My Review of the Schecter Hellcat VI--- Plus Video!
Hello people,
Recently I was at a guitar store and I came across the Schecter Hellcat VI on sale. The guitar is what some people refer to as a baritone guitar. The bottom four strings are tuned like a bass, but the guitar has an extra b and e string. The tuning is exactly like a normal 6 string guitar, except an octave down.
This guitar is different from a 6 string bass because it uses a shorter scale and uses lighter strings. The guitar has 3 single coil Duncan designed pickups and each pickup has its own on/off switch. I use these to control how much of a bass or treble sound I want.
The dilema I encountered when using this guitar was should I use a guitar amp, or bass amp? I thought it sounded great through my Behringer bass rig, which uses an 8x10 bass cab. This setup was good for really percussive slap-style playing. The bass sounded crappy through my vintage Fender Super 6 amp, it was just too thin sounding, and I didn't feel comfortable running low bass notes through an amp of that vintage.
I ended up using it though an inexpensive fender solid-state guitar head, called the FM100, which ran to a 4x12 SLM electronics cab. Of course, I like using this baritone with a ton of distortion through this setup. Also, the bass does sound great for jazzy barre chords when you play it clean. In this video, I'm doing what almost every bass player learns to do, pentatonic groove riffs.
Recently I was at a guitar store and I came across the Schecter Hellcat VI on sale. The guitar is what some people refer to as a baritone guitar. The bottom four strings are tuned like a bass, but the guitar has an extra b and e string. The tuning is exactly like a normal 6 string guitar, except an octave down.
This guitar is different from a 6 string bass because it uses a shorter scale and uses lighter strings. The guitar has 3 single coil Duncan designed pickups and each pickup has its own on/off switch. I use these to control how much of a bass or treble sound I want.
The dilema I encountered when using this guitar was should I use a guitar amp, or bass amp? I thought it sounded great through my Behringer bass rig, which uses an 8x10 bass cab. This setup was good for really percussive slap-style playing. The bass sounded crappy through my vintage Fender Super 6 amp, it was just too thin sounding, and I didn't feel comfortable running low bass notes through an amp of that vintage.
I ended up using it though an inexpensive fender solid-state guitar head, called the FM100, which ran to a 4x12 SLM electronics cab. Of course, I like using this baritone with a ton of distortion through this setup. Also, the bass does sound great for jazzy barre chords when you play it clean. In this video, I'm doing what almost every bass player learns to do, pentatonic groove riffs.
Could this instrument work as a bass guitar substitute? Maybe, but I wouldn't. It is just missing the full bottom end of a conventional bass. Also, my Schecter Hellcat guitar is somewhat susceptible to fret buzzing on certain notes on the bottom E string, it is a side effect of having the action low for extreme playability. A simple adjustment at the bridge would fix this, but you could see how a bass designed for this type of playability may lack some of the bottom end of a conventional bass.
Now here's the real question, is this guitar a good value? It definitely was for me. I notice many reviewers of guitars online don't disclose how much they paid for something, and I can see why. This guitar started at $749 when it first came out. Then, I watched the price slowly fall over the year to the ridiculously low price of $209 brand new. My reasoning is that there are just too few people out there who are "sonically adventurous". It takes a weirdo like me to want to play this bass.
I feel bad for the people who paid full price. I got extremely lucky. This guitar had been on clearance for a while. This guitar was brand new. It does have a small nick in the back of the neck, but that was it. I had to buy it at $209.
---Matt
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