Revelation Guitars' Marrakesh Quarter Note: Microtonal fun on a budget

13 Nov 2017 by Jef | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Revelation Marrakesh Quarter Note guitar · Source: Revelation Guitars

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The Marrakesh Quarter Note guitar is the latest offset design by Revelation Guitars. The company was founded by British ‘Guitar-Guru’ Alan Entwistle, the man that gave us a pretty successful line of guitar pickups. But in recent years Alan has moved towards making budget guitars that offer cool features – and this looks to offer something pretty unique indeed.

Revelation Marrakesh

What caught my eye about this guitar was, of course, its offset design. Anyone that reads my articles frequently will know I am a fan of the offset guitar style. Well, I have been watching Revelation Guitars and their budget lines for some time. The firm has, for example, issued a 12 string instrument for under £300, which also sounds like a lot of fun.

The Marrakesh sounds lime a genuinely interesting design because it has a ‘microtonal’ fret system on the regular length guitar neck. If you look closely at the fretboard you will notice there are 7 extra frets amongst the ones you would expect on a regular guitar neck, placed between positions 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12 and 14. This allows quarter notes to be fretted and played, which makes for some very interesting scale patterns and fingerings.

This opens up the world to more Arabic and North African music styles, where these quarter tones are commonplace.

Specifications

The main body is made from Okoume and is finished in a rather plain brown which they call Sand Storm. It’s fitted with a C-Shape, 25.5″ regular ‘Fender’ scale length maple neck outfitted with a Lignum-Rosa fretboard fitted with those all-important extra frets to achieve its microtonal tuning.

The pickups are a pair of Entwistle X90 Ceramic P90-style single coils controlled by a three-way toggle and a 5-position rotary switch, the latter accessing the ATN circuit. This is, essentially, a set of preset tone stacks. Plus, you get a regular Tone and Volume control as well. Sounds lime a lot of variety from one guitar.

The Marrakesh also has a vintage-style tremolo with six saddles and matching vintage-styled machine heads as well. This all sounds like a lot of fun and honestly, if I could actually get to hear one then I would be tempted to go out and buy one myself, but as yet I cannot find any audio demos online.

RRP – GBP 229.99