Reverend Buckshot

“With a 25–1/2” scale length, note attack is nice and snappy”

Rev­erend gui­tars have been around for a few years now but despite some great offer­ings they’re still prob­a­bly yet to enter the absolute fore­front of most play­ers’ minds. They’re per­haps still in the ‘Oh man, why didn’t I think to try this gui­tar ear­lier?’ cat­e­gory. Well that looks likely to change very soon once peo­ple get their hands on cool gui­tars like the Rev­erend Buck­shot.
UNCLE BUCK

One thing I really dig about this model is that it’s really hard to pin it down visu­ally. The body is made of Korina, a wood most often asso­ci­ated with Fly­ing Vs and Explor­ers. The tune-o-matic style bridge and stop tail­piece also recall var­i­ous Gib­son designs, while the con­trol lay­out and Rev­erend T-style sin­gle coil bridge pickup sug­gest a Tele­caster, and the neck pickup, a Rev­erend Revtron mini-humbucker, hints at a Gretsch influ­ence. Pick it up for a noo­dle and you’ll find that the bolt-on, 12” radius neck feels a lit­tle Stratty. And that’s before you even con­sider the body out­line, which is nei­ther Les Paul nor Tele­caster, yet sub­tly sug­gests them both. You may also notice another con­trol pot on the bass side of the body, near the neck. That’s a bass con­tour con­trol which lets you roll back the bass so you can really fine-tune your tone.
BUCKLE IN

With a 25–1/2” scale length, note attack is nice and snappy. There’s a decent amount of sus­tain for a bolt-on, pos­si­bly aided by the tune-o-matic bridge and korina body. The bridge pickup is not too bright, nor is it too woolly, but if you feel that you need a lit­tle less warmth and more cut you can reach for the bass con­tour con­trol, which you will find dips out some of the low end while keep­ing the highs intact, while cre­at­ing the illu­sion of addi­tional treble.

The neck pickup is fuller and cooler, with a nice rounded attack which makes it great for Jeff Buckley-style chordal moments as well as gritty blues leads. In the mid­dle selec­tor posi­tion, the two pick­ups com­bine into a rich tex­ture for strummed, jan­gly indie chords. Again, you can increase or decrease the upper end detail and low end oomph just by fid­dling with that bass con­tour con­trol, or you can turn the mas­ter tone knob down for some sweet Clap­ton style woman tone.
SHOT THROUGH THE HEART

The Buck­shot is a sur­pris­ingly capa­ble lit­tle gui­tar which sounds famil­iar yet new, much like how it looks. It’s also worth point­ing out that playa­bil­ity straight out of the box (well, out of the case) was utterly flaw­less: low enough to not get in the way of more fleet-fingered wan­der­ings, but high enough to main­tain nice lively tone. If, per­chance you dig the over­all vibe of the Buck­shot but would like some­thing with a lit­tle more out­put, con­sider the Reeves Gabrels sig­na­ture model released at NAMM this year. It has the same con­trol array and bridge lay­out but fea­tures a rose­wood fret­board, a flamed maple top on a solid korina body, a Rev­erend hum­bucker in the bridge posi­tion and a DiMarzio Fast Track sin­gle coil-sized hum­bucker in the neck. There are also other mod­els which use a sim­i­lar out­line but dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions, such as the Fla­troc (two Revtrons), and the Gil Par­ris Sig­na­ture (two Rev­erend hum­buck­ers and a Lace Sen­sor Bur­gundy single).

Price: RRP $1580 inc case.

Distributor:555 Music

Phone: (03) 9818 5040

web­site www.555music.com.au

By Peter Hodgson