NAMM 2019: Ciari Announces Ascender Travel Guitar
Full-size instrument can be folded “in seconds.”
NAMM 2019: Ciari Guitars has unveiled the new Ascender, which the company touts as the “first-of-its-kind electric travel guitar.”
The full-size, 22-fret, 24 ¾” scale instrument is folded by releasing a concealed lever that relieves string tension and unlocks a hinge. The neck then folds away from the playing position. To return to full size, the user straightens the neck and return the lever to its concealed locked position, returning tension to the strings and locking the hinge.
Other features of the Ascender include a single cutaway, soft “C” style neck profile, Gotoh locking tuners and Seymour Duncan ’59 neck and bridge humbuckers. One particularly cool facet of the guitar is what Ciari calls “improved string management”: With the Ascender in travel mode, the strings remain aligned in subtle grooves built into the fingerboard at the hinge in order to keep them organized.
The Ascender was crafted in cooperation with Joe Glaser of Nashville’s Glaser Instruments and is constructed using Plek neck technology.
For more information on the Ascender, head over to Ciari Guitars.
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Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
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