The Acoustic Guitar Forum - Godin 5th Avenue!! Adding Pick Up?

I certainly wasn't on the look for a new guitar but an opportunity to do a face-to-face deal for a very gently used Godin 5th Avenue (sans pickup) came my way and was too good to resist. I met the seller for lunch today and took it home with me. What a pleasant surprise!

It's in great shape. I got it for a very good price, so I wasn't necessarily expecting too much, but it's virtually like new, without even any appreciable fret wear. Not a ding or scuff to be found on it or the TRIC case it came with. It sounded fine in the noisy restaurant where we met but I had some ideas for minor changes.

I got it home, stripped off the strings, and almost everything looked fantastic. The overall workmanship is superb -- typical of Godin. The laminate cherry body in natural is good looking in a fairly spartan way, with a sort of pearlescent tortoise finger rest and truss rod cover adding just a hint of understated bling. The tuners seem fine and work well; the trapeze tailpiece is sturdy and attractive.

Just the bridge was rough. It's a pretty cheap rosewood compensated adjustable bridge and is fairly crude. The compensation cuts were reasonably accurate but not that neat. There were milling marks on the surface of the wood, which was not even close to being polished. The saddle section was pretty wobbly on top of the adjusting wheels, which didn't turn that smoothly on their posts. It worked okay but stood out as a place where some costs had been saved. So, off with the original bridge and on with a nicely polished, new Stew-Mac ebony bridge.

I fitted it to the top, matched the string notch spacing from the original, tuned her up with mediums (it had lights on before), moved the bridge to get the intonation just right, did a bit more sanding on the feet of the bridge to get the contact more solid, set the bridge location again for intonation, and retuned.

It's a surprisingly nice guitar! I'd read that these aren't as quintessentially archtop-sounding as some guitars of that design -- sort of somewhere between a flattop and an archtop. That's a pretty fair description. It plays very nicely (set up with just a whisper of relief and 1/16" action on both sides of the board). The mediums give it plenty of volume and it's great fun for playing old blues tunes with bare fingertips. Even with mediums, the short scale makes for easy string bends. It has just a little bit of nastiness to it that I like for playing blues. It's perfect as a guitar to keep leaning against the bookcase for when the urge to play a quick tune strikes. Its tone isn't as rich as a good flattop, but it's really not supposed to be. It's a different kind of beast. For substantially less than a new one, this is a lot of guitar. Actually, even at the normal street price, this would be a lot of guitar.

I couldn't justify or afford getting a high-end archtop, given the styles I play the stratospheric prices for some of them (beautiful though they are), but this modestly-priced little gem gives me a new flavor to fool around with and I'm enjoying it a lot. Worth checking out, especially if you can find a used one in good shape at a good price.