"Man - it sounds like a REAL classical guitar!" - Justin Heath
Superbly comfortable instrument to play with the slightly tighter string spacing and a greater range provided by the "hybrid" neck style exclusive to this style of Alvarez guitar.
The Artist Series is Alvarez' mid-range offering, with professional-level features like hand-selected solid-wood tops, proprietary FST2M bracing and a bi-level bridge, real bone nut and great quality tone woods - at a budget-conscious price.
From Alvarez :
Artist Series classical guitars are beautifully made using a traditional Spanish heel construction. Their thoughtful bracing helps deliver sustain, balance and volume. This Hybrid version AC65HCE is a classical guitar with a narrower nut (48mm) and therefore thinner neck. The fingerboard is also arched with a radius similar to that of steel string guitars. So really, it's a nylon string guitar that sounds like a classical but plays like steel string. It's also fitted with the wonderful SYS550 EQ and pickup.
The Alvarez Artist Series AC65HCE Classical Hybrid Acoustic-Electric Guitar is a member of the Alvarez Artist '60 Series with a solid A+ Western Red Cedar top and mahogany back and sides. Alvarez was careful to get the construction just right to allow this series to sing, and deliver a player experience that's exceptional for a mid price instrument.
The term "solid top" of course refers to the soundboard of an acoustic guitar being made of solid wood, rather than being laminated. However, just because the top is solid, it doesn't necessarily mean the sound automatically benefits from this feature. The tone of the instrument only improves significantly when the whole guitar is built correctly to really release the energy a solid soundboard can generate. The Artist Series is built to do exactly this.
Each model is designed to get the best out if its components, and for them to work together to produce a tone and player experience, rarely found in affordable instruments.
The sound is warm, open and powerful, and both the treble and bass registers are clearly present and balanced in relation to each other. These guitars feel right and are exciting to play and responsive.
The solid 'A' grade cedar tops are hand selected from quarter-sawn wood. This ensures consistent quality, and its no secret better guitars are made from better wood. These tops not only look great but they are stiff and strong and finely grained. This allows them to be cut just that tiny bit thinner, which lets them dance a little more and produce a lot more vibration, and ultimately a richer tone.
All of the components are made of natural materials such as mother of pearl and abalone inlays, real bone saddles and nuts and rosewood appointments.
The SYS550 designed by B-BAND is a pro-level EQ and pickup that reproduces the sound of the guitar very closely with great clarity. B-BAND use a patented under saddle electret film pick up which eliminates synthetic or processed sounds often heard with piezo or other styles of pickup. The result is a very true, acoustic sound. SYS550 also has an accurate, backlit chromatic digital tuner.
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