When I saw this Maranello ’63, up on the wall of a guitar shop, I was totally wowed by it’s looks. It was so individual and retro, so quirky and cool. Once in my hands, it’s quality also became evident. Beautifully made, with quality finishing, it has a Gibson-like neck, with lovely low action and no buzz.
The Italia Maranello '63 is a limited edition. How limited, I have no idea. It seems to have evolved from the Maranello ’61, with the most notable difference being, a P90, in the neck position
This guitar is a semi-acoustic with a compactly designed, mahogany body with a spruce top. It has a nice, vintage sunburst finish and cream binding, back and front. The set neck is of mahogany, with matching, cream binding and is C-profiled, with 22 frets and a 12" radius, rosewood fingerboard. The nut is 42.5mm/1.68 inches wide. The guitar’s scale length is 635mm/25 inches.
The bridge pick up is a Wilkinson WVC humbucker, the neck pickup, a sweetly toned W90S-P90. The 2 pickups are controlled by a 5-way switch. Postion 1 = neck, 3= both and 5= bridge. What positions 2 & 4 are, I really don’t know but they are probably my favourite sounds, particularly 2. The asymmetric headstock has Italia, Lock-In tuners, which is another quality plus to this guitar. The Italia, vibrato tail-piece, although cool in appearance and very nicely engineered, resembles in operation, a Bigsby. So don’t expect too much pitch change.
The bridge is of the roller variety and like the trem, is well made, looking and functioning perfectly well. The tortoiseshell like scratch plate, is very cool and it also holds the passive tone and volume knobs.
Having such a compact body, can often lead to the guitar’s balance being neck heavy. Seated, this is not evident. With a strap, there is a slight down-pull. But don’t worry, it doesn’t pull heavily. In fact, when I changed the strap from a thin one, to a thick, quality, leather strap, the problem was resolved. Easy!
As I said before, this guitar is very easy to play and has a nice, responsive feel. All the finishing is high quality and very accurate. This makes this a very musical guitar to play. The tones available from the pickups are pretty varied, sounding great when clean and ballsy when all cranked up. You’re not going to get a strat sound, with a HB and a P90 but you can get some very vibrant, beautifully sustaining, clean & dirty, thick and thin sounds, to suit most musical styles.
This guitar is pretty unlike all my others, in many ways but after an hour or so of playing, it felt natural, in my hands. If you love the quirky, retro style, with all the modern additions, then this Italia may be the one for you.
It’s cool, good quality, musical and very good value. You can’t complain at that.
