Reverend Descent W Maple Fingerboard Baritone Electric Guitar Midnight Black

magnificent Guitar! Huge clear sound, full deep amazing baritone sound with clear soaring highs. best tremolo system iv'e ever used with the locking pegs so there's no "redundant" locking nut, so no slippage with tremolo. all easy to play, very smooth. brought out some great playing with "new" baritone range and sound plus more " familiar tremolo capabilities enabling a vast range of sounds

This is my first baritone (been playing guitar since 83). One thing that attracted me to the Descent was the scale length. At 26.75" it's the smallest scale baritone I am aware of. The other baritones I looked at had scale ranging from 27 to 30" (note: a Strat is 25.5" and most basses are 34"). When I first tried the Descent it felt very natural to me. In comparison I tried another baritone with a 29.75" scale, and it almost felt like a mini-bass in that my left arm was stretched out much more noticeably when playing lower frets. Because of that difference in feeling, the scale length was a crucial factor to me. The hard part was picking between the Descent W (aka HC or HC90) and the Descent RA. The W has P90 pickups and a Wilkinson trem, and the RA has humbuckers and fixed bridge. What I really wanted was a hybrid of the two: the Wilkinson trem, a humbucker in the bridge and P90 in the neck. Since the W variant had two out of the three, I went with that to start. The P90s were smoother sounding than anticipated and I was pleasantly surprised by the versatility of tones from them. The bass countour control is helpful for dialing the resonance back if needed but I like it on full most of the time. Clean tones were crystal clean and I really enjoyed playing everything from super-processed 80's tones (imagine hair metal clean guitar but with more oomph), chicken pickin, and retro surf inspired tones. Adding a sprinkle of gain to the mix and I was able to get tones that worked well for blues, and increasing the gain more allowed tones suited for retro heavy rock. Ultimately, I did swap out the bridge pickup for a Railhammer humbucker, and now I can play high gain metal riffs on it more cleanly, and overall it's more versatile now. If you plan on only playing metal (and can do without the trem bar), I say go for the RA model. If you want more retro tones, I say go with the W aka HC model. Or you can get creative like me :) Either way, I'm having too much fun!