EG-1 Traveler Guitar

s plane flights become cheaper so does the amount of baggage we can take. I have always felt that musicians were unfairly treated in this way and I would rather get on a plane and arrive well rested as opposed to crawling up the highway in the middle of the night and feeling shit for the gig. Call me a wuss but hey… whatever.

Being rather sceptical about the whole “tiny traveller” guitar world I was quite surprised at how much fun and how much I actually liked the tone of this thing! First off it doesn't look like a cricket bat and it features a very nice “vintage gold” finish. You can plug headphones into it or run it into a set of little speakers, and it also has an INSANE drive unit built in and the whole thing in about the size of a violin when in its case (overhead luggage).

The only way I can describe the “headless” design of this guitar is that they cut the headstock off and placed it in the back of the guitar, thus placing the guitar tuners either side of the strings! This design doesn't make for quick tuning but it does make for a smaller design.

The neck feels quite nice and features an ebonised rosewood fingerboard with 21 frets. The single humbucker pickup in this guitar sounds magnificent! It has a clean and articulate tone that is well balanced. It isn't a ridiculous high output thing so you can get a lot more from it by running overdrives and such but I feel that the tone control could be voiced better to allow more tonal variation. I actually first tested this guitar with my headphones and was surprised (and deafened) by the built-in distortion! Make sure the guitar is turned all the way down before plugging in. The resulting tone was nothing short of incredible! It was like having instant “Billy Gibbons” tone right there inside the guitar! Amazing! The sounds were just so thick and makes for a powerful touring asset. You could arrive off your plane flight and hire an amp with reverb and tremolo and pretty much plug straight in and cut the whole gig.

Plugged into a real amp, the tone of this distortion comes out even more. I found it easy to get notes to feedback and backing down the volume doesn't actually take the drive level down - it only affects the volume of the guitar.

Big thumbs up to Haworth Guitars for making available this aesthetically pleasing and toneful traveller guitar that doesn't hurt your pride… $729 is money better spent on this than having to pay ridiculous excess baggage fees.