There are millions of S-Style guitars out there and the Cort G290 Fat ii is a mid range priced S-Style with a HH format that is a reliable workhorse guitar. Read on to find out more.
For those of you who come to my gigs. you will be familiar with The Druid aka my mate Andrew Keen. Over this past year we have been avidly devouring guitar based videos and reviews and a couple of weeks ago I got a text from him saying that he had watched Darrell Braun's review of the Cort G290 Fat ii guitar.
Years ago I had heard that Cort had a reputation for poor workmanship but I had no experience of them until I purchased my PRS SE Starla which of course is made for PRS under license by Cort. The workmanship on the Starla was amazing so when Drew texted me to say that he had watched the above video and then placed an order on impulse, I knew it had to be good and I couldn't wait to get my hands on one.
The Cort G290 ii: What did I think?
Drew brought his guitar round last Friday and I plugged it into my Boss Nextone Artist Amp.
The video below shows Drew playing some riffs...
Here are the specs of the Cort G290 Fat ii electric guitar taken from the Cort website.
CONSTRUCTION | Bolt-On |
|---|---|
BODY | Alder |
NUT WIDTH | 1 21/32" (42㎜) |
TOP | Flamed Maple |
NECK | Roasted Maple |
FRETBOARD | Roasted Maple |
FRETS | 22 |
SCALE | 25.5" (648㎜) |
INLAY | Black Dots w/ Luminlay Side Dots |
TUNERS | Cort® Staggered Locking Tuners |
BRIDGE | Cort® CFA-III Tremolo |
PICKUPS | Cort® Voiced Tone VTH77 Pickup Set |
ELECTRONICS | 1 Volume & 1 Tone, 5 Way Switch |
HARDWARE | Chrome |
STRINGS | D'Addario® EXL120 |
SPECIAL | Graph Tech® Black TUSQ Nut |
What I thought about the Cort 290 Fat ii guitar.
When I picked this guitar up, in my head I was expecting a guitar that would suit a 'shredder' better. The bolt-on roasted maple neck has a compound radius fretboard that encourages fast lead lines with a radius of 12" at the first fret leading to a 15.75" radius at the other end. To be fair, this guitar felt lovely to play. Very comfortable and the back of the neck felt smooth and would definitely not be sticky after a few hours of playing at a gig.The fretboard edges are rounded and the fretwork was high quality. This thing even had locking tuners and the tuning stability was rock solid.
The body was comfortable to play with and looked stunning with its flamed maple veneer (it comes in three colours).
The two point trem did it's job perfectly and the five way switch gave me a load of different humbucking and single coil tones (positions 2 and 4 coil tap the humbuckers).
There was only a couple of things that I didn't like about the guitar that I played:
1) The routing around the pickups, whilst neat, just looked unfinished to me, I would have like to have seen some pickup rings for a guitar of this price, but at the end of the day, I would prefer this than say not have the locking tuners. I guess Cort had to compromise on some things.
2) The guitar strings were a set of nines and I just don't like nines, I always go for tens but this is subjective and of course you can change them.
It sounded good and I found that I would have liked more time on it than I had.
The tones I got were good enough for most of the riffs I played but I felt that the clean tones lacked clarity and the distorted tones were a little flat for me. This could be to do with my amp, but my Starla sounds sublime through my Nextone so I do think that it is more to do with the guitar. They weren't bad tones but subjectively I just didn't get too excited.
On Gear4Music the guitar costs £599 which I don't think is a bad price at all for a guitar with this level of specification.
Would I buy it? Nah, it isn't for me. Not because it isn't a great guitar and not because I didn't like it, but I already have a PRS Starla which just seems to put me in heaven every time I play it, I didn't get the same vibe off the Cort G290 Fat ii... but you might!
It is definitely worth checking out and I know that there are some good deals knocking around which are as low at £329, so at this price it is a no brainer if you are looking for an S-Style HH rock guitar.
Please note that I do use affiliate links in this article that may pay a small commission that helps me with my costs of writing articles.
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