WISHLIST Rock N Roll Relics Heartbreaker Goldtop
Rock N Roll Relics Heartbreaker Goldtop £4,520
CONTACT Music Street
PHONE 01480 431222
Billy Rowe founded Rock N Roll Relics in 2005. After years treading the boards and skirting fame with his band Jetboy, rubbing shoulders with Guns N’ Roses, Poison and the other burgeoning rock and metal bands of the time, Billy decided to pour his knowledge of what made a great guitar into building them. He now runs a small team of dedicated creators of these brand-new musical ‘artefacts’.
The company’s range of instruments are inspired by legendary models of the 50s and 60s. The guitar here is a Heartbreaker Goldtop, Billy’s take on the world’s most famous single-cut archtop solidbody, and it comes in an array of finishes, with pickup types and other options readily available. While the guitar’s influence is plain to behold, it’s not a slavish copy, with the convex curve of the upper bout flattened off, the lower horn less prominent, and the headstock devoid of that famous ‘cleft’. Using African mahogany for the body back and neck, a cap of maple and a 304.8mm (12-inch) radius Indian rosewood fingerboard, the basic bones are all in place as a platform for big rock and blues tones.
Pickups on this particular model are by revered boutique maker ThroBak. Here, we see the Michigan company’s SLE-101 PAF-style humbuckers, whose slug coils are wound on Gibson’s own original winder, while the screw coils use a Leeson 101 machine. Between them they create some of the finest toned doublecoils we’ve heard, with none of the bottom-end flab that often blights modern humbuckers. P-90s are also available should you prefer that look or sound.
Rock N Roll Relics’ finishes – always nitrocellulose – are available in various levels of distress, from light to this extra-heavy version. The work is done painstakingly well, and ours really does look like it’s been gigged five nights a week for over 50 years!
We had the chance to plug the guitar into an Orange Rockerverb 50 MKIII, and boy did it rock. Clean tones are what Gibson used to call “bell-like”, inasmuch as they ring clearly and sustain sweetly. Such clarity is a great platform for creating the very dirtiest of sounds, and our Rockerverb was happy to oblige, kicking out anything from Eric through Slash, Zakk
