“Something a little different, with vibey and diverse sounds for not a lot of money”: Vintage REVO Galactica and Astrostar review

What is it?

Known for pretty tidy lookalikes, and celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, the Vintage company certainly hasn’t stood still these past decades.

Last year, the brand took the wraps off some 15 models under the new REVO banner that nodded to some of the classics, recalled a few forgotten gems and added a few more.

That wave continued earlier this year when Vintage launched four more additions, two of which we have here, the Galactica and Astrostar.

Now, there’s obvious Höfner Galaxie DNA in the Galactica. The Astrostar’s inspiration appears less obvious, but it seems squarely modelled on a Japanese-made mid-’60s Univox UC3. Neither is a direct copy, though, and perhaps ‘inspired by’ would be a better descriptive term.

Veteran designer Alan Entwistle is behind these new models again, but pulling both guitars from their cardboard shipping boxes – there’s no gigbag included in the prices – we’re met with very clean and tidy-looking pieces that really could have come from some catalogue back in the day.

Both guitars use okoume for their thinner bodies – the lightly offset Galactica is 40mm in depth, the Astrostar marginally thicker at 42mm.

With the high-gloss opaque finish you can’t see the wood, although the Galactica has the usual contours, the forearm bevel is a little light, and the ribcage cut on the back is hardly vintage-Fender deep.

The Astrostar is quite radically offset with a light forearm-area top chamfer and a light ribcage cut. Both have heavily radiused edges – more Strat than Tele – and while the Galactica’s heel platform is Fender-like, the racy Astrostar’s heel has a boat-bow point just like the Univox it’s modelled on.

You’d think the bolt-on necks would be pretty similar, but no – not in terms of the details. The Galactica’s maple is slab-sawn, the cleanly cream-bound fingerboard is a mid-brown rosewood (last year’s first wave of REVO models used jatoba) that has those striking Höfner-style stripe inlays and clean-looking fretting from a wide and relatively low-height gauge.

In contrast, the Astrostar’s neck is quarter-sawn and we have a rather attractive flaming to its back – it’s probably a one-off, but it’s very welcome, adding a real touch of class.

The ’board here is a deeper dark brown with cream/black/cream edge binding and pearloid dot inlays that run down the bass-side edge between the low E and A strings, just like that Univox guitar. Oh, and in case you missed it, while the Galactic uses a Fender scale and has 22 frets, the Astrostar goes for the shorter 629mm (24.75-inch) scale and has 21 frets.

One feature both guitars share is the roller saddle tune-o-matic-style bridge, the Galactica’s sitting in front of what appears to be a fairly generic-looking Fender-style offset vibrato.

The Astrostar’s bridge sits on the top plate of the Rapier Hi Lo vibrato (based on the original design by Watkins, we believe). We don’t get locking tuners, but we do get those Wilkinson E-Z types with dual string holes in each post to lock the string, or simply to offer a choice of string heights.

Technically, these have staggered-height posts anyway, although the Galactica has three full-height tuners, three lower ones, while the Astrostar has only the low E and A string tuners full height, the other four are lower.

There’s little parity when it comes to the electrics, either. Yes, both have three pickups. The Astrostar is the more simple drive with a five-way lever pickup selector, master volume and tone and a bass-cut switch. But the Galactica? Best you take some notes.

On the bass side of the cream scratchplate, each pickup has its own on/off switch, plus there’s a single phase slide switch below those. Starting at the top on the treble side is a five-way rotary ATN 5 passive filter circuit, conceived by Alan Entwistle, with its chickenhead knob.

Below that are two rotary-wheel controls with quoted ‘mid-tone’ and ‘warm-tone’ functions, and below that is a single volume control and where the tone should be we have the output jack. Got that?

Specs

Vintage REVO Galactica

• PRICE: £649
• ORIGIN: China/Vietnam
• TYPE: Offset double-cutaway electric
• BODY: Okoume
• NECK: Maple, bolt-on
• SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”)
• NUT/WIDTH: Graph Tech/42.9mm
• FINGERBOARD: Bound rosewood, pearloid double cross-bar inlays, measured 241mm (9.5”) radius
• FRETS: 22, medium jumbo
• HARDWARE: Vintage offset vibrato, roller saddle tune-o-matic-style bridge, Wilkinson E-Z Lok tuners – nickel/chrome
• STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 51.5mm
• ELECTRICS: 3x Alan Entwistle HFS63 mini-humbuckers each with on/off switch, phase switch (on bridge pickup), master volume, ‘warm’ and ‘mid’ roller tone controls, 5-position rotary ATN 5 passive tone control system
• WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.47/7.63
• RANGE OPTIONS: The 3-pickup REVO Superthin (£699) uses the same mini-humbucking pickups and is another nod to Höfner
• LEFT-HANDERS: Not this model
• FINISHES: Firenza Red (as reviewed), Cappuccino, Green/Yellow Burst – gloss to body and neck back

Vintage REVO Astrostar

• PRICE: £549
• ORIGIN: China/Vietnam
• TYPE: Offset double-cutaway electric
• BODY: Okoume
• NECK: Maple, bolt-on
• SCALE LENGTH: 629mm (24.75”)
• NUT/WIDTH: Graph Tech/43.3mm
• FINGERBOARD: Bound rosewood, offset pearloid dot inlays, measured 241mm (9.5”) radius
• FRETS: 21, medium jumbo
• HARDWARE: Rapier Hi Lo Resonance long-plate vibrato,
  roller saddle tune-o-matic-style bridge, Wilkinson E-Z Lok tuners – nickel/chrome
• STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 51.5mm
• ELECTRICS: 3x Alan Entwistle Astrosonic VX pickups, 5-way lever pickup selector switch, master volume and tone, bass-cut switch
• WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.26/7.17
• RANGE OPTIONS: Plenty of offset action in the REVO range like the 4-pickup Surfmaster Quad (£549) and 3-pickup Surfmaster Thinline 12-string (£529)
• LEFT-HANDERS: Not this model
• FINISHES: Vintage White (as reviewed), Boulevard Black and Metallic Gold – gloss to body and neck back
• CONTACT: JHS

Playability and sounds

Both guitars have a good weight for their bolt-on style and, playing seated, the Galactica feels most conventional, while the Astrostar is more Fender offset-like. From a strapped-on perspective, that observation is similar and the necks on both seem to sit into the body more than your Telecaster. The Astrostar’s top strap button is unusually on the inside of the upper horn, but both feel perfectly good and are nicely balanced.

The setups, with 0.009-gauge strings, are more similar than many of the guitars’ other features: the Astrostar has minimal neck relief and a string height of 1.5mm (0.06 inches) on both treble and bass sides. The Galactica is virtually identical with just a little more height on the bass side at the 12th fret of 1.8mm (0.07 inches).

Both nuts are cut nicely and all the strings are low over the 1st fret, although the fret edges of the Galactica are left a little sharp and square, and with a higher overall nut the string grooves sit quite low. The final finishing on the Astrostar’s nut is much neater: the edges are rounded and, as the overall nut height is lower, the grooves are less deep.

Both necks do go for a similar slim C profile, though, the backs are glossed on both, and dimensionally the Astrostar is slightly deeper (21.5mm deep at the 1st fret, 23.5mm at the 12th) but only fractionally.

The Galactica’s ‘everything-but-the-kitchen-sink’ switching certainly won’t be for everyone. Starting with the ATN 5 out of circuit (fully clockwise) and with both roller tone controls fully up (towards the neck), you can audition each pickup individually and there’s good, quite tough-sounding ‘fat Strat’ voicing here.

It’s biting with a good characterful midrange nose but not shrill at the bridge, and there’s more depth with just enough clarity at the neck – a rather good old-style blues voice. Meanwhile, a best-of-both-worlds middle pickup keeps some of the bridge’s midrange colour with a little more depth.

On this platform, these pickups come across as rather well voiced and sit between the bluster of a good Les Paul and the thinner Strat. It’s a lot tougher-sounding than it might appear.

Of course, as each pickup has its own on/off switch there’s a total of seven sounds here with the added potential of all-three-on plus bridge and neck, compared with a Strat, and the ability to entirely mute the guitar.

The phase switch is on the bridge pickup, so with bridge and middle you get that typical out-of-phase thinness, likewise with bridge and neck. Its effect is lessened with all three pickups on, making it more usable. There’s choice.

The two roller tone controls are global and not assigned to a specific pickup, as they would be on a Strat, and the differences in their shading are pretty subtle. Neither tone overly cuts back the high-end, and in use either you ignore these or perhaps just pull one or both back to subtly shape the overall tone and leave as is. Neither is as useful as a faster-to-use standard rotary tone, but then not everyone uses that, either.

If all this switching and tone manipulation isn’t enough, there’s still the ATN 5. Again, think of this as a ‘global’ control that filters and thins the sound progressively as you move through the four positions (it’s bypassed in position 1, fully clockwise).

From the off position to the fully anti-clockwise notch, there’s really quite an increasing difference and it seems to benefit from pulling back the volume control a little, actually giving the ATN sounds a little more clarity.

It’s really like a pickup-voicing control, pulling the sounds back to lighter shades, and at the extreme an almost electro-acoustic strummy response. Would you use all these sounds? On a function gig, perhaps not, but for the recording guitarist, not to mention any ’60s-aimed stylist, there’s considerable potential here.

The Astrostar is a lot simpler, aping the Stratocaster with a Jaguar-like bass-cut switch. So, unlike the outline, the voice is more familiar: single coils but not lacking in output, with good definition and depth. They’re lively sounding, too, with thickness and plenty of percussion.

There’s a bit of a ‘clonk’ if you hit any of the pickups with your pick, suggesting they’re not overly potted, and we suspect the covers are also helping to pull back any excessive highs. They seem quite ‘quiet’ for single coils, too, in terms of pickup hum, and in the two mixed-pickup positions they’re hum-cancelling.

The bass-cut does what it says and really does thin the sound, not least when the volume is rolled back a little. Useful? With old-style fuzz, it certainly produces some wiry sounds and it’s quite a throwback tool if you’re chasing authentic ’60s garage tones.

Both guitars have vibratos, but they are rather different. The Galactica’s has a push-in arm and works really smoothly for light shimmers. Once its strings are stretched, it holds its tuning pretty well, too. The Astrostar’s vibrato – which has a screw-in arm but with no swing-tension adjustment – needed a little help.

Even without using the vibrato it wasn’t keeping in tune, so running a nut file over a couple of too-tight nut grooves and adding some lubrication quickly fixed that and kept things in pretty good tuning, for light vibrato shimmers certainly.

There’s more range to the Astrostar’s vibrato: under a thick backplate you see there are three springs and it’s that lower string anchor bar that actually pivots against the top plate. It’s quite different from the top-loading offset vibrato of the Galactica. With its shorter scale, we’d be tempted to ship this one with 10s.

As ever, the string length from the bridge to the string anchor on the Galactica, like a good offset, adds appealing overtones, which are less apparent on the Astrostar.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

There’s an appealing retro vibe in this pair, inspired by Höfner and Univox builds from back in the ’60s. Neither aims to clone the originals, and the Galactica has considerable tweakability in terms of the diverse sounds it can produce.

The Astrostar is a pretty radical-looking offset guitar with fewer sonic options but strong, clear and big-sounding single coils.

The vibrato and overall tuning needed a little minor help, and with its shorter scale we’d be recommending some heavier strings. But it’s quite the space-age looker, while the Höfner-inspired Galactica is a little more familiar and, sounds aside, more conventional.

It’s not just the looks: the core sound of both guitars is really strong. The Galactica’s mini-humbuckers have a punchy and focused voicing that’s good for a lot of styles, from ’60s clean with a little grit to dirty blues, roots rock and Americana – these are all areas that the Astrostar fits perfectly, too.

Guitar World verdict: If these REVO models aim to offer something a little different, with vibey and diverse sounds for not a lot of money, well, they succeed!

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.