the outer coil of the neck pickup, depending on switch position.

Ratings

Pros:
Excellent playability and a broad range of killer sounds. Great build quality.

Cons:
None.

Tones:

Playability:

Build/Pattern:

Value:

Street:
$869

Charvel Pro-Modernistic San Dimas Manner 1 HH FR
charvel.com

You can get dandy sounds from just nigh every configuration. The neck pickup is crisp with a lot of bite, and free of tubbiness. The heart sounded a piffling glassier than the neck position and inspired whammy-infused, make clean melodies (Steve Vai'due south "Telephone call it Sleep" riff among them). The span pickup is muscular, open, and sounds reminiscent of some of Guthrie Govan's brash lead tones. For rhythm playing, the tight low end makes Eddie Van Halen-way metal-boogie riffs and percussive djent-type rhythms sound equally tough and articulate.

Coil splitting offers another layer of tone flavors. For make clean settings, I particularly enjoyed the split-coil heart position—an out-of-phase sound that was cracking for funking abroad on small-scale-6 chord voicings or land-manner, open-string pull-offs. With a lilliputian dirt, the dissever cervix pickup offers cool Stratocaster-on-steroids tones that work for sounds from stinging dejection to Yngwie-like rapid-fire precision licks. The split bridge pickup also delivered powerful variations on bluesy lead sounds. It'due south a treat being able to coax and then much tone variation just from the guitar.

Tone Isn't Just in the Fingers
Several years agone, I pondered buying a San Dimas, but held off because it didn't have a tone knob. (Many rock guitarists feel that a tone knob robs the tone.) This edition of the San Dimas finally features that missing knob. But in order to please former-school San Dimas users, the tone knob has a very effective and useful no-load option, which removes the capacitor from the excursion entirely at maximum levels. Moving back but a notch from max, yous feel a detent setting that lets you know the tone knob is engaged. It takes a minute to become used to the knob's slight resistance when moving from maximum to lower settings, simply the payoff in tone-shaping leeway is huge. While no-load controls typically issue in a brighter sound, the San Dimas is never shrill. Instead you get clarity that lends a mensurate of single-coil cut to the humbuckers. In the opposite management—even with the tone knob at a near minimum—the guitar still feels very alive, opening up the possibility of about jazz-similar tones with a crisp pick responsiveness on acme.

The Verdict
The cool thing well-nigh the San Dimas is that, while it's conspicuously targeted at the shredder, it covers miles of musical territory. And the street toll—just under 870 bucks—is very reasonable considering the excellent build quality and the sonic versatility within.

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Source: https://www.premierguitar.com/gear/charvel-pro-mod-san-dimas-style-1-hh-fr-review

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