I’m on location at Guitarworks in Greenwood, IN reviewing the G&L S-500 40th anniversary guitar.
G&L was founded by George Fullerton and Leo Fender in 1980 in Fullerton, CA. Leo’s ideas on this guitar show his engineering maturity with the design of the pickups and vibrato.
The S-500 is a Stratocaster style guitar made out of Okoume wood for the body, maple for the neck, and Caribbean Rosewood for the fingerboard.
The Okoume wood is similar to Mahogany, but is not as scarce. It feels a little bit lighter than Mahogany, so it would be easy to play all night long.
It has a dual fulcrum bridge for vibrato that allows a lot of sound to transfer directly to the wood.
It uses the Magnetic Field Design (MFD) pickups, that have a different way of expressing the mid-range. It’s a versatile pickup that is a little bit beefier, and just as twangy as most other single coil pickups.
They do everything on a clean channel that other single coils can do, but where they really shine is when you want to rock. The upper mid-range push sounds absolutely great.
The output of the pickups aren’t too hot (high output). When there’s too much output, it’s like going from loud talking to screaming. These pickups allow you to go from a whisper to screaming.
If you play in a variety band, you could play all night long with just this guitar. It has the twang and other classic Telecaster sounds, along with solid distortion sounds.
This is a truly expressive instrument.
