Walden Natura G740CE Acoustic

After having reviewed quite a number of different Walden guitars over the years, one thing always rings true, they've always been great value for money. Walden guitars are solid in construction and attractive in design, but more importantly always seem to play well and sound great too.

The body on the Natura G740CE is something different, coming in a 'Grand Auditorium' design, where the body is wider at the lower bout and narrower at the upper bout, with a beautiful Venetian cutaway allowing easy access to higher frets. The materials are all solid wood, a hard Sitka spruce top, light mahogany back, neck and sides and dark rosewood bridge and fingerboard.

A scalloped spruce X-brace sits under the top alongside carefully carved tone bars stabilising the soundboard and providing detailed clarity and an open voice for this instrument. North American Sitka spruce is the pick for the top and is renowned for its balanced voice and strong attack, adding extra detail and crisp overtones in the mix.

Six custom gold machineheads with satin black buttons aid tuning, and a Graphtech Fossalite nut and saddle cut to perfection, mimicking the tone of a vintage bone nut. Two glass fibre rails sit in the neck just before the headstock adding extra stability and extra tonal harmonics.

The action is set low and string tension is loose, perfect for lead guitarists, beginners or players that are sick of shredding the callouses on stubborn strings, and the neck profile is shallow, smooth and makes for hours of comfortable, stress-free playing.  

Visually, the quality and colour of woods is quite attractive, a soft vanilla spruce top, golden brown mahogany back, sides and neck and a dark tan finish on the headstock. The rosette features a nice blend of abalone and pinstripe to match surrounding white plastic pinstripe bindings, and mini dot markers add a modern, minimalist vibe to the fretboard.

Unplugged she sounds great, very evenly balanced without too much top or bottom end. There is a nice sparkle of presence resulting from a combination of fresh strings and great construction making lighter picks and fingerstyle playing sound crisp and airy. Lead guitar playing is especially good with the lower action and light string tension, as it's so desirable for bending strings, vibrato and hammer-ons and pull offs. 

Plugged in, the B-Band T-35 is a simple, clear and bright preamp, utilizing a piezo pickup under the bridge saddle to provide tones. It's a very brilliant sounding guitar when plugged in that would sit beautifully at the top of a dense mix, ideal alongside a couple of electric guitars or perhaps capo'd to sound a bit like a mandolin.

The Walden Natura G740CE is another quality choice in a saturated market of acoustics under $1000, its appeal lying in comfort, tone and ease of use. The pickup is very easy to operate, and it would be hard to get a poor tone out of it with its wide, musical 3-band EQ.