For years, the Godin family of guitar
companies—Godin, Seagull, Simon
& Patrick, and Art & Lutherie—has built
unique and often great guitars at prices
that are competitive with just about any
manufacturer in the world. It’s a trick the
Canadian company pulls off with an inarguable
regularity. So when Godin created
the Richmond brand a few years back as
a vehicle for more traditional ’50s- and
’60s-inspired electrics, few were surprised
at how stylish, well built, and sweet
sounding guitars like the Dorchester and
Belmont were for the price.
Richmond’s latest, the Empire, is more
of the same goodness. It rocks with a no-frills,
budget-lux combination of appointments
and playability that’s the stuff of
pawnshop sleepers and minor classics like
the Gibson Melody Maker.
Built for Business—on a Budget
With its chocolaty mahogany finish and
compact heft, the Empire made it impossible
not to reminisce about the 1971 SG
that was one of the first electric guitars
I spent any real time with as a lad. But
though the beautiful grain, bass-bout
carve, and sense of solidity in the Empire
are very SG-ish, there’s a lot of cool design
inspiration from less likely sources. There’s
certainly a touch of PRS and some hints
of Gibson’s ill-fated Sonex in the body
profile, and the headstock is a bit of a nod
to the slimmer Rickenbacker headstocks
of the ’60s.
You can’t get much simpler than the
control layout on the Empire: Volume
and Tone knobs and a pickup switch in
the forward bass bout. But the simplicity
belies the range of sounds available
from the bridge humbucker and the
neck-position single-coil. The tailpiece is
a wraparound design that’s elegant and
well made, though its lack of adjustable
saddles does beg the question of how to
deal with intonation problems down the
line. The cool-looking Kluson-style tuners
are a great match for the headstock,
though they lack the advantage of slotted
posts that make Klusons the easiest string
change of all time.
The Empire is very well balanced for its
weight and feels really comfortable hanging
over your shoulder. Much of the overall
comfort is attributable to the 2-piece,
satin-finished, 22-fret neck, which has
a slim, fast-feeling, and slightly flattish
C profile that makes chording and deep
bends uniformly easy. A neck joint that
tapers toward the cutaway facilitates access
to the upper frets.
Straight Ahead
A vigorous strum of a first-position E
chord long before I ever plugged the
guitar in revealed a remarkable resonance
that’s doubly notable given the bolt-on
design. You can really feel the body sympathetically
vibrating, and the sustain of
unamplified chords is impressive.
The combination of the Empire’s solidity
and simplicity called for a straightforward
approach to amplification, so I hooked it
up to a blackface Fender Concert, a blackface
Tremolux, an Ampeg Super Jet, and a
50-watt Marshall plexi to probe the surprisingly
wide array of tones on tap.
It’s hard not to want to rock with the
Empire. It feels sturdy and thrashable in
your hands, and the bridge humbucker
possesses a snarly character when you open
up the Volume and Tone controls—not
totally uncivilized, but heavy on high-end
content that helps leads and power chords
cut through a mix. It’s a great match for
Marshalls if you like the dry bite of Paul
Kossoff ’s or Mick Ronson’s tones, but it’s
also a perfect fit for slashing, mod-garage-style
chords and punk riffs. Through the
less powerful Fenders, the humbucker is no
less effective for generating spiky punk textures
and hot blues-rock lead tones, though
it’s predictably a little more rubbery.
The Tone and Volume controls are
effective and responsive—which is nice
to see on a mid-priced instrument, given
how many companies cut corners on
electronic components in this price range.
Used in conjunction with the bridge
humbucker, the two knobs enabled me
to shape the top end into a form ideal for
use with fuzz—particularly if you’re into
wooly and endlessly sustaining Randy
California-style sounds. In fact, the
Empire’s humbucker, with a little roll off
in volume and tone, is a great guitar for
taming your most hectic fuzz while retaining
some meat and buzz in your signal.
The single-coil neck pickup is full of
surprises, too. It’s a great all-around pickup
that sounds wider than a neck humbucker
you hear in an SG or Les Paul. It doesn’t
have the wide-spectrum detail of a
Rickenbacker toaster pickup, which
it slightly resembles, or the high
end of a good Filter’Tron in the
neck position, but it has the versatile
feel of a Telecaster pickup and
works great in lead or rhythm situations
without getting muddy. Like the
bridge humbucker, it’s a great match
for a fuzz—especially if you’re dealing
with the sting and rasp of a squirrelly
old germanium or silicon unit.
The Verdict
Like every Richmond we’ve
encountered to date, the
Empire is a steal. The fit
and finish are excellent,
the components are better
than most that we see on
mid-priced guitars, and the
mahogany body is beautiful
and magically resonant.
And rather than throw together
the same old two-humbucker set,
Richmond selected a humbucker and single-
coil that sound unique and expand the
range of tones at your fingertips.
If you’re into punk, garage, or blues-rock,
the Empire is an ideal partner in crime, but
it’s equally at home grinding metal chords
through a Marshall and a distortion pedal or
jangling away at folk-rock arpeggios. At just
500 bucks, however, it represents an extraordinary
value—particularly given the quality
of the materials and build. If it’s a no-frills
rocking machine you need, you’ll find that
and a lot more in the Richmond Empire.
Buy if...
sweet, blossoming, mahogany rock
tones on a budget sound sweet to
your ears.
Skip if...
you’re just going to keep saving until
the SG of your dreams is in your
hands—no matter what it costs.
Rating...
