My guitar collection - G&L

 
 

This ASAT Deluxe II is one of latest built as part of the Black Ice Collection, which was available between October 2012 and May 2015. The Black Ice Collection also included the ASAT Classic Bluesboy and Legacy as well as the M-2000 and M-2500 basses. Its finish is a variant of the Nearly Naked™ (NENA) finish used on ‘The Wrangler’ and this ASAT Classic ‘S’ 2012 (NENA) Special Collection. Or should one say “lack of finish”? Either way, Black Ice makes the grain of the swamp ash body pop out with black and silver streaks. On top of that, with a clear satin finished quartersawn hard-rock Eastern maple #1 neck with 12” maple fingerboard, Jescar Stainless Steel Medium Jumbo 57110-S frets, 1⅝” nut width using a non-standard Graph-Tech nut, and Sperzel Locking tuning machines, the guitar seems to be ready to attend a black-tie party. The pickups are a chrome covered Seymour Duncan (SD) ’59 (SH-1N) humbucker in the neck and an SD JB Trembucker (TB-4) in the bridge controlled by a volume control, push/pull tone control, and 3-position pickup selector. Of course what makes it a “II” is the presence of a TonePros Tune-o-matic bridge. Beyond the Honey Ale and Black Ice NENA finishes, a third one called Blue Ice is still in use on some post-2018 G&L Custom Shop guitars and was first seen on an ASAT Classic Solamente (S/N CLF60698) displayed on the archived G&L prototype page. For more in the Black Ice ASAT Deluxe II, see this archived snapshot from 2016.

 

Black Ice Collection ASAT Deluxe II

The story behind this guitar

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These guitars just look so gorgeous. So I had been on the lookout for either a Black Ice Bluesboy or Deluxe II. Around my birthday in 2019 Chicago Music Exchange discounted this guitar on their Reverb auction site. To properly photograph this finish turned out to be tricky and I still feel I did not succeed. The wiring harness is identical to the Korina ASAT Deluxe II. Hence the sonic difference between these 2 guitars, if any, should be related to the body and fingerboard wood. This guitar indeed has slightly more bite most noticeably when the neck humbucker is used. The guitar cleans up beautifully when the volume pot is turned down and this is also the happy spot for the single-coil sounds. The latter have more “snap” compared to its Korina brethren. In what seems to be typical for an ASAT Deluxe, the gold lettered G&L logo with black trim on the headstock has the “MADE IN USA PAT PEND FULLERTON CA” phrase underneath. The brand logos likely go back all the way to the 1980s!

The story behind this guitar

2015

CLF074040

04/29/15

MAY 01 2015

D’Addario EXL110 Nickel Wound Regular Light (10-46)