While this guitar looks uptown, it'll do rock or blues with the best of them if that's your bag.

Why We Love This

From time to time Gene Baker and his crew at b3 Guitars will produce a batch of very special SL Deluxe guitars, and as you may have guessed, this is one of them. A few things assert their presence immediately - the very rare Hawaiian Mango woods used throughout the build (body, top, and neck), the archtop-style finger tailpiece, and the beautiful Ebony fingerboard (sans inlays). Flip the guitar around, and the 5-piece Mango/Mahogany neck immediately grabs your attention with its slight nod to 70s instruments.

Once you've taken the visual tour and sit down to play this 7lb 5oz beauty, you're met with an extremely lively, resonant, and musical guitar - a hallmark of all b3's. To be sure, Gene and his crew set out to build a show stopper of a guitar - but - not at the expense of the most important elements of any guitar: musicality, tone, feel, vibe....this is an incredibly fun guitar to play, no two ways about it. This is what separates the master builders from other builders in our book - the quest for beauty never overshadows the core job - to make a great sounding, great playing, and inspiring instrument. When both come together like it does with this SL? Incredible.

Loaded with Lollar P90s, you can get a range of tones from this guitar - from fat yet articulate neck tones to great P90 snarl via the bridge pickup. While this guitar looks uptown, it'll do rock or blues with the best of them if that's your bag. We could even see Languedoc fans latching on to this beauty.