Guitar Info

Let's make another exception to the implicit moral obligation we have here to not promote new models from big companies (what most so-called guitar blogs make a living from) - unless, like it is the case here, it's a real soft spot for a really cool one.

I don't know if I'm getting old but since I feel less and less receptive to pure excitement and macho display of musical skills, I enjoy playing bass more and more, so I'm looking at bass guitars more accurately. For the first time I have a real coup de coeur for one, the newly released Epiphone Triumph II. With its hollow body, F-holes and hidden pickups, it might seem devoid of any rock potential, but that's maybe what is so cool in it, its way to be one of its own, open to any music style for any musician, without forcing into anything.

Again a very good example of how you can upgrade a classical design with a little distortion - here the wide 'gipsy style' cutaway and the wooden bridge -, and keep a pure line. Then you can remember that Epiphone is not only providing democratic Gibson guitars to non-billionaire musicians (I imagine that most Gibsons are bought by fetishist old timers too old to play in a rock band ever again) but sometimes manages to keep to their glorious past by proposing nice and original hollow-bodies.

Ah, and this bass is said to be powered by 'revolutionary NanoFleax™ and NanoMag™ pickups' but I don't have the slightest idea of what this means!

OK, I made my little Gibson bashing but they make of course the best guitars and Epiphone is part of it. There was another bass called Triumph made by Gibson in the 70s that is also quite amazing. A few weeks ago GL wisely pointed how the Jolana Diamond bass was a much better Les Paul bass that Gibson ever released, but the Triumph is a brilliant LP style bass, even though it doesn't bare the name. It looks almost too good to play on it, doesn't it?

And finally this is the ultra-classic Epiphone Triumph archtop acoustic guitar designed in the 30s, when Epiphone was the direct concurrent of Gibson - who solved the issue by buying Epiphone. So I don't know if the II in Triumph II makes it a inheritor of the Epiphone Triumph guitar or the Gibson Triumph bass but it both case that is quite a legacy!

Additional: The bass has been renamed the Epiphone Zenith so as a avoid a potential trademark conflict. G L Wilson