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Crafter SA BUB Semi-Acoustic Guitar

 

Review of the Crafter SA BUB by The Man in the Jar 

Sometimes it's a simple pleasure to get a guitar out of its box and just look at it.

Features of the Crafter SA BUB  

Tuners - Unbranded sealed tuners with large kidney knobs. The guitar came out of the shipping carton almost perfectly in tune. No complaints there.

Headstock - The face of the headstock bears a thin veneer of marvellous bubinga wood (more about which later). The Crafter name and a decorative inlay are in abalone. The rather subdued shape of this three-a-side headstock is in perfect harmony with the classy nature of this guitar. The literature states that the guitar has a "dual action" truss rod, but I can find nothing about what this actually means in practical terms. 

Nut - White plastic nut abuts the fretboard and is tidily finished.

Neck -  The mahogany neck has a beautiful mocha colouring and the grain adds dark contrasting flecks. It's a comfortably slim neck with a parallel profile. The heel starts to fatten the profile at the 11th fret. Bar chords are not possible after the 13th fret and access to the highest frets is a bit tricky.

Fretboard - Chocolate rosewood fretboard has a good, even, tight grain. Abalone dot markers are used except at the 12th fret where the traditional double-dot is replaced by a decorative inlay.

Frets - Very thin, square-ish profile frets give the guitar a "jazzer" feel. They are highly polished and great for bends and vibrato.

Action - A good medium action straight from the box. The acoustic-style bridge saddle makes it a chore to lower the action, but it's not impossible.

Body - The back and sides of this guitar seem to have been routed from a solid piece of mahogany of about two inches in thickness. Onto this is fixed a delicately arched top carved from bubinga. Now bubinga is an impossibly attractive swirly-grained wood that bears a passing resemblance to walnut. The photograph does not do it justice, in the flesh it is jaw-droppingly beautiful.
The delicate arch to the top adds a little sexual frission and the unique design of the f-holes perfectly enhances the antique instrument vibe of the swirly bubinga. The f-holes are superbly finished with white binding that matches the binding on the edge of the top.
The cutaway is quite shallow. Visually this is sweepingly graceful, practically it somewhat restricts access to the higher frets.

Bridge - Essentially an acoustic style bridge with slot retainers for the ball-ends of the strings. The saddle is staggered to improve intonation.

Pickup - The only visible pickup is a Kent Armstrong lipstick in the neck position. This gives the guitar a real vintage "jazz-box" look. An LR Baggs element pickup resides under the bridge. 

Controls - The control panel sits in the top edge with an integral battery compartment. Across the top of the panel is a battery indicator (lighting when the battery is low), a phase button, a mute button and a small rotary volume control. Below these are sliders for Bass, Middle, Treble and Blend. The last of these mixes the output from the two pickups. 

Strap-buttons - Large strap buttons reside in the usual places.

Output Jack - On the lower edge set in a square plate.

Finish - Excellent throughout.

 

Sound of the Crafter SA

I was pleased to come across the Kent Armstrong lipstick pickup as I'm considering one of these for the neck position of my Fat Strat. On its own the lipstick has a lot of vintage twang and high-end chime even though it sits at the neck position. I was able to mellow this out nicely with a touch of bass boost and a bit of middle cut. With this careful tweaking the lipstick responded with deeper, woodier tones that better expressed the tone-woods used in the construction. Flipping over to the element pickup, the Crafter produced a modern electro-acoustic sound not dissimilar to a decent Ovation.
The extra joy comes from overlaying these two sounds with the Blend slider. My favourite tones came with about 2/3 Baggs and 1/3 lipstick. The output from the lipstick was noticeably higher than the element pickup on the model I tried. The lipstick can be lowered using two adjustment screws on the back of the body to balance out the outputs. 

 

Overall Impressions of the Crafter SA 

A very beautiful instrument that supplies two distinctive voices that can sing alone or together. Although it is labelled as an electro-acoustic, it actually has very little volume when played acoustically, so in reality it should be considered as a semi-acoustic.
Taking into account the crisp voicings of the LR Baggs pickup, the pure mojo of the lipstick and the devastating good looks of the bubinga, you should be binning your bowl-back and placing your order right now.

Buy the Crafter SA Semi Acoustic

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