GRB Kokocaster Guitar REVIEW (GG-501) How to play

Justin's completely Free Guitar Lessons. Guitar Gear Review GG-501.

In this video I do a review of the GRB Kokocaster donated to me by Gordon, the maker. Nice guy. Because he was cool and didn't insist, I have done a full review of this unusual and funky guitar. Check it out at the GRB web site:

http://www.grbguitars.com/

Find the related course notes on the following link:
http://justinguitar.com/en/GG-501-GTR-Kokocaster.php

Reviewed by Justin Sandercoe.

Full support at the justinguitar web site where you will find hundreds of lessons on a wide range of subjects, and all the scales and chords that you will ever need! There is a great forum too to get help, no matter what the problem.

And it is all totally free, no bull. No sample lessons, no memberships, no free ebook. Just tons of great lessons :)

To get help with this lesson (and for further info and tabs), find the Lesson ID in the video title (like ST-667 or whatever) and then look it up on the Lesson Index page of justinguitar.com

http://www.justinguitar.com

Have fun :)

.

How you been doing people?

I hope you're all well and happy

Justin here

In this little clip today

I'm going to be giving you

a bit of a demo

a review kind of thing on

this very nice guitar

which is a GRB Coco casta

Gordon from GRB gave me a donation

of this guitar

because he liked the website and stuff

and I thought I'd give him a little review

let him know what I think of it

you guys know what I think.

This is kind of a mid-price guitar

I think it retails at about $899 U.S

dollars.

So it's not a cheap guitar

and it's not made like a cheap guitar

but it's not is the same league

as my old vintage

strats and stuff, you know.

But it's got a lot of good things

going for it, a lot of good sounds in it

a couple of really funky things

about the pick up.

So I'm just going to go through and

explain some of those things to you now

so you get a sort of a vibe on this guitar

Really well made

it's mahogany body

with a cut away hole, I cant' remember

I think they call it a sound chamber

and it's a quilted maple top

so it kind of looks nice as you can see

it's a bit of a sun burst color.

It's got two pick ups, one's called

a lipstick pick up, which I'll give you

a vibe on the sound in a second.

It's got a really high output humbucker

pickup in it which is

like when it says high output on the

website but it's really high output.

Volume and tone, one tone control

really full on tone control

I'll demonstrate that in a sec.

and it's also what's called a push-pull

so you can pull the tone knob in and out

I'm pretty sure it's splitting the

Humbucker because it sounds like

a single coil

it comes with two different types of

bridges, you can either get a tremolo

version like this one

or you can get what's called a hardtail

which doesn't have the tremolo effect

if any of you guys are complete beginners

you might want to go with the Hardtail one

as apposed to the Tremolo one

cause the tremolo one is notoriously

they are not that difficult to get in tune

but they can be difficult to get in tune

and if you break a string while using one

with a tremolo the rest of the strings

often pop out of tune

you have to restring before you can keep

using it.

Hence why a lot people have a spare guitar

when their playing with a tremolo.

Let me just go through some of the sounds

that this thing's got

gonna start of with a lipstick pickup

I'm gonna put the volume control up all

the way

this is just going through my

Sir Badger 30 amplifier

it's got a little bit of reverb courtesy

of this G-lab reverb pedal

which is the only effect i'll be using

on this little bit of reverb

which most amp's have built in

here's just the lipstick pickup

with the tone right up

so this front pick up, the silver one

I'll give you a couple close ups of the

guitar later so you can have

a bit of a gander

Really really nice sound, nice clean sound

for this lipstick

It's also really good for your bright

50's and 60's

That kind of sound effect is a nice crispy

really bright

really crispy bright sound there

with the old lipstick

Now the tone control on this is really

really strong

I'm not sure exactly what they do to them

to make them like this

a lot of guitars don't have as good a

tone control as this.

If I start with the tone control now

currently right up, which is the position

you'll have your tone in most of the time

but if i back it right off to nothing

It's really like it's got a sock over it

it's taking away all the tops completely

that's a little bit not tune

it's not quite as smooth as it is on

the really high end guitars

as I gradually bring it up it goes from

the muffled sound to the bright real quick

there we go now you move to about one

which can be quite a nice effect

I think the sounds that I quite

like with this one

is just bringing so you can hear

the tops back in

and you get a pretty

decent kind of a jazzy sound then

It's got that kind of mellow tone there

with the tone backed off a bit

I'm gonna put the tone right back up to

full again, so the tone and volume

now are full

If I flick the pickup selector back to

the back pickup the humbucker pickup

it gets really grungy

if I flick to the front

down

it's really, it's a super high

output pick

none of my guitars have got that much

difference between the two pickups

which I at first I thought it was

a bit not really right

thinking about it actually if you wanna

go from a clean sound to a dirty sound

you can do that just by flicking your

pickup that's actually a pretty cool thing

if you got loads of effects for doing

that then you'll probably use that

it's quite a nifty little trick to have

that much

front pickup

back pickup

and to compensate for this a little bit

I mentioned before we've got a push-pull

tone part

so if I pull the tone part out a bit

it splits this humbucker into a single

coil and actually I'm certain

that's what I was doing

cause when I pull it up and it's single

coil I can hear a bit more noise

through the amplifier from the lights

cause the lights always have bit of fun

with single coil pickups, that's all my

guitars not just this one

so you can hear the difference

in sound for this

really bright

there's your humbucker

single again

humbucker

a lot more meaty with the humbucker

pickup on

you got a bit of a choice there of what

kind of sound you're after

that's the humbucker sound

if we put in on to the single

it's a lot brighter and crisper sound

both those tones are really usable sounds

you got quite a lot of stuff that you

can experiment with

like I said it's got the old tremolo

Tremolo on it

which I don't generally use a tremolo one

and it was one of the things when he wrote

to me and asked if I'd like one of these

guitars, I mentioned that having a tremolo

would actually be kind of cool

It has a stop piece, it's kind of a Bigsby

style thing

where the tremolo only goes up yay far

which I found a little bit weird because

when I have used a tremolo

I normally sit in the palm of my hand

and move it around

so that was a little bit odd

but it's nice and seems to stay pretty

good in tune cause most of this style of

tremolo's don't stay in tune so good

It's quiet, it's nice

it can go, you can go silly

if you want

but it's not

their not really designed for that

and when you thrash this type of tremolo

and really push it in or pull it up

too much

it's almost certainly going to knock

your strings out of tune

on this guitar or any other guitar

with this style of tremolo

even some really beautiful

expensive old gretschs that I've played on

that have got this type of tremolo

they don't stay in tune

so yeah

this is the GRB Coco caster

thanks very much Gordon for donating this

it's excellent

I don't play it all the time

because I've got some really really

beautiful old guitars

which I kind of prefer playing

but this had become a keen favorite

of my students if they don't bring

their guitar along one time and they need

to play a guitar

this is often the one they choose

yeah

it's a really really cool instrument

so thank you very much Gordon

Go and check out their website which is

GRBguitars.com

and go and check it out

find a dealer near you

if you're interested in this kind of thing

it is a really really well made guitar

I'll grab the camera

off the stand in a second

show you a few shots of it

so you can have a look at the close ups

and hope you enjoyed that

check it out

I'll see you all again soon

for another lesson

see you later, bye bye

Bridge of the guitar

with a tremolo on there

you can see the humbucking pickup

if I bring it down

and the lipstick pickup

bring it forward again

here we go

you see the nice little inlays

I think their called shark tooth inlays

if we come down here

there's some really good detailing

on the head stop there

with this mother of pearly kind of effect

on the head stop there

there we go GRBguitars

I wasn't a big fan of the plastic nut

but I think it's available in bone

and other things as well

just some regular tuners there

on the back you can see nice

nice quality neck finish

kind of washed off there

well it looks like I got number 26

cut away to make it a little bit

easier to play at the back there

back of the guitar's pretty straight

that's it

this is your a

actually it does look really nice

doesn't it

that's cool

oh and

here's your push-pull tone

although I should turn the volume down

so you can see here that your

you pull that up to get that

single coil sound

push it back down

you got that humbucker thing

it doesn't change when

you're on the front pickup