But for just about a year and a half, that was just longing. I never thought I'd actually HAVE one.
Everything changed on my birthday last year, though. I received $85 worth of Guitar Center gift cards from my awesome friends (Thanks guys! You know who you are!). I figured it would be a nice jump start. I saved up my money for the next 6 months until I had around $425 including the gift cards, out of the $600 I needed.
That was when we got the April Guitar Center catalog. My brother was looking through it when he ran into my room and showed me that Guitar Center had the Casino in a new limited edition color: Goldtop (well, technically Metallic Gold, but it looks just like a goldie Les Paul to me). I fell in love then and there, and decided I couldn't wait any longer.
It was like the stars had aligned: our local GC, which never had Casinos, happened to have a Goldtop model in stock, and there was going to be a Cinco de Mayo sale in about a week ($75 off anything $499 or more!). The only problem is I was still about $100 short. I did my research and found out Guitar Center had a 12 month no-interest financing plan. I figured that if I used my $425 as a nice big down payment, I would have no problem finishing the payment in 12 months.
So, on one of the days of the Cinco de Mayo sale (I don't remember if it was actually the fifth), we zipped on down to Guitar Center, with me clutching my jar of hard-earned money. I had called ahead and asked them to hold it for me, which they very kindly did. I rushed into the store and asked right away about the guitar; they led be behind the counter where it was sitting there in all of its Metallic Gold Casino glory. I played it for a while and decided it was more than good enough for me: I loved it! I had been really worried that I would play it and hate it, but luckily it did not turn out that way. I bought it (after the manager tried to sell me a warranty and a hard shell case), and walked out to the car.
I decided that I couldn't waste any time that could be spent playing it, so I hopped in the back seat of the car, took off my shirt to protect my new baby from getting scratched on the seat belt buckle, and played along to the blues station all the way home.
That was a long story, now for the review.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the Casgino is how versatile it is: you can use it for practically everything but death metal. On the clean channel of my amp, I can get a nice Beatlesy tone that sounds great. But when I flip on the dirt, I can go from low grit, to roaring overdrive, to extreme bluesy distortion that sounds as much like Jack White as you can get without stealing his rig. If I set my gain to the right level, I can hold a note right on the edge of feedback, and it's up to my fingers whether I dive in or hold back. Man, P-90s are great pickups.
Okay, lets get specific:
If I have my amp (which almost always has the treble cranked up and the bass pretty low) on clean and the Casino on the bridge pup, I get that chimey sound you hear in your head when you think of the Beatles. When I dirty it up a little, it sounds nice and gritty, but the brightness shines through. When I crank the gain, it will feed back quite a bit if I don't have it under control, but the tone is bright and dirty and to die for. Flipping to the neck pup (back to the clean channel again), it gets more bassy, but doesn't lose any clarity. I usually don't use the neck pup on any of my guitars unless I'm learning a song that uses it, but I use it a little more on this one. It makes the tone sound more woody, and it works great to emulate the plugged-in J-160e tone that was used on "I Feel Fine". I use the neck pickup a lot more when I have distortion on, though. If I crank the gain knob to 6 or 7, the Casino gives me a roar that stands out even when I play single notes (think the intro to Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground by the White Stripes). It muddies up a lot when I play anything more than a power chord, though, so it's only useful for getting big fat notes low down on the fretboard.
I really love my Casino. I've had about a month and a half to mess around with it now, and I have decided that it's never going to leave my arsenal. Even if it didn't have any sentimental value as the first guitar I bought myself, it sounds so sweet that I am going to be keeping it until I die.
