About four years ago two friends looked at the range of travel guitars available and, not seeing anything that was quite portable enough, decided to make their own. Italy’s Daniele and Emanuele are now ready to share their prototype Freccia guitar in the hope of finding partners to help take the idea to production.
The Freccia project is currently the subject of a Kickstarter campaign, where the travel guitar is not being offered up as a product, but rather Daniele and Emanuele are looking for support to take the guitar to the next stage of development.
Travel guitars are often lessons in compromise. You want something that’s portable but also an instrument that offers decent playability. This can mean that body shapes are cut back or cut out, or necks are detached, folded or shortened, or makers cram amps and speakers into the body so you don’t have to carry a battery-powered combo along for the trip. The Freccia full-scale travel guitar breaks down into three components for transit – the body and a two-part neck.
Assembled, the instrument has the look of a Steinberger headless and Vox Teardrop hybrid, with the tuning system positioned behind the bridge. At this stage, the guitar has been fitted with two single-coil pickups and one humbucking, but a production model’s pickup configuration may differ. Pickup selection is undertaken using a five-way blade switch, and there’s a single combined volume/tone knob.
The most interesting feature here is the neck, with two pieces that lock together to form a 21-fret full-scale playing surface. Each component is made from non-flexible alloy to negate the need for a complicated truss rod setup, and the two pieces join between the fourth and fifth fret. The components are locked together using one mechanism where the body meets the neck and another where a headstock would normally sit.
The Freccia’s makers are keeping exactly how the guitar works and what materials are used in its construction close to their chests for the time being, but reckon that the join doesn’t affect play, and the strings will only need a minor tune-up after assembly (assuming that the guitar was in tune when collapsed for travel).