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Bohemian Guitars BOHO Series Motor Oil
Summary: Inexpensive but incredibly playable and most importantly, very nice sounding, the BOHO Motor Oil really took me by surprise. Yeah, it seems a bit gimmicky, but these guitars are inspired by the founder’s South African roots where people put instruments together from whatever they could find. Pros: Super-easy and comfortable to play. Pickups are voiced such that there’s a clear distinction between the positions. Very response to volume knob variation. Cons: These are nits at most: The tuners need to be tightened a bit, as the strings can go out of tune fairly easy. Tone knob almost acts like a volume knob, but it’s serviceable. Price: $299.00 Direct Features:
Tone Bone Rating: 4.75 ~ The best word to describe this guitar is FUN. It plays as fun as it looks! |
I’ll admit it right out of the gate: I really tried NOT to like this guitar. The moment I took it out of the box, my first reaction was literally, “Oh shit! HAHAHAHAHA!” and I chuckled about it for several minutes. In fact, I let the guitar stand in my living room for a few days before I even decided to play it because I didn’t think this was a very “serious” guitar. I imagined myself in a clown suit playing it. But since I asked for the review unit, my sense of obligation overcame my initial amused disdain for it. So I took it to my man-cave, plugged it into my amp, tuned up the guitar, then started to play. And play. And play.
A couple of hours passed by with me just tooling with the guitar, and I finally had to stop when my wife opened the kitchen door glaring at me because I hadn’t gotten to my honey-do projects for the day.
Did I really lose track of time? I asked myself, That ONLY happens when I’m getting lost in the sound and what I’m playing is pleasing to me. When something gets me in the “zone,” it’s special, and all my initial thoughts and bias about its appearance completely disappeared.
When I put the BOHO down, I resolved to do a sound test with it as soon as I could. I had a gig that night, so I couldn’t get to it until the next day, but I looked forward to playing that guitar throughout my gig.
Even still, this guitar reeks of “gimmick” when you look at it. But how it plays and sounds completely overshadows any gimmickry that its appearance may imply. It totally took me by surprise, and I have to say that hands-down I love it! And the fact that it’s made in China is actually a good thing. Chinese guitar construction has come a long, long way over the years, and labor is still cheap, which means these guitars are affordable, so you shouldn’t let price-bias get in your way.
Fit and Finish
I could see nothing wrong with the guitar’s appearance. Other people have reported dents in the past, but my review unit had none. Note that those reports were from earlier models, and I don’t think they had the bracing that the new models have that make them tougher. The only nit I really had was that bending the first string at around the 12th or 13th fret while really digging in would fret out the string. But I attributed that more to a setup problem, and it’s quite possible that the bridge settled a bit during shipping. Raising the bridge a millimeter or two would solve that issue. It certainly wasn’t a neck angle issue. Everything appeared to line up just fine.
As far as overall construction is concerned, amazingly enough, the guitar’s pretty solid-feeling. I was thinking that it might be a bit flimsy; after all, its body is a freakin’ gas can! But the internal bracing provides plenty of structural integrity, so fragility isn’t an issue at all.
But other than my little nit, the guitar actually looks pretty cool, and over time, as I played it, it grew on me. That had more to do with how it plays and sounds than its appearance.
Playability
Amazingly enough, moving around the neck is smooth as silk. I love that it has a rosewood fret board because it provides a tactile feel that makes it feel familiar (most of my many guitars have rosewood fret boards). I personally prefer fatter fret wire, but that’s just personal preference, and doesn’t take away from how well the guitar feels and plays. And surprisingly enough, even with my belly, the guitar’s very comfortable to play despite the obviously fatter body from the can.
How It Sounds
Okay, so this is where the rubber hits the road, and where, most importantly, the guitar impacted me the most. Once I got past the guitar’s appearance, it was its voice that really struck me. While the folks at Bohemian Guitars tout this as the “rock” model, and it certainly has a great voicing for rock, I actually loved its voicing clean or just slightly dirty. For comparison, the voicing has elements of a later model Les Paul with sort of deep voice, but also has the “woody” elements of a semi-hollow body like a 335. It’s a cool voice. I would’ve liked to have a better EQ response with the tone knob because changes in the tone knob affected volume, but I found a good spot that worked for all three pickups and kept it there.
The first three clips you’ll hear are the same phrase played through each of the pickup positions, starting with neck pickup and moving to the bridge. With the first two, I just made up stuff off the top of my head, but with the third clip, I used the main riff from Oasis’ Wonderwall. No matter what I’m playing, the one thing I always look for is note separation, especially when played dirty. I didn’t play any lead lines because frankly, 97% of the time I’m playing rhythm. So it’s important to get a sense of how well the guitar articulates. The amp I used for this was my trusty Aracom VRX18 with EL84’s, played in the drive channel. The amp was set to the very edge of breakup so I could get it to overdrive with volume knob changes and attack.
All clips were recorded raw with the exception of the last clip where I added some hall reverb.
Clean, all three pickups
Dirty, all three pickups
Edge of breakup, all three pickups
Jazzy Blues w/reverb, middle pickup
Admittedly, the clean and edgy tones were the ones that got me to lose myself for those couple of hours when I first played the guitar. And to be completely honest, I love the sound this guitar produces clean and at the edge of breakup best. This probably has to do with my Les Paul bias with respect to a “rock” sound. It’s not that I don’t like the overdriven sound of the guitar, it’s just that I have a preference for the sound I want to produce when playing with overdrive.
Overall Impression
Once I got over my initial doubts about the guitar, I discovered a very nice-playing and nice-sounding guitar under the covers. And at $299, this an incredibly approachable guitar that won’t break the bank in the process. Would I gig with it? To be honest, I’m not sure. But I have no doubts with its solid construction that it would be able to stand the rigors of gigs. But for its gorgeous clean tones, I’d certainly use it in the studio, especially for the new reggae-style tunes I’m working on.
And truth be told, its appearance has actually grown on me. I still don’t know if I’d gig with it regularly, but that has nothing to do with how it looks. With a gigging guitar, I typically look for versatility. I’d have to bring it to band rehearsal to see how it would perform. But other than that, I love this guitar. For what it is, it’s the ultimate in “cool.”
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