Shergold Guitars has unveiled the Provocateur Standard Series, a more affordable take on their vintage-inspired Provocateur Classic single-cut that retails under the magic £500 price point.
The SP12 certainly doesn’t look like a cheap electric guitar but at £409 street there is no question that it is a very approachable option for beginners and students, and has a pretty classy look as you might expect from a guitar designed by the esteemed Patrick James Eggle.
It has a solid poplar body, a bolt-on Canadian maple neck and a 12” radius Indian laurel fingerboard inlaid with Shergold’s distinctive lined fret markers. The bevelling on the body augurs well for the ergonomics. But there are some other design features that present the SP12 as something different from your garden variety budget six-string.
Firstly, it has a vintage 24.625” scale length, which with the 12” fingerboard radius would give it some vintage Gibson DNA in its design, and yet here we have this on a bolt-on guitar a la Fender. Secondly, that pairing of Page Alnico V humbuckers at the neck and bridge positions have a coil-split feature so you can dial in some single-coil sounds, too.
Elsewhere, we have got a set of locking tuners, a string-through-body hardtail bridge, and an oversized pickguard that extends across all the guitar’s controls, with the three-way pickup selector switch mounted on the shoulder and volume and tone pots on the lower bout. We particularly like the looks of those amp-style knobs with the silver inserts.
The hardware is chrome. Your finish options are Dirty Blonde with a black pickguard and Mint Green with a cream ‘guard. The nut is synthetic bone and measures 42.5mm wide. The 22 frets are “hard nickel” and medium jumbo. And that’s that. A gig-bag is available but sold separately.
The SP12 is the first model in the series. Shergold hints at more to come, perhaps with different pickup configurations, but with the coil-splits here, there looks to be plenty of tone options, and as always with guitars at this price point, they make excellent candidates for modding, with a high-quality aftermarket electric guitar pickup often the tonal pick-me-up you need to keep engaged with the instrument over the years.
Indeed, the Provocateur Classic models, which look similar, are equipped with Seymour Duncan pickups, mahogany bodies, ebony fingerboards, PJE Design Shergold Custom T bridges, etc, are pretty good value too at £809 street.
For more details, head over to Shergold Guitars.
