June 3, 2011
Great to see that the Andy Wood signature Suhr has been added to the Suhr website with some gorgeous pictures and spec sheet.
Here’s what the guys at Suhr had to say about the guitar:
The goal of the Andy Wood Modern was to offer an incredible looking and sounding instrument utilizing the very best woods while offering simplicity and surprising versatility in one stunning package. We believe we have achieved this goal as this guitar pretty much sums up who Andy is as a player and musician. The sound is full, warm, and smooth while still having plenty of cut, bite, and punch.
Andy picked Mahogany for its mid-midrange emphasis on the body back and the neck while choosing “5A” Quilted Maple top for its aesthetic beauty and tonal brilliance. Mahogany neck and Pau Ferro fingerboard add definition and tightness so the notes literally shoot off the guitar during Andy’s patented high-speed runs. Like all discerning great players, Andy cares as much about the tactile response of an instrument as how it sounds and this wood combination turned out to be the perfect fit for Andy’s demanding style.
The neck shape is the slim Modern Elliptical .780-.830 which plays fast but has enough girth for Andy to really hang on to during big string bends. Really thin neck profiles tend to tire out your fretting hand after an extended playing session, but the profile on this neck is full enough for your hand to feel comfortable even after hours of playing. The flat 16″ radius facilitates speedy legato and tapping licks while the Jumbo Stainless Steel frets feel glassy smooth during string bends while providing years of reliability.
The pickup configuration and the electronics look deceptively simple: two humbuckers, one volume pot, one tone pot and pickup selector. But this simplicity has a few hidden features which helps Andy wring out more than that meets the eye. First, the Mega 5-way gives Andy the split neck HB single-coil tone and the combination of two inside coils of both HB’s for that in-between “out-of-phase” single-coil sound. Combine these sounds with the normal HB tones of the neck HB alone, both HB’s in series, and the bridge HB for over-the-top leads and you have one very versatile axe that can cover virtually any musical style.
But there is one more feature that can turn this modern rock-shred machine into a convincing county twang guitar. Affectionately called the “Redneck Mod” by Andy, the push-pull tone pot converts the bridge HB in series to parallel wiring. The sound is noticeably thinner than that all-out HB but it is still hum-canceling. What you get is a fat T-style single-coil sound that’s bright but never grating on the ears. This is where Andy can go into his full-blown country and bluegrass mode, adding a sound not typically found on guitars of this style.
The pickups are the Suhr DSH+ humbucker in the bridge position and the DSV humbucker in the neck position. Andy chose the double-screw pickups for their smoothness in the initial pick attack. Andy has such an amazingly precise and razor-sharp pick attack that he felt the double-screw pickups would smoothen out the attack and he was correct. The “DS” pickups have smoother high-mids with less lows and highs than their “SS” counterparts and they were exactly what Andy needed to complement his technique and style.
The hardware consists of the Gotoh 510TS-FE1 solid-saddle fulcrum tremolo bridge that is blocked in the trem cavity so that it only goes down. It is not floating so Andy would still be able to keep playing if he was to break a string. But there is another reason that the bridge is blocked and this feature is hidden behind the headstock. It’s called the D-Thing from Sperzel and it allows Andy to instantly switch to Drop-D tuning, adding yet even more versatility.
The stunning ‘Dark Inferno Burst’ is a finish that Andy requested on his own. He looked at our own ‘Fireburst’ finish and asked us if we can make it even more intense with a darker sunburst edges. The result is indeed as the name suggests – a finish that looks too hot to handle. This is a burning axe in more ways than one! The matching color figured Maple headstock with Mother of Pearl logo rounds out the look with a touch of class.
Such a classy guitar and personally exciting for me as the spec is similar to what I’m getting in my own custom organised through the lovely people at Peach Guitars! 
Models have been available to order in the shops for a few months now and seem to retailing around the £2899.00 mark.
