Acoustic Alchemy
FENDER ACOUSTASONIC STRATOCASTER & PRS SE HOLLOWBODY II PIEZO £1,749 & £1,349
It could easily be argued that while the electric guitar seems hampered by its past, one of the truly innovative paths in the past three decades has been to add acoustic-like sounds turning the electric guitar into an electric/acoustic hybrid. Although efforts appeared a lot earlier, this type of hybrid came to the fore in the 90s with guitars such as Hamer’s DuoTone and Parker’s Fly illustrating two very different ways of creating this duality. We’ve seen this trend peak and trough over the subsequent years with numerous brands usually offering piezo acoustic sounds on distinct models or simply as an option.
As those mid-90s designs showed us, there is definitely more than one way to skin this sonic cat. Hamer’s DuoTone was effectively a solidbody-sized thinline acoustic with a braced spruce top and acoustic bridge. It was powered by a pretty conventional piezo under-saddle transducer for its acoustic sound and a pair of humbuckers for its regular magnetic pickup electric sound. The Parker Fly, one of the most radical designs in the history of the instrument, was a soldibody electric with regular magnetic pickups and its acoustic voice came from individual piezo elements, mounted in its vibrato bridge and designed by Larry Fishman.
On review here we have two radically different yet very mainstream hybrids, both released this year. Now, we looked at the
