Hello Lori

I have read your website and wanted to write you an email anyway, so I
thought, why not do both things at once and show off my guitar, too

[snip stuff for Lori]

Anyway, about my guitar:
It is a Hohner (don’t laugh, they used to make some great guitars back
in the 80ies and 90ies) Revelation RTS which is a cheaper version of a
Revelation RTX. This guitar model has an interesting history: back in
1991 Hohner wanted to surpass Ibanez and make the best shredder guitar
in the world so they hired Trev Wilkinson - a famous guitar designer and
owner of Fret King - to design the guitar and Alan Entwhistle - a
British pickup maker - to design quite interesting pickups.
Soon, the first prototype model was made - Revelation ATX. It had an
interesting superstrat shape, a set-in maple neck with an ebony
fretboard, 27 (!!!) frets, top mounted pickups Wilkinson vibrato system,
roller nut and an interesting passive pickup circuit designed to emulate
different sounds, from Strat to Les Paul.

Only a few of Revelation ATX were made because the long set neck was too
expensive for Hohner so it is nearly impossible to get this guitar.
After that the production was simplified a bit: The guitar got a pointy
pickguard, a bolt-on neck and only 24 frets and was sold as Revelation
RTX. Although the neck was bolt-on, the neck joint was the best one an
electric guitar ever had: it was mounted inside the body, not in a
separate neck pocket, and a pickup was mounted on top (you can see the
neck joint on the attached photo). This arrangement not only sounds
better, it is much more comfortable to play. Even with very short
fingers you can play up to the 24th fret without any hindrance.
The guitar still had that Wilkinson vibrato system and a roller nut - a
combination which can be abused almost as heavy as a Floyd Rose system
but is much easier to tune. The guitar was very light, about 3 kg, which
added to the comfort.

All in all the guitar was extremely playable, with the slim and fast
satin-finished neck, low action, a very well balanced body and an
interesting tone circuit providing lots of different sounds. It was not
far away from being the ultimate shredder guitar.

But after only a few thousands of them were made in Czechoslovakia,
Hohner was sued by MusicMan because of - what else - the headstock
design. Hohner redesigned the headstock, but because of the lawsuit
costs they had to make the guitar cheaper so they put cheaper tuners and
bad pickups into the guitar, simplified the neck plate and removed the
complicated tone circuit. Fortunately they kept the most important
things: the body, the neck and the vibrato system. They sold this guitar
as Revelation RTS but soon after that Hohner practically quit the
electric guitar business so they have stopped to make Revelation guitars
in 1992.

This guitar was an underdog for a long time and was sold for about 150
Euros on eBay just three years ago, but somehow the people became more
informed and now the guitars go away for 300 and more Euros.

I also bought my guitar there, about 20 months ago, for 280 Euros and,
as I am more or less a guitar technician, modified quite a lot to be
nearly perfect

First of all I have replaced the .9 roller nut with a roller nut for .10
strings. Then I have shielded the guitar properly using a lot of silver
conductive lacquer and star grounding. After 30 Euros worth of lacquer
the guitar was practically hum-free, even with those bad singlecoils it
had. I have also added a 0.33µF 400V capacitor between the strings and
the ground so I won’t get shocked by a damaged amplifier.
After that I have added a new tone circuit, basically creating two
channels in the guitar: one where the pickups are arranged in series and
the other where the pickups are arranged in parallel, and a
push-pull-pot to switch between those channels. This allows me to have
about 20 different sounds.

Later on I have added locking tuners for more tuning stability and for
more comfort when changing the strings. Even later I have replaced the crappy single coils with active single coils made by Schaller. They sound more or less like EMG S pickups.
And yes, the tone circuit is still functional with active pickups, so
all of you who say that it is impossible to put active pickups in
series, you are wrong. It works pretty well, although the tonal
difference isn’t that pronounced as with passive pickups.
My last additions were green abalone dome knobs (just for the looks),
GraphTech saddles (for a bit better tone) and Schaller security locks
because I don’t like when the strap goes off.

The guitar is nearly perfect as it is, but there is one thing I want to
modify: the guitar needs a refret job and I want to refret with
stainless steel frets - so I don’t have to refret the guitar ever again.
But I am not brave enough yet to do it - while I have a couple of strat
necks to practise I am not sure whether my tools can treat stainless steel.

I am pretty sure, that you would enjoy playing this guitar - well,
except for the colour maybe

[Lori’s note: I *love* the look of the guitar AND the color]

Btw, I have forgotten to mention three more modifications I did to this
guitar:

1) Active tone shape controller instead of the tone knob, basically an
active equalizer which gradually changes the tone shape from sad face to
a happy smiley (mid boost to presence). This is possibly the most
important addition to any guitar with active pickups so it can shape the
tone from a hot humbucker sound to piezo acoustic one.

2) Distortion controller instead of the second tone knob - with 5
positions: 1 is bypass, 2 is very very littler warmer tone, 3 is a soft
bluesy overdrive, 4 is hard rock sounding, more or less like the rat
pedal, and 5 is ultra high gain. It can be very practical when you want
to send the amp a bit more to the dark side but have no spare pedal or
when you have to plug the guitar directly into a hifi amp or mixer.

3) Rockinger Blackbox. It is a little device for taming a floating
vibrato so it will stay calm when heavy bending. The negative side is
that you need a lot more force for upbending with the whammy bar, but
since I don’t do it often (except of showing off a bit to my guitar
pupils) I thought that I could live with that

Well, if I don’t bore you yet I can write about three other strats of
mine next two or three months or so - all of them are project guitars,
assembled by myself from custom made and aftermarket parts, but they
aren’t finished (one for example literally needs clear coating) yet.

And if you ever need some advice about modifying your guitar in any way,
just write me or even better, visit the guitarnuts forum

Dunkelfalke, Germany