Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Carvin HF2 "Holdsworth Fatboy"

As I mentioned in my NAMM 2006 post, I ordered a custom guitar from Carvin. It's a model designed for the legendary fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth. They have two Holdsworth models, I opted for the hollow body HF2. Beyond the stock features, I added a flamed koa top, matching koa headstock overlay, abalone inlays, coil taps for the pickups, and tung oiled neck.

Carvin is pretty great to deal with - they are really setup for building custom instruments. Obviously, they should be since that is their business but many guitar makers are surprisingly bad at planning, scheduling, and communicating with their customers.

Carvin's latest innovation is quite nice. It's called GuitarTraq. For quite some time now, they have been installing security chips (SNAGG) in guitars to help locate an instrument if it is lost or stolen. They've taken advantage of that for another great use. You enter your invoice # on a web page and they tell you exactly where your instrument is in the building process.

Currently my guitar is at the neck construction station.

2 comments:

Mayday's lost world said...

Guitar looks like it will be killer.. whats the neck like on those?

We hit the Carvin booth last year and i was really impressed with the cali archtops.. awesome guitars ..

hippietim said...

The neck is a bit beefier as you might expect - like his Charvel's were. The neck width is about medium (leaning towards the wider side I suppose) - it is not super wide but not as narrow as a Fender.