VINTAGE REVO TRIO | REVIEW

Vintage Revo Trio
MSRP: (UK) £499 / (US) $TBC

Vintage guitars are designed in the UK and built to exacting standards using only the best quality hardware, pickups and tone woods. The Vintage design team’s relentless quest for innovation, authentic tone, outstanding playability and great-looking instruments delivers true working musicians' tools—and nowhere is that more evident in the brand's new Revo range of guitars. Nick Jennison takes an exclusive first look at the Vintage Revo Trio.

Perhaps in spite of their name, Vintage Guitars are never ones to rest on their laurels. Never content just to put out affordably priced and shockingly good takes on classic instruments, the reigning British heavyweight champions of “affordable guitars” are constantly looking for cool new takes on timeless designs and player-approved “quality of life” upgrades.

This is encapsulated in their new Revo series. New for NAMM 2023, these guitars are designed and built in collaboration with Alan Entwistle, the brains behind the very impressive Rapier guitars we’ve looked at in previous editions of GI. The first of these instruments we were lucky enough to lay our hands on the Trio, is a T-style guitar, but not as we know it.

Let’s begin with the superficial similarities. The Trio has a single cutaway body with a pickguard over translucent sunburst, a 25.5” scale maple neck with a rosewood board and a familiar headstock silhouette. But it also has a tremolo system, three P90-style pickups and two pickup selectors. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be intrigued to find out what sort of sounds this guitar can produce. Well, let’s talk about it.

Using the Alan Entwistle “Double Switch System”, this guitar affords you no fewer than seven distinct pickup selections, with further refinement from the volume and tone controls. The first switch works as a traditional 3-way, giving you “neck only”, “neck and bridge” and “bridge only” settings. The second switch will bring the middle pickup into the circuit for either pseudo-strat tones or a massive “all pickups” voice or give you the middle pickup all on its own. They say a T-type is a guitar that can do it all, but the Trio pushes this idea to its limit.

The tremolo system resembles the classic Jazzmaster “out-of-tune” lever, famous for not really doing very much besides putting your instrument wildly out of tune. This is absolutely not the case with the trim on this guitar. It’s smooth, offers a lot of travel in both directions and thanks to the roller bridge, Wilkinson E-Z Lok tuners and well-cut nut, tuning is very reliable.

The Trio is another W in Vintage’s years-long winning streak. A very versatile and well-made instrument that offers a whole rainbow of tones while still retaining a cool old-school vibe and aesthetic.

For more information, please visit:
https://www.jhs.co.uk/collections/vintage