D'Angelico Premier Bedford SH Semi-hollow Review

Excellent Guitar

I purchased the sky blue because it is made of mahogany. The neck of the premiere is one piece which will deliver maximum tone. The scale is 24.75" which is easier on my tendons when playing stretched out chord voicings. The mother of pearl blocks are deep and further the aesthetics that allude to the 'jazz box' fret board. It will accept a myriad of drop in pick ups although… read more the stock designs are pretty nice. In synopsis, the guitar plays and sounds great, the aesthetics are very appealing to me and, it's affordable. Mine was made in Indonesia by skilled craftsmen. I'm very happy with this instrument.

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Close to perfect

I've spent about a month with the Bedford Premier SH. I got the blue w/ white pick guard version on a deep discount from a certain nationwide bricks and mortar retailer. I've noticed a surprising lack of reviews for this instrument so here's my contribution. Feel. It feels superb. I love Fender-y necks (not too fat) and this fits in my hand beautifully. The satin finish… read more is lovely and quick, and the way it tapers seamlessly into the body is unique and top notch imo. The string spacing is great; action came low and neat. The neck is a 14in radius which I thought I wouldn't prefer. I love 9.5 radius, but I honestly have no complaints in this area. I also thought I'd miss the snap of a 25.5 scale but this one is still pretty snappy. I like to "feel" the acoustic resonance (and since I play unplugged around the house this is a great feature). One thing to consider: the three pickups are quite close together so you can end up striking them with your pick. There is a little less room than with a strat. The guitar feels great all around 4.75/5 in this area for me. Sound. There's a wide range of tones here. Before we get to that we need to talk about these Duncan Designed pups. Descriptions of this guitar say that it has two single coils and a mini-humbucker. After playing around with it, I think we're dealing with stacked hum-buckers in neck and middle positions. There is absolutely no 60-cycle hum on these two pups and they both have a nice high output with very sparkly highs. I find myself occasionally rolling off just a little bit of the treble with the tone control. I noticed that there's a noticeable volume drop between the "single coil" mid pup and the bridge mini-humbucker. The mini-humbucker is also noisier (a little hum and buzz that you wouldn't expect from a humbucker). The mini-hum has a pleasantly vintage type tone that's really bright and useful without being piercing. I adjusted the pickup heights to even out some of the volume differences--that helped but didn't totally solve the discrepancy. I'm okay with this. One major bonus for me is that you can get a lovely position 4 strat quack when the neck and middle pups are engaged. Love that sound. You don't get the position 2 quack from the bridge and middle though--just FYI. It's a good tone with plenty of cut and clarity but it's no Cory Wong potion. Also, I found a compressor to be a major tone tool for this guitar for what it's worth. Sound is probably a 4/5 for me.

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