Grosh NOS Retro TME Blackout Series Fiesta Red/Timeworn

Grosh 'Blackout Series' - TME-spec hot-rod guitars with blacked-out hardware and vintage '80s attitude.

A lot of us here got into guitars in the '80s - when EVH had rewired what the instrument could do and builders answered by hot-rodding everything to keep up. Dive-bombs, tapping, guitar gymnastics of every stripe. We were all the way in.

Then our tastes grew. Hendrix, SRV, the icons - and one by one we traded the neon-green pointy super Strats for more traditional guitars and colors. You get older. You mature. But the soft spot for this era never fully went away.

The question became: how do you build an '80s guitar that a modern player actually wants to be seen with? We took that to Don Grosh, and he absolutely killed it. The Blackout Series is named for the black hardware those '80s guitars used - black bridge, tuners, knobs. It's an '80s-style guitar for adults basically. We'd bring it to a gig without a second thought. Maybe not the blues jam. But you could. We would - because why not?

Built on Don's NOS Retro series: alder body, maple neck, rosewood fingerboard. The hot-rod DNA lives in the 2-post tremolo, an ultra-comfortable medium roundback profile (.83–.93"), 22 6150 (medium) frets, and Don's own in-house wound humbuckers - a 302 in the neck, a Blown 79 in the bridge.

Fretwork is flawless, which is why it plays effortlessly (a Grosh hallmark) and it'll have you ripping gained-out licks in about ten seconds. Plugged in it runs from clear, mid-forward, punchy cleans to articulate high gain. We're getting nostalgic just describing it.