MusicRadar

Everybody needs a hand-tooled leather scratchplate in their lives

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• Review

Think Blade and you'll probably imagine a rather posh Strat-like guitar with an active circuit. Well, there's nothing wrong with that and certainly guitars like the RH4 offer a lot of sounds and versatility. But that very platform has meant that Blade is seen, by some, as a virtual copycat brand.

It's something that, to this writer at least, has held back the brand, along with a rather too swish, almost eighties vibe that seems a little out-of-step with a lot of the instruments used for modern music making. But this new Dayton, designed as a 'concept' by Blade founder Gary Levinson, seems different.

"We were looking to go in a totally new direction," explains Christian Hatstatt, Gary Levinson's right-hand man. "The original concept was, okay, we're going to do a new guitar, but we also wanted a signature of the famous fifties/sixties designs in terms of sound – we wanted to integrate those influences without making them too obvious: a guitar that would sound like the classics but look different."

Built in very limited quantity in Blade's Japanese custom shop, the Dayton also rekindled something of a lost art. "I re-discovered the pleasure of hand-making," says Hatstatt. "In a world of CNC machines and price-driven guitars you, as a manufacturer, spend your time on business.

"But with the Dayton, and a number of other custom shop designs you'll see next year, we went back to the traditional methods: a band saw and pin routers."

Construction

Its alder body can best be described as an offset Telecaster, the sort of shape Fender could have come up with but never did. To our eyes it works very well with Strat-style comfort contouring and generous edge radiusing.

Aside from black there's a good choice of colours – all smooth and glossy 'hand-rubbed' nitro-cellulose. The scratchplate contrasts the guitar's outline and may be a point of discussion as it, uniquely, has a "hand-tooled" leather facing. But its burgundy hue sits nicely enough with the body, fingerboard and hardware.

In fact, the Dayton has a real cool vibe about it. Take the headstock: normally adorned with the rather eighties Blade logo, here we have a simple script logo on the slightly tinted and distinctly not Fender-clone outline. There's a single, height adjustable string tree – one of many Levinson-isms, such as the cap at the base of the dark rosewood fingerboard that allows easy access to the truss rod.

The neck feels a little modern but is very well shaped into a slightly fuller 'C'; a mainstream choice that really can't be criticised, although some of us would prefer a little more meat.