Bargain is a slippery term. At £349, this guitar is admittedly nudging into the mid market, but it’s hard to count the pennies when faced with the beauty of that singlecut body, which looks like an offcut from an Edwardian tea chest. If this guitar plays as good as it looks, it’s a snip.

After 35 years in the game, Schecter isn’t about to fluff the basics. As such, there’s much to enjoy about this axe’s performance, with the flat neck and XJ frets meaning you can play a lot of notes very fast, while the beefy body supplies similarly hefty sustain.

It’s a good compromise between a puny shred axe and a meat-and-potatoes rocker, and nicely built, too, with recessed dials, rugged bolt-neck and idiot-proof bridge also signposting a life on the road. But this guitar ain’t quite perfect…

Verdict

You want noise and fury from a rock singlecut, and with its twin Diamond pickups wound to buggery, the Schecter delivers that in spades, making everything you play sound ragged, angry and a bit like Humble Pie (the tone even breaks up on the clean channel).

That’s great, but we also want a mellow tonality for weeping blues, and the Omen isn’t so convincing there, with the basswood body failing to supply the warmth of mahogany and even the neck pickup sounding a bit ‘in-your-face’. It’s a great axe, but sometimes you just want to tell it to, y’know, calm down.

4 Stars