Dean Cadillac Select Guitar Review

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Review by Mick Taylor Total Guitar
Issue August 2000

DEAN CADILLAC SELECT

Bold, brash and brassy, this shapely six?string from US rockers Dean falls to MICK TAYLOR for a thorough examination. Nurse, the screens!

Cadilac Select

REMEMBER Cobain's JagStang? The guitar which was half Fender Jaguar/half Mustang. Well, it seems somebody down the line has taken a similar approach with Dean's Cadillac. Bodywise, we have the front end of a Gibson Explorer (albeit slightly smaller) and the back end of a Les Paul, melded seemlessly to produce one of the oddest looking axes you'll ever encounter. There are four Cadillacs, kicked off by the series at £249, and finishing with the sumptuous Premium for a quid short of a grand. This is the second guitar in the hierarchy, the Cadillac Select, boasting a flame top, twin, coil-tapped zebra humbuckers and gold hardware - all for a very reasonable sounding £379.

FEATURES

So what's the catch? Well for a start, the Select is built in Korea where guitar factories enjoy much lower productions costs. While that was once a guarantee of dodgy quality control, it really isn't an issue these days. Secondly, what looks like a flame maple top over the mahogany holy is in fact a veneer; obviously much cheaper to source and machine compared to high?grade figured maple. Like the body, the set neck is also mahogany and both are bound tidily.

Pearloid block position markers and gold hardware complete the visual niceties which after you get used to the body shape and the outlandish headstock ? make for a very attractive guitar indeed.
The pickups are genetic Korean units, vet stand out from that crowd with their expensive?looking zebra covers. You also get coil taps for each, via push/pull pots on the tone controls for extra tonal versatility.

PERFORMANCE

Strung with .009?046 gauge strings, the Cadillac Select is dead easy to play. A little too easy, in fact, for my maulers so a set of 10s added that extra fight that encourages you to dig in more. The C?section neck profile is neither every chunky nor thin, although the nut, at a shade aver 41mm with string spacing of 34mm, means fool a little tighter than they would, say, on a Stratocaster. No complaints about the action, though; straight out of the box, this Caddy was low enough for speedy stuff, vet choke?free all the way up the neck. A fairly flat fingerboard radius and chunky frets means you can go bendsilly all day, although the nut could be cut a shade deeper on the D and G strings to avoid some slightly wayward tuning at the first fret.
Fire her up and any doubts you have about Korean humbuckers are blown away. The neck unit is fat and warm, yet retains surprising clarity as you pile on the gain. Same goes for the bridge unit, although it doesn't have the out?and?out punch of its partner. Nevertheless, it's well balanced, full and meaty. Pull up the coil taps, and you have a much wider selection of tones that become extremely useful for thinning things out if you're not a fan of using your volume pots, and its also ideal for clean `n' funky rhythm sounds.

The overall character is a less chunky than the mid/low punch of a Les Paul (due in part to the lower body mass), yet retains much of that guitar's personality; plenty of balls and grunt which is just perfect for heavy blues and rock.

CONCLUSION

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You can just imagine this guitar in the hands of rockers and blues fiends who tend toward the extrovert in their playing; Dimebag Darryl (he used to play one, y'know), Zakk Wylde, Paul Stanley all spring to mind as examples. Whether Dean will convince less distinguished members of the guitar community to pick one up, in what are undoubtedly minimalist times, remains to be seen. market conditions should. take anything away fro the sheer feel?good factor this guitar exudes.
For anyone who was around in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the lasting memories of Dean guitars are probably the scantily clad girls in their ads. In another 20 years, we might just remember some cracking guitars, too.