I saw a review of this thing and it made me very curious though. My stable of guitars tends towards the traditional but I do have some modern guitars: A Fender Elite HSS strat, a Charvel pro mod socal type 2 (super tele hh/fishman open core classics), a Standberg Bodin essentials 6, and an 80s style Ibanez RG w/ floyd. I'm not a shredder and I tend to like traditional guitars more in terms of sound, feel, and aesthetics, but I do like the versatility of modern guitars. I've also never had a Japanese-built guitar. Anyway, in a moment of weakness (we'd just won a court case that'd been dragging on most of the year so I wanted to do something special) I ordered one direct from Vola to satisfy my curiosity. I did use a 5% off code but it was still not cheap, like $1150 shipped I think. It arrived mind-bogglingly quickly from Hong Kong, I ordered on late Monday or Tuesday and it arrived at my door on Thursday.
I'm still in the honeymoon phase for sure but so far I really appreciate it. The neck is roasted (flamed) maple w/ stainless frets and it feels very much like the Charvel in shape and satin-y feel. Nice little touch that they put the luminlay dots on the side of the neck and the fretboard. Feels very solid and comfortable if you like modern/thin necks. The edges aren't quite as rolled as on the Charvel and the frets may be slightly smaller but it feels very similar. I'm still used to like a Fender C shape strat neck so it's slightly thinner but not thin like an Ibanez wizard or anything. Just like a slightly thinner strat neck.
It's pretty light, I haven't weighed it but I'd guess maybe 7 and a half lbs. Gotoh hardware including a nice strat-style slip-in 2-screw trem that feels really smooth and I haven't had any issues with tuning. Speaking of tuning, locking gotoh tuners on a reverse proprietary pointy headstock (the only other reverse headstock is the reverse tele headstock on the Charvel).
The shape is offset and clearly reminiscent of the Jazzmaster but it's smaller, closer to a strat in size. There is a weird little tail on it, doesn't really bother me
It's got humbucker-sized p90s in the neck and bridge and a push-pull to turn on a middle strat-style single coil. I really like the pickups--I have always liked the goldilocks nature of p90s in terms of tone, clarity and oomph, and adding or removing the single has a really interesting effect on the tone, a touch of extra high end sizzle but still sounds like the same guitar. So in a way it's less versatile tonally than like that Charvel, which thanks to those fishman fluence pickups can sound like three completely different guitars. But I really like the base tone of the pickups, so I don't really feel ilke I'm missing much. It's a little more strat-like with the single coil on, but sounds good either way. The three-way switch selects the neck, both, or bridge p90s and the knobs are just master volume and master tone. There is also a direct button which takes the volume and tone knobs (although not the switches) out of the circuit, which is a nice feature to have a sort of built-in pseudo-"boost", or if you just want to hear the raw pickups loud, bright, and clear.
I guess there's really not too much else. It's a nice MIJ mostly-modern take on an offset, with cool passive electronics and unusual pickup options. With how much I like the comfort and sound of strats, I can see this guitar competing with them for playing time since it's similar but different. These only came out this year so I don't think there's much of a used market for them yet if there ever will be, but buying direct from Vola was easy and fast.
If you read all that you deserve a pic at least:
