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RJ Super Vintage 5-in-1 Guitar – NAMM 2016

The RJ Super Vintage is an electric guitar that can switch between five popular guitars without built-in DSP modeling.

RJ Super Vintage

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The guitar company from the Philippines designed this new 5-in-1 model to reproduce the tone of five iconic guitars that cover multiple musical styles, including the Fender Stratocaster, Fender Telecaster, Fender Jazzmaster, Gibson Les Paul, and the Gibson ES335.

The story goes that this guitar was released locally in 2014, and is now getting a worldwide release this year in time for the 2016 NAMM Trade Show. This move to export the guitar is said to be inspired by UK endorsers and positive user and expert reviews.

The RJ Super Vintage guitar itself looks pretty straightforward, but it does have a unique appeal to it. What makes it special however are the special switching electronics and custom hand wound pickups that allow for on-the-fly voicing changes.

Instead of copying the look of the five guitars that it is trying to reproduce, the guitar looks more like something inspired by Rickenbacker, with a semi-hollow double cutaway body. The body is crafted from locally sourced Philippine mango wood, which may not be a popular tonewood, but it does give the guitar a unique appeal. For added cosmetic vintage appeal, the body is wrapped in cream binding.

Inside the exotic semi-hollow body is where this guitar stands out from regular ones, it comes with custom wound RJ Mystique HSH configuration pickups and special RJ Intelliswitch mini toggles that allow the guitar to emulate the sound of the five popular guitar models mentioned above. To vary the guitar’s voice, the switch utilizes the right pickups or splits the humbucker coils when needed, and it works in conjunction with the tone/volume knobs. Note that there are no active electronics, the voice switching is done passively through the pickups.

It’s not necessarily a plug-and-play feature but with practice and experience, you should be able to get the sound close to the five iconic instruments quicker. Obviously, this guitar does not perfectly capture the tones of the five instruments perfectly, but it should be within the ball park so to speak.

The guitar’s maple neck follows Strat configuration with a 25.5″ scale length, 22 frets, 1.653″ nut width and 122047″ radius. So playing feel should be more like the ever familiar guitar. Other hardware features include Wilkinson WJ55 Deluxe Tuning Machine Heads, Wilkinson WVS50IIK floating tremolo system and tremolo bar.

Check out the official video demo:

The RJ Super Vintage guitar has an MSRP of $1,099, more information will soon be available at RJ Guitars.

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