They look like single coils, but are actually stacked humbuckers. Tuning issues? Don't be silly.Īnderson guitars always use Anderson pickups and here we have two SC1s at the neck and middle, with flush pole pieces. On the super smooth vintage-style vibrato, the E and A string tuners have higher posts than the other four and an over-tall string tree on the top two strings means that all six exit the nicely cut nut at pretty much the same angle. This same attention to detail pervades the rest of the instrument. Even under a magnifying loupe it's hard to see any abrasion marks - each fret end is perfectly domed, almost like a signature, and the fingerboard edges are just slightly rolled to give a played-in feel. It's astonishing, not least the fret work, which is much tougher to do on these harder stainless steel frets. Set up is low and slinky (around 1.3mm on the treble at the 12th fret, through 1.6mm on the bass-side, with the barest hint of relief ), but where so many guitars would struggle - and we'd struggle to play them - every note rings out perfectly with enough height to the fret to dig in without it feeling over-tall or too big. Sure, if you can't play anything else but a vintage Fender-like 184mm (7.25-inch) radius you're going to find this too flat, but most of us won't be thinking about the radius because our fingers will be skipping over the finely fettled medium gauge stainless steel frets at such a speed that the only thing you'll be considering is how can you afford to buy one. The 'board has a pretty subtle compound radius that starts, Gibson-like, at 305mm (12 inches) at the nut and flattens out slightly to 356mm (14 inches) by the top, 22nd fret.
Previously known as the 'standard' neck profile, the now-called 'even taper' neck is beautifully shaped, a good full C-section that doesn't taper a great deal from its 1st fret depth of 21mm to its 22.6mm depth at the 12th. It's unmovable and a bolt-on joint that really maximises the vibration of the strings: both guitars have a glorious acoustic resonance. The precision of the modern CNC router used to cut these parts means that the fit is perfect and two bolts not only pull and hold the parts together top to bottom, they also slightly pull the neck downwards into the body.