Reverend PA-1

Reverend guitars is a small maker out of the United States. Their guitars are are well made and well priced and have a mix of traditional and modern features that everyone loves. This is the Pete Anderson signature guitar. This is their only Hollowbody model that I know of and it has some great features taken from the world of solid body guitars. The guitar has a laminated spruce top with maple sides and back. The top and back are ached as well as bound. The hollobody construction from Reverned has a cool feature they call the uni-brace. This is a extra bit of bracing that braces the bridge and connects it with a piece of wood to the neck block. With this extra bracing you can have a real tune-o-matic bridge on your hollowbody and not a bridge held on by string tension. The pickups are a set of P90s that are hum cancelling when used in combination. Up top you get a set of reverend locking tuners that help you stay in tune with that Bigsby tremolo. The controls are typical Reverend with a volume and tone with their bass contour knob.

UTILIZATION

Their uni-brace system gives great tuning stability to the guitar. Having the bridge fixed in place is pretty rare on a hollowbody. With a bridge that is not attached whenever you changed strings you could lose the placing of the bridge and your intonation would be off. With this design the bridge is fixed into the guitar and you get more sustain and better tuning stability. Locking tuners is not something you find often on an old school guitar like this either. This helps tame the tuning problems caused by the Bigsby but if you go crazy on it the guitar will still go out of tune.

SOUNDS

With the bass contour knob you can get a great variety of tones from the P90s without complicated switching. With the bass contour full on you get the full thick and gritty P90 tone. The P90s have the top end clarity that you expect with the bottom end fullness that makes P90s unique in the realm of single coils. The bass contour knob lets you also change the tone on the pickups. With it all rolled off you get a thinner more traditional single coil tone like if you had a coil tap. With the thinner single coil tone you get extra twang and this combined with the woody bigness the hollowbody construction gives you lets the tone just ooze out of the f=holes

OVERALL OPINION

At times I forgot that this is a signature model. It didnt have any silly markings or logos or features on it. It is just a good solid guitar and what you would expect from Reverend. Now with this Hollowbody Reverend has a guitar for just about every style of music you could want to play. Reverend is quickly becoming a guitar maker where you go if you want something different but do not want to go fully custom. They are like a mid level boutique guitar maker almost. They are a gateway into the world of limited production high end guitars.