The Swingster is one of those guitars that looks so fancy, it might be considered delicate or frail.

The machineheads are courtesy of Grover, and the headstock upon which they live has the vine inlay, more popularly associated with Epiphone’s Sheraton guitars.

The rosewood fingerboard features block inlays, which always look classy. The SwingBucker pickups are controlled by a standard four knobs: one each for volume and for one, for each pickup. The most obvious piece of excitement is the presence of a Bigsby vibrato unit, from where the strings go on to pass over a Tune-O-Matic bridge, perched on a piece of rosewood.

However, a guitar like this takes a little more craftsmanship to complete, so costs need to be refined somewhere, and taking the time for aesthetically pleasing wood is unlikely to be a priority. It would be nice to see some of the beautiful flames that are normally associated with maple tops. There isn’t a single blemish on the finish. It’s actually hard to know where to start in looking at the parts of the Swingster! I’m excited to look at this in more detail – it’s always nice to have a reminder that not everybody playing an electric guitar is aiming to be as loud as possible, and it’s lovely to have the chance to review something for them. It’s actually very rarely you’ll see one being used with heavily overdriven sounds, mostly because the design of these guitars would turn them into absolute feedback monsters. Guitars like this aren’t designed for hard rocking. With this number of applications, it would be well-suited to an intermediate guitarist exploring any of these styles. This will likely be a winner for more refined playing – anything along the lines of country, rockabilly, early rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, maybe some blues. With first impressions of its overall appearance and a run down of the full list of specs, it seems like we might be looking at something a little bit special, but we’ll take a closer look, just to make sure. There are plenty of interesting things going on with this guitar, that you just wouldn’t see on a regular, solid body electric. Presumably, this is because it’s easiest to shape. Image from Flickr Core Features and SpecsĪs with pretty much any hollow body guitar, the Emperor Swingster comes with a maple body.

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