Build and features

Does serious amounts of mahogany equate to an awesome tone? Here, the answer would be yes! There’s very little chance of playing this exotic creature while sitting; even thrusting your thigh into the cutaway behind the bridge is forestalled by locating the jack socket there.

More grizzled readers may well take one look at the hand-painted pinstripes and body shape and remember the Jackson Roswell Rhodes, and we’d agree that there’s a connection or two. Here, though, replacing the aluminium of the RR is a huge slab of mahogany, married with a set mahogany neck that, as is usually the case with modern Washburns, features the Buzz Feiten Tuning System.

The WV is the only guitar here to feature a full-on original Floyd Rose, which adds to the tone due to its machined parts and, with a breath of genius, Washburn has also incorporated a phenolic resin fingerboard into the spec. Reminiscent of ebony, it’s very durable and is speckled with very smart pearl and abalone markers.

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