Want a guitar with top-notch tone, looks, materials and playability, and with an affordable price tag to boot? Then go for the gold – the Cort Gold-A6 acoustic, that is.
“This is a great guitar at a great price,” says guitar ace, in-demand session player and popular YouTuber Pete Thorn.
And indeed it is. For starters, there’s the all-solid build, consisting of a Sitka spruce top and African mahogany back and sides. The top, Pete points out, “goes through a torrefication process” – Cort calls it Aged to Vintage – “to make it sound like an old piece of wood, like it’s been aged and worn in.”
There’s also a mahogany neck and a Macassar ebony fingerboard that’s “really beautiful,” Pete says, and “shares a lot of the sonic properties of rosewood.”
Another cool feature? “The bracing is scalloped like old-school-style Martins and Gibsons were,” Pete says. “It’s quite narrow, thin bracing, and doesn’t have the great big round bracings I see in a lot of modern acoustic guitars. To me, if you can get away with a little less bracing it just seems to let the whole guitar ring and speak better.”
Pete goes on to point out that the “sides of the fingerboard and the fret edges are rolled, which lends a really broken-in and nice feel” to the neck, and there’s also a “thin UV finish, which helps to not dampen the guitar’s vibration too much and helps with the tone.”
Want more? “The neck is reinforced by walnut strips on the inside to keep it nice and strong and straight and true, and the body shape is a Grand Auditorium, right in between a Dreadnought and a Grand Concert, and it’s got a great cutaway, which is terrific for getting all the way up the neck,” Pete says.
And then there’s the Fishman Flex Blend pickup/preamp system, which offers a wide range of sonic control along with a built-in tuner.
The system offers Volume, Tone, Phase, Blend and Tuner functions, and, Pete says, “one thing that’s cool is you actually can hold down the tone control and it flips the phase of the output of the guitar” – a nice trick to help eliminate feedback on a stage.
Pete’s final opinion? The Cort Gold-A6 “is a really, really nice acoustic guitar for substantially under $1,000. It sounds terrific, the built-in electronics work great, they’re nice and simple to use and yet really natural sounding with the microphone.
“It’s a really pretty guitar, too. Really tasteful and understated, not too ornate and not too ‘plain jane’ either. I really like that.”
To try out the Cort Gold-A6 for yourself, head to Cort Guitars.
