Back in 2014, guitarist Andy Alt nailed a successful Kickstarter to fund the production of a box-shaped pickup that's actually home to a single coil humbucker and a two pole bottom feeder pickup to give a guitar some extra low end wallop. It was only a matter of time before A Little Thunder made its way into a signature guitar, and thanks to a partnership with Italy's Marconi Lab custom shop, that guitar comes in the shape of the eye-catching Ego Thunder.
The two pole pickup of A Little Thunder adds a separate signal to a guitar's lower strings, which can be routed to a different amp to thicken the lower reaches of the instrument's tone or to make playing bass and "normal" guitar possible using the same instrument. Since making its crowdfunding debut, the design of the drop-octave pickup has been fine tuned and tweaked, with Alt adding capacitive touch control, status lights and just last month, the "D string" was opened up to the pickup's bass-pumping influence.
Now a special "Orange Drop" signature edition of Marconi Lab's Ego guitar has been revealed. The contoured alder body – or chassis – sports a black pickguard with A Little Thunder at the neck position and a Lace Deathbucker slotted in at the bridge.
The pickup selector and volume/tone controls are included on a blackened alder hearth section, while the arm section (the part of the body where your picking arm comes to rest) is also given a race orange finish. The Ego guitar design allows players to customize the chassis, hearth and arm sections to taste, though this option doesn't appear to be available for the Thunder edition.
Elsewhere, the orange guitar's strings run down a headless maple neck with an ebony fingerboard and angel eye inlays to a dual axis tremolo bridge.
The first 50 Ego Thunder guitars are priced at US$1,840, which will rise to $2,199 when those have all gone.
Source: A Little Thunder
