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After a certain amount of time with the electric guitar you think you have pretty much got the instrument all figured out, and then like Donner goes and expands its futuristic Hush series with a headless guitar that has its own onboard amp, effects, and speaker.
Not only that but the speaker is detachable. And this is the year 2026, so of course this guitar – the Hush-X Live and its more upscale sibling, the Hush-X Live Pro – has onboard Bluetooth.
You can keep your jetpacks and hoverboards; this is the future.
Debuted at OSAKA Guitar Show, these really are the ultimate take-anywhere travel guitars, lightweight, compact, fashionable, headless.
The Hush-X Live Pro even comes with some celebrity pro-player kudos with Japanese string-slapping virtuoso MIYAVI involved with shaping key elements, such as the neck profile, the headstock (well, what’s left of the headstock), the pickups, and co-designing some of the amp models you can play on it.
And as Guitar World has learned at first hand, the Hush-X is a serious guitar, travel or otherwise.
Traditionalists, if you’re still reading, bless you, but this is one you can definitely sit out. The Hush-X Live and Live Pro are so 2026 they would make the Jackson Soloist look like the Rickenbacker Frying Pan. You might have to wait until... well, the year 2126 for these to be considered “vintage”.
The detachable speaker module is really an out-there idea, even for Donner, even for its Hush series. You charge it via USB-C and get up to nine hours of continuous play.
You can blast out Enter Sandman as you walk down the aisle at Target, work through some Joe Pass-style chord changes as you wait to be seated at your local pizzeria, or, y’know, play some bluegrass neo-folk as you browse the range of organic alt-milks at Whole Foods. You do you, anywhere, anytime, for up to nine hours at a time.
Okay, so the two guitars are not that different. They both have neck-through builds, a 25.5” scale, Alnico V humbuckers, with the Pro model’s pickups wound to MIYAVI’s specs. They have bone nuts with a quite narrow 38mm width. The standard model has a mahogany body, a five-piece mahogany neck strengthened with 1mm maple strips and fashioned into a mainstream modern C profile.
The Pro version has the MIYAVI neck with an HPL fingerboard and a 13.7” radius, while the standard offers the choice of HPL or roasted maple and has a flatter 15.7” radius. You’ll also find the neck is roasted maple with maple strips, and the body is aged Canadian maple.
And so that leaves us with the amp, speaker, combo… Wait, is this really a modeling combo amp with an onboard guitar, or a guitar with an onboard combo? You decide.
Either way, you’ve got five-watts, five onboard amp and cab sims on the standard, seven on the Pro. There’s even tap tempo on these, and a noise gate. A noise gate?! Incredible.
The Hush-X Live is available now at $439, with a 10 per cent discount voucher available online. The Hush-X Live Pro is out July 15, and is priced $566. Both come with gig bags.
Head over to Donner for more.
