A splash of autumn colour: Solar Guitars announces new finishes for A2.6C
Blue Metallic Matte, Blood Tangerine Metallic, Gun Metal Matte and Lemon Neon!
Ola Englund’s Solar Guitars has just announced four brand new colours for its A2.6C model. It’s quite the departure from the usual flat blacks or whites. You can now order one in either Blue Metallic Matte, Blood Tangerine Metallic, Gun Metal Matte and even Lemon Neon!
A2.6C in Colour
This well-specified guitar is now available to order in four new finishes which should be shipping in September. Usually, you would associate the Solar Guitar models with a more ‘Stealth’ flat black finish and so it is good to see some more options available at last. Blue Metallic Matte, Blood Tangerine Metallic, Gun Metal Matte and Lemon Neon will now be available for you to order directly from their site.
Solar Guitars new colours for Autumn · Source: Solar Guitars
Hardware
All the standard features have been retained, including the mahogany body, maple neck, 24-fret ebony fingerboard and a string-through-body hardtail bridge. You get a single Volume and Tone control with a five-way switch to control the Duncan Solar humbuckers in the neck and bridge positions.
The price is certainly attractive. I appreciate having a few new colours to choose from, as well. Ola Englund is gradually making his guitar brand more approachable to a broader variety of guitar players. With the introduction of new colours, it should widen the appeal of this range considerably. There’s a nod towards classic ’80s Ibanez RG550 colours in there, but the range still maintains brand identity through the body carve and that Solar Guitars logo at the twelfth fret. All in all, I think these look like a good buy for anyone after a modern-looking, high-performance guitar.
RRP – EUR 649 Available from September
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5 responses to “A splash of autumn colour: Solar Guitars announces new finishes for A2.6C”
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I’m wondering if you get paid for this ad.
First off, even though you put “Duncan Solar” in bold letters, they are not designed by nor manufactured by Seymour Duncan. By calling them “Duncan Solar” Ola is implying that somehow the company Seymour Duncan from Santa Barbara, California, was involved in the creation of the humbuckers. They were not. It just so happens that Seymour Duncan never registered an international trademark for “Duncan” in guitar electronics, so the Korean/Chinese company, probably G&B, that actually manufactured the pickups put a “Duncan Solar” on the cover. At one point Ola claimed that the Duncan Solar pickups were based off an existing SD humbucker, but that’s no better than you or me bying pickup wire and magnets and claiming that our pickups were based on an SD humbucker.
Second, what makes you say that these are “high-performance” guitars? They are actually manufactured in the same factory as $300 guitars, using the same wood, same paint, same die-cast tuners, same pickups, and same process. The EUR 649 price tag is inflated due to 2 factors: shipping the guitars from Asia to Sweden, and very high taxes in Sweden. In fact, without these two the price would be and should be very much in the $300 region, i.e. at the spot where you can buy a Cort with similar build quality and features.
And lastly, the only reason why they’re now selling full-tone, non-quilted and non-flamed bodys is to cut cost and hide imperfections. As Ola and his OEM were figuring, nobody is going to drill into the body and investigate what kind of 5 different parts of scrap wood they glued together for the “new models”. If I had to take a guess I’d say that this is really a salvage operation of returned or defective bodies that they couldn’t repurpose other than giving them a new full-tone paint job.
No guitar company pays me to write news about equipment. I write based on my own opinions.
I have played the standard ‘stealth’ version of this guitar and so I would say it is a lot of guitar for the money. I take you you played one and didn’t enjoy it?
I have had more than a dozen Solar guitars in my hands, and I respectfully disagree that they’d be a lot of guitar for the money. That OEM factory where Mr Englund’s “luthiers” are mass-producing the Solars is also churning out $300 guitars with the exact same build quality and components, so if you believe that for EUR 649 that’s good value maybe you should try out a few more guitars.
By the way, your claim that “no guitar company pays me to write news about equipment” would be more credible if Gearnews weren’t owned by Thomann, and if Thomann weren’t a large distributor of Solar guitars, if not Europe’s largest. In that regard, the Imprint’s claim that Gearnews were just an “initiative of thomann.de” is at least misleading. The domain history of gearnews.com clearly shows that gearnews.com (and gearnews.de) are the property of the commercial entity named Thomann GmbH.
Hi Dane! My name’s Angus, I’m the editor of this here website. I wanted to give you my perspective as the person responsible for the content we publish here. Let me be 100% clear about this: No one writing for Gearnews is ever paid – or so much as asked – to voice any particular opinion about anything they write about, good or bad. I demand from all our contributors that they give their personal, subjective opinion about all the products we cover, based on their experience in their field. If you want proof, you should check out more of Jef’s posts. He has written some, ahem, not-so-nice opinions about gear made by a lot bigger manufacturers than Solar.
Yes, Thomann is involved as a kind of “silent partner” for our site. That makes us editorially independent of the interests of any individual manufacturer. We can give the honest opinions that other sites won’t give you for fear of upsetting them. We’re honest and our views are our own. And you are, of course, free to offer your opinion about what they write – we welcome that! Looks like you disagree with Jef about the playing characteristics, quality and price/performance ratio of Solar guitars. I think it’s great that you’re here giving our readers your perspective as someone who’s tried out a lot of Solar guitars. Maybe someone from Solar is reading this thread and taking in your opinion, too…