Fusing influences from pawn shop prize to 1970s Fender and more, the El Hombre is both bold and familiar.
El Hombre. Spanish for “The Man.” It’s a handle that's so heavy, so loaded, so mas macho that not even multi-gazillionaire slugger Albert Pujols wanted anything to do with it. BilT Guitars, of Des Moines, Iowa, is apparently not encumbered by such modesty. They’ve happily adopted El Hombre as the name for their latest creation—a subtly flashy, shoot-from-the-hip, humbucker-equipped solidbody that shows off BilT’s penchant for styling mixology and their capability for building beautiful playing guitars. And while it may not possess quite the in-your-face visual pizzazz that’s defined their more Fender-inspired creations and shaped to company’s reputation to some extent, it’s a guitar that speaks in many tongues, paints in about a thousand shades while packing the potential for a wicked knockout punch.
On The Air
BilT excels at left-of-center styling that’s oddly familiar and all their own. So it goes with El Hombre. It essentially traces the body profile of a ’60s Aria Diamond, a shape that will leave certain pawn shop prowlers scratching their heads and wondering where they’ve seen it before, and excite devotees of ’60s Japanese eclectica. But where the Aria Diamond had an almost minimal and delicate air with its slim single-coils and dot inlay, El Hombre gives the lines a balanced muscle car-like brawn that marries Fender, Gibson, and vintage Japanese elements. The substantial and beautifully carved headstock, which looks lifted from a Fender Starcaster, is a nice bit of visual counterweight to the long and lean but substantial alder body. But the unique fluted trapezoid inlays also contribute visual mass, as do the chrome covers of the standard-equipment Lollar Imperial humbuckers. The ’70s muscle car aura is accented by the boldly underlined and embossed “El Hombre” on the pickguard—which apart from following the contour of the pickguard in an arc, looks like it could have been lifted from the fender of a ’72 Chevy.
The hardware is top-quality stuff, including a Tone Pros tune-o-matic style bridge and stop tailpiece. And the vintage-style Kluson inline tuners help balance the heft of the large headstock.
Though it looks like an armful—and when you do hang El Hombre over your shoulders you’ll notice a very pronounced length to the whole thing—the guitar’s contours make it as comfortable against your body and picking hand forearm as a Stratocaster.
El Hombre’s bolt-on maple neck feels fast and sweet and marries the feel of a chunkier ‘60s Fender c-shape with that a more contemporary flatter-radiused length of fretboard. The setup on El Hombre is excellent—set for a low-medium action that makes complex chords feel easy and facilitates fast picking—and the fit and finish of El Hombre is superb.
Big, Responsive, Touch Sensitive
Though it looks bossy (and boss) El Hombre’s name makes the most sense when you turn it up. This guitar sounds big whether you’re wired to a little Fender Blues Jr. or a Bandmaster and a 4x12. The 24.75” scale, the great setup, and the guitar’s nicely balanced mass give El Hombre impressive acoustic presence, resonance and sustain, and a simple E chord rings with lingering harmonic richness without the help of an amp.
Once you do plug in, though, El Hombre is a study in what a nice slab of wood, careful construction, and a great set of humbuckers can mean in sonic terms. The Lollar Imperials are a perfect match for the alder El Hombre, with an uncommonly wide range and responsiveness that make this guitar effective and expressive in countless situations—especially if you’re willing to tinker freely with the volume and tone knobs.
With the bridge pickup engaged, and volume and tone maxed, the Hombre and the Imperials speak in a detailed, super-dimensional voice you don’t hear from a lot of humbuckers—particularly when you thump the low E string and let it rumble. There’s not a hint of muddiness, simple chords burst with overtones, and the excellent string-to-string definition make the guitar a dream for jangly arpeggios and speedy lead work that benefit from great from a more focused sonic picture. Encounters with pickups that are this hi-fi and full of character are rare. And El Hombre’s playability, balance, and attitude invite you to dig in and explore every facet.
Rolling off the tone and volume a touch doesn’t cost you much in terms of harmonic content. El Hombre’s alder body, the Imperials, and some very responsive pots help the guitar retain brightness and detail that can help you work around vocals and dynamics within a song or arrangement without a sacrifice in character. The combination of El Hombre’s alder-toned personality and the Lollars also create a slightly and pleasingly compressed voice that also works beautifully with a little additional pedal compression or overdrive. Even if El Hombre gave you just the bridge pickup to work with, it would be an astonishingly colorful guitar.
Ratings
Pros:
Stunning, harmonically rich, wide-range pickups. Excellent build quality. Extraordinarily versatile.
Cons:
Just a bit expensive.
Tones:
Playability:
Build:
Value:
Street:
$1,650
BilT Guitars
biltguitars.com
The manner in which El Hombre and the Imperial in the neck position match up makes the guitar a superstar of versatility. Though the neck pickup lacks a little of the range of the bridge pickup (you lose a fair bit of detail with the tone knob all he way back, unlike, say a good 335) keeping the tone knob somewhere between halfway up and full enables you to explore a tone spectrum that runs from bright-and-mellow Jim Hall tones to slow-burn Peter Green zones.
The Verdict
El Hombre is about as solid, practical, and expressive as a humbucker-fitted solidbody guitar can be. And while the Japanese pawn-shop/’70s Fender/Firebird fusion styling is bound to estrange some, it’s a beautiful and balanced design that has loads of practical merit and marks a welcome departure from the more familiar solidbody templates. The alder body, careful construction, and Lollar Imperial pickups make El Hombre a great match for high-headroom and smaller Fender-style amps, which showcase it’s many harmonic shades, and Vox- and Marshall-style circuits that highlight its hot-headed, stinging and singing side.
At $1,650, El Hombre is hardly a bargain-priced instrument. But it matches up or exceeds the performance of a lot of comparably configured and comparably priced humbucker-equipped solidbodies. And given how good this guitar sounds outside price constraints it qualifies it’s worth every bit of the coin if you can spare it.
It’s almost over, but there’s still time to win! Enter Stompboxtober Day 30 for your shot at today’s pedal from SoloDallas!
The Schaffer Replica: Storm
The Schaffer Replica Storm is an all-analog combination of Optical Limiter+Harmonic Clipping Circuit+EQ Expansion+Boost+Line Buffer derived from a 70s wireless unit AC/DC and others used as an effect. Over 50 pros use this unique device to achieve percussive attack, copious harmonics and singing sustain.
Does the guitar’s design encourage sonic exploration more than sight reading?
A popular song between 1910 and 1920 would usually sell millions of copies of sheet music annually. The world population was roughly 25 percent of what it is today, so imagine those sales would be four or five times larger in an alternate-reality 2024. My father is 88, but even with his generation, friends and family would routinely gather around a piano and play and sing their way through a stack of songbooks. (This still happens at my dad’s house every time I’m there.)
Back in their day, recordings of music were a way to promote sheet music. Labels released recordings only after sheet-music sales slowed down on a particular song. That means that until recently, a large section of society not only knew how to read music well, but they did it often—not as often as we stare at our phones, but it was a primary part of home entertainment. By today’s standards, written music feels like a dead language. Music is probably the most common language on Earth, yet I bet it has the highest illiteracy rate.
Developed specifically for Tyler Bryant, the Black Magick Reverb TB is the high-power version of Supro's flagship 1x12 combo amplifier.
At the heart of this all-tube amp is a matched pair of military-grade Sovtek 5881 power tubes configured to deliver 35-Watts of pure Class A power. In addition to the upgraded power section, the Black Magick Reverb TB also features a “bright cap” modification on Channel 1, providing extra sparkle and added versatility when blended with the original Black Magick preamp on Channel 2.
The two complementary channels are summed in parallel and fed into a 2-band EQ followed by tube-driven spring reverb and tremolo effects plus a master volume to tame the output as needed. This unique, signature variant of the Black Magick Reverb is dressed in elegant Black Scandia tolex and comes loaded with a custom-built Supro BD12 speaker made by Celestion.
Price: $1,699.
Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is one of the loudest guitarists around. And he puts his volume to work creating mythical tones that have captured so many of our imaginations, including our special shoegaze correspondent, guitarist and pedal-maestro Andy Pitcher, who is our guest today.
My Bloody Valentine has a short discography made up of just a few albums and EPs that span decades. Meticulous as he seems to be, Shields creates texture out of his layers of tracks and loops and fuzz throughout, creating a music that needs to be felt as much as it needs to be heard.
We go to the ultimate source as Billy Corgan leaves us a message about how it felt to hear those sounds in the pre-internet days, when rather than pull up a YouTube clip, your imagination would have to guide you toward a tone.
But not everyone is an MBV fan, so this conversation is part superfan hype and part debate. We can all agree Kevin Shields is a guitarists you should know, but we can’t all agree what to do with that information.