(I made a couple of corrections and added some details on Aug 25, 2002.)

I was looking for a travel guitar and eventually settled on the Ovation CC012. Despite the category that this guitar is listed in on Epinions, the CC012 does not have an electric pickup. It is strictly an acoustic guitar.

FEATURES

The Ovation CC012 is built like a mini Ovation guitar. It has the black round back made from composite materials, a solid spruce top, a rosewood bridge and a mahogony neck topped with a rosewood fretboard. The 22.5-inch scale neck has the standard Ovation headstock shape, so the guitar looks like the baby brother of an Ovation Celebrity.

The top has a glossy finish and the sound hole is trimmed with a black plastic ring. The overall construction quality is pretty good... I think that the Ovation CC012 is made in Korea.

The Ovation CC012 has a cutaway that lets you finger chords easily up to the 15th fret.

There is a button for a strap on the bottom of the guitar and another on the body near the heel of the neck. I found that hooking a strap to the button on the heel of the neck caused the guitar to rotate up as I played; therefore, I attached another strap button at a different location on the neck heel.

The body is trimmed in an ivory plastic binding and the binding runs up the neck to the nut. The chromed tuners are enclosed and say "Ovation" on them.

I really wanted a hard case for the CC012 but only a soft-sided gig bag was available. The bag is pretty good at protecting the guitar and it is lightweight, but I wouldn't want it to be on the bottom of a pile of luggage. The case does have straps that let you carry the guitar like a backpack, which I have used a lot more often than I thought I would.

PLAYING

Although I have never been a fan of the Ovation sound, the CC012 sounds pretty good for a small, travel guitar. It sounds much better than a Baby Taylor and it blows the Martin Backpacker out of the room. In its own way, it sounds about as good as the Taylor Big Baby or the Larrivee Parlor Guitar.

I like to stand when I play guitar and the round back on this little guitar makes it rotate so that the strings start to face the ceiling. As I mentioned, I installed another strap button on the heel of the neck to combat this tendency. I also taped some of that soft, rubbery, non-slip stuff to the back of the guitar to stop this rotation. The combination of the two works for the most part. Ovation needs to re-think its back design on its guitars... molding in a small hump on the composite back would help prevent this rotation.

The neck has good action and my fat fingers have no trouble fingering chords on the 22.5-inch scale neck. There is decent bass and good treble from this little guitar.

Fingerpicking and strumming sound good and the guitar makes enough sound to fill a living room.

Other than the mechanical problem of the guitar rotating as I play it, my CC012 is hard to tune. Without using a tuner, I usually have to resort to a couple of tuning techniques to make it sound good. (It sounds fine if you tune it up with a tuner.) Obviously, the intonation was not precisely set up on my guitar.

I should have found this in the store before buying it... what can I say? Thinking about it, I should have returned it. But I didn't and now I have a guitar that is hard to tune.

Although the intonation is clearly off, once I get the tuning right I can play chords up and down the neck and they sound fine. It's a little weird.

The upside is that the CC012 is a good traveling companion. It is small and easy to carry in its gig bag, and makes good sound in a hotel room or a friend's living room.

WRAP-UP

If I was going to do it all over again, I would still buy the Ovation CC012... but I would get one with better intonation. It is inexpensive, has good sound and travels well.

This is not a guitar that I play often but it is a small guitar that sounds close to a full-size guitar. For the money, it's nice to throw it in the back of the car and not worry about it.

Recommended: Yes