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Ovation CSE44 Electro-Acoustic Guitar

 

Review of the Ovation CSE44 by The Man in the Jar

Features of the Ovation CSE44

Tuners - Sealed mini-tuners bearing the Ovation logo. They are finished in gold with medium large knobs and work well and smoothly.

Headstock - One of the most distinctive designs in guitar history. The scalloped top lends it a classical loveliness. The narrowness of the head causes the offset tuning capstans to converge in a disarmingly attractive fashion. The effect is not so attractive on the back of the headstock but that hardly matters until you're running away from the audience!

Nut - The tidy white plastic nut abuts the fretboard.

Neck - The mahogany neck is smooth and slim with a slight hint of a V in the profile. This quickly feels very natural in the cup of your hand. The heel is nicely rounded and is not as intrusive as it looks it might be when playing the upper frets. 

Fretboard - The medium dark rosewood fretboard is of a good quality, smooth and close-grained wood. The board is bound in white and the fretmarkers are arrowhead shapes in rainbow abalone.

Frets - The medium frets are highly polished and well finished. The fretboard is one short of the octave under the top three strings.

Action - The factory set-up is a tad higher than I prefer personally but is perfectly playable for most things. You might like to take it down a touch if you plan on spanking the upper register.

Body - The iconic Ovation bowl-back is always a wee bit exciting to pick up and play. The juxtaposition of modern plastics with an ancient lyre-like design is what sets Ovation electro-acoustics apart from their all-wooden cousins. But there is certainly quality wood in evidence here with a solid spruce top with what looks like a quilted maple veneer. Under the black-cherry-burst this looks bum-squeezingly gorgeous. The whole is topped off with a pinstripe edge binding. The soundhole is in fact a number of soundholes situated in the upper bout. These add up to the same surface area as a standard soundhole and therefore produce the same sonic result. Around these holes is a decorative scratchplate made from different stained woods. Technically this is a scratchplate but as it is nowhere near the playing area you should expect your new guitar to pick up fine playing scratches very quickly. 

Bridge - The rosewood bridge has holes and slots to hold and guide the strings which dispenses with the need for bridge pins. The saddle itself is more complex than the usual compensated blade. This unit is compensated at the 6th and the 1st and looks like it's held in its retaining slot by string tension. This would make experiments with the action easier to carry out.

Pickups - The OCP1K pickup sits under the bridge.

Controls - The controls sit in a removable pod in the top edge at the waist. Remove the pod to access the battery compartment at its base. When replacing the pod take care to insert the fattest end first and click home the thinnest end. The OP30 preamp has 3 eq controls; Bass, Mid and Treble plus a Volume control all attenuated with sliders. There are three buttons associated with the eq. Firstly there's an eq in/out button to bypass the sliders. Then a Pre-shape button that lifts bass and treble and rolls off sub 40Hz rumble. Finally a Mid-shift button which changes the range of the Mid slider. Included in the control panel is a funky little chromatic tuner that is really easy to use. Be aware that the tuner turns off automatically after one minute.

Strap-buttons - Buttons are situated in the sides of the bowlback in roughly the same positions as you'd expect on a standard solid-body guitar.

Output Jack - On the lower edge of the bowlback.

Finish - Excellent throughout. Korean-made guitars are fairly reliable in this department these days.

 

Sound of the Ovation CSE44 

The CSE44 lacks the woody timbre of a full acoustic but the sound is well balanced across the strings and certainly has sufficient volume to hold its own with other acoustic instruments. Playing through a good acoustic amp the CSE44 delivered the clean and crispy Ovation sound in spades. The eq's are wide-ranging but not so critical as to make fine adjustments difficult. On the contrary, I found it very easy to shape the basic sound and nail exactly what I wanted to hear. The Mid-shift "doubles" the usefulness of the Mid slider and vastly increases the flexibility for "tuning" your sound to the venue. The Pre-shape function adds a cool scoopiness to the tone.   

 

Overall Impressions of the Ovation CSE44 

Ovation guitars represent the original solution in amplified acoustics and once you're in the market for an Ovation it simply becomes a matter of looks and budget. This is a very beautiful example of the Ovation genre that delivers the flexibility and reliable amplified sound for which the company is rightly famed. 

Buy the Ovation CSE44 Electro-Acoustic Guitar

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