Godin Freeway SA

Made in Canada, like all Godin guitars, but the Canadian-made parts are surprisingly assembled in the USA. Floyd Rose-style bridge – at least one with a tremolo that goes in both directions, bolt-on neck with 22 frets, Godin pickups: 2 humbuckers with a single soil in the middle PLUS piezo sensors, one per string with an interface that allows MIDI connection to a Roland GK2 or equivalent with a switch to choose between MIDI only, MIDI and audio or the audio signal alone, and another switch to change MIDI settings. There are also two Tone and one Volume knobs, and a 5-position mic selector.
I read several hypothesis regarding the mic switch, either the humbuckers turning into single coils or 2-by-2 combinations of the pickups, but I haven’t opened the guitar to check this – so for all I know there are 5 possible selectable positions and this is it.

USING IT

The neck is very easy to play, the highs can be accessed very comfortably, the weight and ergonomy are very good, no problem at all.
Beware that when the MIDI switch is on “MIDI only” there is NO outgoing sound AT ALL – only MIDI signal. Of course it can be useful for some kinds of uses.
It is highly versatile and delivers high-quality sounds with all sorts of settings (at least to my taste).
I considered buying a MIDI interface to take advantage of all its capacities, but it’s expensive (€300 for an Axon or Roland) and I have 3 basic MIDI keyboards, so I didn’t get one and can’t judge the result and have no idea whether all notes are correctly detected, bends are taken into account or polyphony (there’s a total 6 piezo sensors) is working. Anyway, all that depends more on the interface used than on the guitar itself.

SOUND

Whether I use my VOX AD30VT or Toneport UX1, UX2 and Gearbox/Podfarm, I get many great sounds and find no real flaw. Unfortunately, the neck was the victim of a heating problems I encountered some past Winter, now the B and E strings tend to buzz a lot but the neck doesn’t appear to be warped. It certainly needs to get adjusted by a guitar tech. EDIT: the guitar finally paid the guitar tech a visit, now everything's fine.
If you actually use the MIDI feature, you certainly can get everything you need but I didn’t try it this way.

OVERALL

I’ve been using it for 7 years now on my (rare) spare time.
I haven’t tried many other models before I came across it by chance, but now I also like its look.
Looking back, I’d get the same but without the MIDI feature, which seems useless to me: a GTK-style device costs three times the price of a keyboard (not that I’m so good at keyboard playing but I can play a little), and I’m not sure a guitar player really has an interest to switch to MIDI unless their playing style translates perfectly. It’s up to everyone to see.

I have no idea of its price either new or used as I got it as part of a home-studio bundle with undetailed prices, but regarding the price new I believe the extra cost induced by the MIDI is excessive compared with the (non-)use I have for it.

I only rated it « for advanced users » because of the MIDI feature and the additional cost it induces, but a second-hand, non-MIDI version definitely addresses just anyone.