GEARREVIEW
Jet-Black Revelator SuperTone
KEY FEATURES Light weight
Rooted in Authentic Vintage Design
Both Lollar and Porter Custom Pick-Ups
Revelator Guitars was born in 2002 in the farms just about 20 miles south east of Philadelphia by Eric Stein. After working a multitude of jobs from building furniture to antique refinishing and carpentry, Eric decided to pursue his passion of building guitars full time. He’ s owned, played, fixed, and finished vintage guitars most of his life. With musical tastes steeped in the old blues Masters, it’ s only natural that the company’ s name came from the old Son House song“ John the Revelator”( hopefully you have heard Phil Keaggy’ s amazing version).
At first Eric began by hand routing 50’ s era correct Fender bodies from templates of his own vintage guitars. Next, he started building complete instruments, and actually was one of the earliest guys to make“ relic” style guitars. Recently the company has taken on more employees to help facilitate Revelator’ s future success. When I asked him about this, he replied,“ We have steadily gathered steam, exposure, and taken on more artist endorsements. This year marked the release of the SuperTone, which is our take on past legendary offset designs, but with the Revelator flair.”
What is the Revelator flair, you ask? It seems Eric made the wise call to gather several unique aspects from iconic guitars and blend them into something new.
The first thing you notice when you pick up the SuperTone is how light this offset body guitar is( usually offsets average 8-10 lbs). I like lightweight guitars, but at 5.5 lbs, this one takes the cake! It is made of Sugar Pine, and I was already on board.
The guitar is well balanced and there is no“ neck-dive”. Speaking of the neck, this model sports a hand shaped and contoured heavier C back profile made of maple( think authentic
BY BRUCE ADOLPH
vintage Fender) with a rosewood slab board( yes, think Fender again) with the truss rod adjustment at the heel. The fingerboard has a 10” radius with hand fretted and leveled 6105 size frets( translation: medium size). High playability marks for this guitar too … action, feel, and fretwork. The headstock and body are painted Jet Black with a Nitrocellulose Lacquer finish( lightly aged). Eric uses gold Gotoh lined, Kluson style tuners and a gold Hipshot Strat style 6 saddle bridge. Next feature up is the brass tone bar that accommodates the“ string through body” design.
The pick-up selection is where Revelator hits a home run as he uses two of my favorite boutique pick-up makers … I know them both personally and I was thrilled to hear that Eric smartly mixed the two together. The neck position is a Porter Pickups Gold Portertron Humbucker( think Gretsch Filtertron – full and rich tone) and the bridge pick-up is a single coil Lollar Special Telecaster Flat Pole( high output with a more rounded top end. More mids and bottom too. Roll back the tone knob some and head for P-90 land). Now, just think about that combination for a minute … lots of tonal versatility! This guitar also resonates well before you plug it in, with such a light body too!
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Eric Stein
Nov � Dec 2016 WorshipMusician. com
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