Fibenare Basic Jazz Hollow (USED, 2021)

A NAMM show piece Basic Jazz Hollow with a violin-style soundpost under the bridge, mastergrade quilt top, and a spalted ebony board.

Fibenare is a family operation out of Kecskemét, Hungary. The Benedek brothers started building in 1990 because decent guitars were nearly impossible to get in Hungary at the time and their father told them to make their own. They now design and produce every component in-house, right down to the pickups and the bridge, and the work stands up next to anything coming out of an American custom shop.

Their fantastic Basic Jazz Hollow is exactly what the name implies - no center block, no solid slab under the pickups, just a hollow mahogany body. Ordinarily that means you get all the air and resulting bloom you'd want, and you also get a guitar that starts fighting with you the second the amp gets loud. A 335-style center block fixes the feedback issues, but it takes a lot of the air with it on the way out.

Fibenare's answer is the use of a soundpost. It's an idea borrowed from violin building - a single dowel standing between the top and the back - and here it sits directly under the bridge. That anchors the bridge exactly where all the string tension is pulling down, and couples the top and back together at that one point, while leaving the rest of the body genuinely hollow. Resonance and lightness of a hollow guitar, with the top properly supported where it actually needs to be.

The marker-free fingerboard is made from a nicely figured piece of spalted ebony. Spalting is a fungal process that leaves grey and cream marbling running through wood that's usually solid black, and finding a piece stable enough to actually use as a fretboard is not easy. It's a genuinely striking thing to look down at when you're playing.

For other specs, we've got a 24.8" scale (so right in Gibson territory) on a mahogany neck with a 9 to 12" compound radius - rounder down at the nut where you're playing chords, flatter up top where you're bending and want notes to stay where you put them.

The ALV63 pickup set is Fibenare's own, aimed at classic PAF territory with one meaningful change. Instead of a bar magnet under the coils feeding a row of screws and slugs, the ALV63 uses rod magnets, so each polepiece is doing the magnetizing itself. Fibenare describes the result as a bit silky and to our ears that's a good description. Familiar PAF warmth and midrange bark, with a smoother, more even top end and noticeably better string-to-string definition. Controls are kept simple: master volume, master tone, and a three-way toggle, into Fibenare's own wraparound bridge.