There are guitars, and then there are GUITARS! Jaros Guitars are GUITARS!

Talking to David Weiler, now owner of Jaros is like talking to any committed man. He is excitable and on the verge of spilling too many facts about his fine instruments.

David bought Jaros Guitars from Jim Jaros, who made his first guitar in 1996. David, in his own words, explains how he encountered Jaros Guitars. "I was just an attic picker looking for his dream guitar when I came across a nice description of Jaros Guitars on the Internet. I figured that if the sound of an electric guitar has anything to do with its design and construction, then a Jaros guitar must sound fantastic, and so I bought one. It was love at first pluck, and I thought that maybe I should get another. Instead, I ended up buying the company. (Somehow, it's easier to tell your wife that you just bought a new guitar when you own the company that makes them.)"

David goes on the say that Jim Jaros is still the guiding light of the company.

I received this Jaros Nashville a few days ago and have been assessing it. The first thing about this guitar is that it is one of a kind, from pickups and hardware to the color, which is a blue/green/teal/aqua and stunning. I'll call it Alien Sea Teal.

The first thing about this guitar is the exquisite workmanship. It is as clean as a freshly minted coin and detailed. The frets are jumbo, the neck is just right for me and the feel is luxurious.

The Jaros is built with a unique three quarter tenon, neck-through-body design, where the neck extends deep into the body of the guitar. With this design, the guitar's bridge, tuning pegs, nut, pickups & fingerboard are all connected to a single piece of crafted tone wood, producing amazing resonance, attack, and sustain. This design also makes the instrument remarkably stable, and affords us the luxury of opening acoustic chambers within the body of the guitar, enhancing tone quality, and resulting in a guitar that is light weight and truly comfortable to play.

The above, taken from the Jaros website, does make for a very stable feel and incredible tone, coupled with the chambered body makes for a lively sound acoustically, and I will always strum an electric guitar un-amplified first, to see what kind of connection there is with the strings and the body.

Further, the pickups are directly coupled to the neck thru tonewood rather than being suspended in a pickup housing. Regardless of what you think, material and pickup, directly coupled offers a more substantial construction. Many ideas merge into a Jaros to produce a great tone and sustain.

This guitar is a one-of-a-kind in that the pickups and tremolo tailpiece are a first time for Jaros.

The Drop-D is a new idea from them for the guitarist that drops the 6th string to "d." Regardless of if you use drop-d or not these are fantastic pickups with a clear bell tone and gorgeous distortion. Taken from the Lace website: "The is the industry's first pickup that has been designed specifically for the drop "D" tunings and ultra high gain rock music. A totally re-designed pickup to help solve the common complaints of muddy and mushy tones, loss of single note articulation, while enhancing the guitar's own unique personality."

A more succinct description from Lace's website: "We used slightly less magnetic than stock vintage pups - this helps cure the excessive loose string vibration (caused the Drop Tuning) from overdriving the signal. We mismatch the coils, so in the bridge pickup the one 15.1k coil of the 2 drives the pup hard and the other 9.0k coil pulls out the necessary articulation."

"Our unique patented sensor design allows us to mismatch our coils. This can only be slightly altered in a standard humbucker or the hum canceling effects will be lost."

"Our pickups are single coil, with very little hum, so when we combine them in a humbucker pickup, we can greatly increase its dynamic range without adding noise, thus making the Lace "Drop and Gain" pickup unique in design, tone and functionality."

"This neck pickup will give you that big, fat, over wound humbucking sound. It is one killer neck pickup. Not used solely for "Drop and Gain" work. Also used in baritone guitars and with standard tunings. They work well for all types of musical styles."

It is quite true what Lace says. These are very clear and articulate pickups. The distortion is luminous; the clean sounds are bell like. This type of sound can be utilized in any style of music. I played on the front pickup, my own strange renderings of some jazz standards, rolled off the treble and it was extremely sweet.

Further, I used the Kahler 2200 tremolo tailpiece, with distortion and drove the guitar in my strange renderings of heavy metal grimaced glory and the pickups wailed. I suppose the sound is also due to the construction features of the Jaros as it is built for tone, sustain and stability.

Getting down to brass, therefore, musical tacks, the guitar intones up and down the neck with the Earvana Compensated Tuning Nut.

This from the Earvana Site: "We have perfected the correct degree of compensation at the nut and the bridge needed to achieve a total balance throughout the entire fret board. This results in string compression whereby extending the break off point at the nut flattens the intervals from the nut to the 12th fret."

"By moving the bridge forward, it sharpens the intervals from the bridge to the 12th fret. This is where the comparison to tuning like a piano comes in. Lower notes on a piano are flattened progressively more from middle C to the lower register, and sharpened progressively more from middle C to the higher register."

There is a tremendous amount of innovations and premium components to talk about on the Jaros Guitar. This particular guitar uses a blend knob and a stacked tone control.

From Jaros website: Blend Control Configuration: "The Blend Control configuration utilizes a blend control knob to mix the output from your bridge and neck magnetic pickups. This gives you the versatility to play either pickup independently, and to also have easy access to the full spectrum blended combinations. This blend control is accompanied by a Master volume super-pot from RSGuitarworks and a push-pull tone control pot that gives you the option of playing the magnetic pickups in either humbucking or single coil mode."

"Dual Volume Control Configuration; The Dual Volume Control Configuration will appeal to those who like the controls of a standard Gibson Guitar. Each of the 2 magnetic pickups has their own super-pot from RSGuitarworks to control the volume for each pickup independently. The third knob is a push-pull tone control pot that gives you the option of playing the magnetic pickups in either humbucking or single coil mode. A three-way toggle switch is added to this configuration to provide easy selection of each individual pickup, and to select both simultaneously."

This blend knob is a wonderful idea although it is slower than a quick flip of the wrist on a toggle switch. But what a wonderful idea, not original (there is really almost nothing new under the sun), and very effective when you want a bridge pickup softened or a neck pickup brightened.

Finally the capacitors are from Alessandro, another premium component, which just adds to the package.

I'll be getting more of these fine guitars for all of us. This one just went as soon as I showed it.

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