Guitar Pron 2: Godin LGX-SA

The second guitar for your viewing pleasure is a Godin LGX-SA, a hard-tail instrument with a Gibson-style tilt-back headstock. Another eBay find, these guitars are assembled in the USA from Canadian-made parts. This one is another flame maple top with a routed edge that is similar to the Peavey Limited. The flame isn't quite as spectacular -- the finish is quite dark in ordinary room light -- but still very pretty. In bright light it appears that the parts are floating on a deep blue sea.


Like the Peavey, this instrument is beautifully constructed, with a lot of attention to detail. The neck joint is a work of art. It came to me in excellent condition, with only a couple of very minor dings and scratches. I paid less than half of the selling price for a new LGX-SA.


This one features an ebony fretboard, and the older Godin "tetrad" pickups which can be coil-tapped by popping up the tone control.


Besides being a very capable and polished Les Paul-style instrument (but lighter, and nicely sculpted in the back for greater comfort when playing), this is a very geeky instrument -- it is a 3-voice guitar. There is a 13-pin output for running into any type of guitar synth that accepts this output; I use a Roland GR-30. The tracking is excellent; it seems to work better than the usual GK pickup arrangement. There is a piezo output which provides a fairly credible acoustic sound, and which can be EQ'ed using a little 3-band EQ. And it has two humbuckers to produce a more usual electric guitar output, which can be coil tapped for a wider range of tones.


The routing options are somewhat complex, as it has two 1/4" outputs and the 13-pin output. The 13-pin output can actually be used alone and will still give you access to all of the guitar's sounds. The Roland GR-30 has a guitar out that will pass through the piezo and electric sounds. By combining the synth level (one of the sliders) together with the piezo level knob and another slider you can adjust levels to blend your synth patch, electric tone, and piezo tone. In this configuration you can't process the electric and piezo tones through separate effects chains, but there are more options if you are willing to use more than one cable.



It's a very playable, very comfortable instrument and one of the best pieces I've found on eBay to date. And last but not least, it came with a plywood (not plastic) case!

I used this guitar to record the electric part for the Mandelbrot Set's cover of "My Monkey" -- at least for my first take, although I wound up using a T-60 on the second take. I expect to make a lot more use of this instrument in the future.