Fernandes Revolver Pro Guitar

Fernandes Sustainer Guitar

I’ll start out by saying up front that I’m just not into ‘gimmicky’ guitars, much preferring those without vibrato (the truly correct terminology, BTW) or other such accoutrements. Give me two pickups, a 3-way switch, one tone & volume control. That gets it done for me.

But when Scott left his newly-repaired (by Scott himself) Fernandes guitar with a Floyd Rose, locking nut and the ‘sustainer’ technology with me to get my impressions of, I discovered that these guitar gimmicks can be kinda fun, after all. Within minutes, I was ‘channeling’ Jimi with the high-harmonics knob pulled out and the sustainer switch on. The sustainer actually uses the neck pickup sort of in reverse to back-drive the strings by feeding the signal back thru that pickup (or so I understand).

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Fernandes Sustainer Guitars Review

Unlimited sustain, forever (and a day), as long as you want to hold the note and your amplifier keeps working. This, I have to admit, is a very cool gimmick! There’s a knob on the guitar that when pulled out, causes the sustainer circuit to accentuate upper harmonics. With that pulled out and the sustainer kicked in, it’s just like having a guitar with pickups mounted on the pickguard (think Strat), standing in front of an amp loud enough to cause the pickguard to vibrate and set up that feedback loop from signal/pickguard/ pickup/signal. The mechanical vibration of the pickguard minutely moves the pickups in relation to the strings, and thus sort of ‘re-drives’ the strings again, setting up that loop. This is how Jimi did all that weird controlled-feedback noise.

So, without even having twin Marshall stacks, and at any volume level, this little device does the same thing but by a different method. You can actually make a lot of those Hendrix noises at a whisper-soft amp volume…if that’s the kind of thing you’re into.

Legato Sustain Tricks

I discovered another nice application for it, too. With sustainer kicked-in, you can play some lovely legato melodies in a very ‘space-music’ sounding mode with lots of reverb applied. The effect of the sustainer has a little bit of lag, which is much more noticeable with the ‘hi-overtones’ knob activated, thus giving it almost a ‘tape-reverse-ish’ effect if played just right.

As for this guitar, itself, I don’t know what this particular model is called (Fernandes Revolver Pro), but it has a semi-Strat-ish double-cutaway shape with two humbuckers, a Floyd Rose-licensed vibrato mechanism, locking nut, and of course, the sustainer circuitry, powered by a 9V battery. It’s a very nice guitar, even without the gimmicks.

Slim, fast Maple neck, comfy contoured body, beautiful metallic dark green finish and all black hardware. It looks very nice, and plays very nice, too. Scott has it all set up for ‘shredding’ with super-light strings, and it really works for that application. The only real issue I see with it is that even with the locking nut, any wide vibrato arm motion will crank it out of tune easily. But the micro-tuners back on the Floyd Rose make retuning it a snap. Then again, the new strings might just need to stretch out some.

This is not a guitar that I’d ever use regularly, because my preferred musical styles don’t really make use of whammy-bars and feedback sustain. There ain’t much call for dive-bombing the pitch into the underworld in the types of music that I generally play. But the ‘gimmicks’ on this Fernandes Revolver Pro guitar sure are fun to dork around with!

For more information see Fernandes Sustainer