[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING WITH THE EPIPHONE CASINO]

OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley and we're taking a look at the Epiphone Casino. This is one of the newer Casinos made. It's a 2007 model. It's got the new Epiphone Wax-Dipped P90's. These are the sort of the vacuum-sealed, wax-dipped pickups that pickups that epiphone is doing now. I think they actually started that at the beginning of this year. This is probably a 2008 model, and the Casino is sort of the Epiphone made famous by The Beatles, countless other British invasion bands, and sort of second-wave of British -- Brit-Pop bands from the '90s. It's a fully hollow guitar so it has a really sort of intense acoustic property. You'll notice I've got my hat right in the tailpiece here. That's because when it's not in, you get a lot of ringing from these strings.

[OWEN O'MALLEY DEMONSTRATING STRINGS RINGING ON THE EPIPHONE CASINO]

Hear that? Yeah. I mean that's the sort of acoustic energy of the guitar being transmitted through these P90's, so really the only way to combat that is to stick something in there. I often use a sock. You can also thread a piece felt between the strings if you don't want it to look like your guitar has been assaulted by someone's college dorm. Hat works fine.

[OWEN O'MALLEY STRUMS THE STRINGS THE EPIPHONE CASINO]

As you can hear, I've got my AC15 Top Boost with the gain cranked right now. That was both pickups on that little opening riff. Let's just listen to the rear pickup here, the bridge pickup.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING THE EPIPHONE CASINO, BRIDGE PICKUP]

Now you hear how that the decay on those notes fades pretty quickly. There's not a huge amount of sustain on this guitar, and that's the difference between a semi-hollow that has a center tone block, and a guitar like this which is basically a completely hollow body cavity. It makes it really good for sort of, you know, distorted rhythmy stuff. It's not a singing lead guitar although The Beatles used it on the lead stuff on "Revolution", on "Get Back"; they use this guitar on like anything.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING THE EPIPHONE CASINO, BRIDGE PICKUP]

Anyway, I don't remember that riff right now. Let's dial down the gain and listen to what these pickups sound like. Actually before we do that, let's just take a listen to the front pickup here.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING THE EPIPHONE CASINO, BRIDGE PICKUP]

So it sounds really cool on distorted power chords. It's a real dirty like garage rocky kind of guitar. Real old school rock kind of tone to it. Now let's hear it a little cleaner.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING THE EPIPHONE CASINO, BRIDGE PICKUP]

So you can hear the sort of very acoustic properties of this guitar come out when it's clean, a very wide frequency spectrum, very, very bright highs, real deep lows.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING THE EPIPHONE CASINO, BRIDGE PICKUP]

It doesn't have that sort of like gut punchy, you know, focused lower mids of like a Les Paul, and it's not quite as sort of like spanky or twangy as a Telecaster. It's kind of in the middle there, and that's really the combination of these P90 pickups and the body cavity, the construction of the guitar. That's both pickups. Let's listen to the neck pickup here.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING THE EPIPHONE CASINO, NECK PICKUP]

The setup on this neck is not the best. It's pretty light gauge strings on here. It ships with 10's but it's not -- I mean it's not really intended to be a shredder's guitar. You know, it's a really unique guitar. It's got definitely its own sort of unique sounds. You won't always sound like The Beatles when you're playing it. Here's the bridge pickup.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING THE EPIPHONE CASINO, BRIDGE PICKUP]

It goes out of tune kind of easily too, not the most stable tuners. Again, it doesn't really send like any other guitar, and for about under $800, I think about $760 retail in most places, you can get a Casino with a matching Epiphone hard case. So, it's not a bad deal, well under a thousand dollars for a guitar that sounds like no other, and it's kind of a lot of fun to play. It also feeds back real easily so, you know, you're into Sonic Youth, this is the guitar. You've been watching Gearwire.Com, I'm Owen O'Malley, and this is the Epiphone Casino. See you later.