2002 G&L Invader Plus

Details

This guitar caught my eye while looking around the Gruhn Guitars website, a very famous Nashville TN guitar store. The price was very reasonable and after a short chat on the phone, they shipped it to me for free and even through in a T-shirt! This guitar came with the original case and even the original certificate of authenticity - as close to buying a brand new guitar as you can get, impressive for one nearly 20 years old!

This guitar was made in Fullerton CA in 2002, and is one of the more expensive guitars in the G&L lineup. While not all that popular, the Invader has actually been manufactured since the 80s as a humbucker equipped super-strat alternative. It’s available in various solid colors including some very striking metallic sparkle finishes, and even in HSS configuration if you prefer. This model is the “Plus” model though, which has a transparent finish over a mahogany body and a highly figured flamed maple top. This top is truly gorgeous, with a ton of depth to the figuring and one of the best looking cherry sunburst finishes I’ve seen. The mahogany on the back is also quite pretty to look at with some nice figuring too, which is a nice bonus. The neck is a single piece of birdseye figured maple with a nice satin finish. The size of the headstock really caught me off guard, I expected it to be roughly Fender sized but it’s actually quite a bit larger.

Hardware includes an original Floyd Rose as well as Seymour Duncan pickups - a JB in the bridge and a ‘59 in the neck. Kind of odd that the middle pickup is a Gotoh made dual rail pickup, you would think they’d put another Duncan in that position but this is the factory configuration. Both humbuckers are connected to the same coil tap switch, but the middle position is always in parallel mode, and the slanted 5-way blade switch is nicely protected by the volume control from accidental changes.

Now I know I’m a bit too picky here, but this guitar has a few things about it that left me a little underwhelmed for such a nice presenting guitar. I’m a bit surprised coming from a high end USA maker like G&L, but the bridge is just a bit too far offset towards the treble side - this makes the high E string too close and it sometimes slips off the end while playing with vibrato. Looking at the routed recess, there is plenty of space to move it over - and on top of that, the recess is much larger than I’m used to seeing. I’m surprised because even my old Kramers have a recess that is barely larger than the Floyd base plate itself and most of those align the strings perfectly. That minor complaint couples with some other seemingly cost-cutting measures, like the middle pickup not matching the others, and the satin finish on the neck were just a bit surprising to me. Others might have the opposite experience of course, some players love a more satin finish and clearly the quality of the wood and components is very high, so maybe this one is just the tiniest bit worse in terms of fit and finish. Either way, a heck of a nice guitar but not quite the 10/10 I was expecting.

I no longer own this instrument