cheetah1's Full Review: Fender Sonoran Acoustic-Electric Guitar - Lake Pla...
This is a review of the Fender California Series Sonoran SCE acoustic-electric guitar. This model was introduced January 2008 by Fender. It's a full sized single cutaway guitar with a Stratocaster style neck. There are no bolts used to secure the neck, it uses a traditional acoustic guitar glue joint. There is an active on board preamp that can be used to amplify the guitars signal. The guitar has a nice variety of body colors to choose from.
This Sonoran model has a solid spruce top with a laminate mahogany body. My guitar is painted in lake placid blue, a famous Fender color. The paint used is polyurethane. This Fender acoustic uses X bracing for the guitars top and the bracing is scalloped which is supposed to increase bass and volume responce of the guitar. Scalloped bracing originated on Martin guitars but the effect of scalloped braces for the top probably does little if anything for this guitar due to the cheapness of the woods used to construct it.
The neck has a soft C shape, very comfortable to play, and there are white dot inlays on the rosewood fingerboard. Twenty frets are installed on the neck. Access to the upper frets is great due to the body cutout. The bridge is made of rosewood with plastic bridge pins used. The compensated saddle looks to be made of some synthetic bone material, There is an optional plastic saddle included with the guitar. The guitar is about 43 inches from top to bottom.
Strap buttons are installed on the guitar. The strap button on the bottom is where you plug in your instrument cable. The pick guard is 3 ply and has a lovely mint tint to it. The body binding is beautiful and flawlessly done. No problems with the paint it looks beautiful. It's a nice touch to have the headstock painted along with the body.
I purchased this guitar late last year. I loved the color and styling, visually this is a very stunning guitar. I did not get a chance to play it before the purchase and I could not find any decent reviews to read on it either.
The first thing I noticed when taking it out of the box was the jaw dropping quality level, then I took a few strums and was startled by the lack of bass on the low E string. I have seven acoustic guitars that all have solid tops. I usually view a solid top acoustic instrument as more of a collectible item than a laminate top instrument. They are kept in a small closet with a big tub of water to humidify them. It gets very dry out here in the desert where I live.
This is a Chinese built guitar. I have a couple other Chinese built acoustics that are dreadnought design. They have a more woody, complex tone than the Fender. I'm not impressed with this Fender guitars tone at all. It has a generic, vanilla tone while being played unamplified. Out of the box the strings were set very low, like the setup on an electric guitar. This created to much fret buzz. There are 2 shims included with the guitar that I inserted under the compensated saddle to get rid of the fret buzz problem and improve the guitars sound quality.
As I mentioned this Fender acoustic has poor bass responce. Tuning down the 5th A string to the same pitch as the low E string causes the same volume drop. Very strange considering the guitar has a solid top with scalloped braces.
The preamp used on the guitar is a Fender FTE-3. This is a very cheap, inferior preamp. The preamp itself has bass, middle and treble sliders to modify your tone while you play with an amplifer. There is a battery low light and the guitar itself uses a 9 volt battery. The preamp has excessive feedback problems especially when trying to get a bass increase from the preamp. I just keep the bass boost slider in the middle position and use the bass knob on my guitar amplifier instead of the one on the guitar. Along with the feedback the preamp bass slider creates a lot of muddiness to your tone.
I enjoy this guitars tone more when it's plugged into my amplifer. On the guitars preamp I just back off the treble and middle slider positions a bit to get a lovely rhythm tone going. You can get a lead tone going if you bring the treble slider back up to give the sound a boost although you will probably sound like Esteban on the Home Shopping Network playing one of his El Cheapo acoustic-electric guitars.
A beginner may be happy with this guitar. It's an acceptable entry level instrument although a bit to large in size for a child to use. It's very easy to play standing up or sitting down and it has a lifetime warranty for the original purchaser.
If you are looking for a more serious guitar I would suggest skipping over this Sonoran model and pay the extra 70 dollars for the Fender Malibu SCE or the Fender Kingman SCE. Both have Stratocaster style necks and have the upgraded Fishman electronics. The only drawback is that there is not the same color options for these guitars as on the Sonoran model.
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