“This is the guitar you’ll pick up once – and never want to put down”: Kramer ups the ante with the Volante – a tricked-out S-style with Gibson-designed US pickups, AAAA quilt maple veneer and a re-engineered neck joint to enhance sustain

Kramer has unveiled the Volante, an all-new high-performance S-style electric guitar that retails from $999 and features Gibson-designed pickups, a Floyd Rose double-locking vibrato as standard, and a newly engineered KeyLock neck system.

There are options with this drop. Decisions to be made. You can get the Volante with a plain colour top. You can get it with extravagantly patterned AAAA quilt maple veneer on top. You can choose one with a pair of Kramer USA Neptune humbuckers or with a Neptune at the bridge and a Triton noiseless single-coil at the neck. Maple fingerboards are available on the solid-colour models. Ebony on the quilt maple.

Whether in Ultraviolet, Ultramarine, Magenta or Aqua, those Burst finish veneers are definitely a talking point. This model is a talking point. Yes, it’s Kramer, a shreddable six-string, another rock and metal guitar in the catalogue, but the KeyLock system that sounds most intriguing here. It could be a game-changer.

Designed by senior product development engineer Richard Akers, the KeyLock is designed to stop all movement in the neck pocket, which on the face of it sounds like an engineering solution to make a bolt-on behave more like a glued-in or neck-through build.

The Volante features a five-bolt neck joint – a little like what we see on Ernie Ball Music Man builds – with a lot of the heel cut out of the equation to enhance upper-fret access. It will be interesting to see how this performs.

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The dual-humbucker models have a five-way blade switch, volume and tone, while the humbucker/single-coil guitars have a three-way pickup selector, a push/pull function for series/parallel switching of the bridge humbucker, and volume and tone.

Now, that was a complicated and unsatisfying sentence but nonetheless tells you everything you need to know; Kramer has wired these up so you can wring every bit of tone out of the electric guitar pickups, so they can handle more than just rock and metal.

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Your next fusion guitar? Speaking to the Gibson Gazette, Kramer’s product manager, Aljon Go, suggests as much.

“We’re proud to introduce the new Kramer Volante – built for players who demand top-tier tone, feel, and versatility across every genre or style of music,” says Go. “Featuring all-new USA-made pickups developed with the Gibson Pickup Shop and a re-engineered neck joint for unmatched stability, tone, and sustain, the Volante is performance-ready from the first note. This is the guitar you’ll pick up once – and never want to put down.”

Other notable details include the 25.5” Stratocaster-length scale. There are die-cast tuners, a truss rod adjustment wheel at the top of the fingerboard, and the price includes a padded gig bag.

The Volante Quilt HHFR and HSFR is priced £1,099/$1,199. The dual-humbucker HHFR is offered in Intruder Black and Defender Red and is priced £949/$1,049. You can grab the HSGT in Angel White or Triburst, priced £949/$999. For more details, head over to Kramer.