HAGSTRUM "ULTRA SUEDE"
$650 INCLUDING A HARDSHELL CASE
I purchased this guitar new in 2009. It has never been out of my studio since I purchased it and has probably less than 1 hour of playing time on it.
REVIEW
It is just over 50 years since the first Hagstrom electric guitar rolled off the line at Hagstrom’s factory in lvdalen, Sweden, in 1958, and 25 years since production there ceased in 1983. Hagstrom’s guitar manufacturing (and the company themselves) were killed off by the cheaper Japanese-manufactured electric guitars that began flooding onto the market in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The collapse of Hagstrom left behind a legacy of 128,583 electric guitars and basses, which the significant number of Hagstrom enthusiasts out there quickly turned into collector’s items.
Inevitably, Hagstrom were just too big a name to completely disappear, but it took 22 years, a licensing deal, the Swedish company Tricor AB as distributor, and a dedicated Chinese factory to bring the old guitars back to life. Although many original machines (or their exact replicas) are used in the manufacture of modern Hagstroms and all designs are approved by Karl Erik Hagstrom himself, they aren’t exact clones of past glories.
Nowadays, woods come from North America, hardware comes from Korea, and the pickups are manufactured in Korea to K.E. Hagstrom’s exact specifications. The result is good-quality guitars at attractive price points that manage to retain many of a Hagstrom’s quirkier features: the six-block stop tailpiece, the H-Expander truss rod, the stairstep tuner buttons, and the ‘Resinator’ composite wood fretboard, which is claimed to perform better as a fingerboard ‘wood’ than either rosewood or ebony
GUITAR CONSTRUCTION
Hagstrom Swedes always were made of quality materials and this modern version is no exception. The ‘Select’ moniker means that it carries a strikingly figured, quilted maple top, and the ‘Ultra’ designation means that it eschews the Swede’s usual ‘two volume, two tone’ arrangement for a ‘single volume, single tone, plus coil tap’ setup (more of which later). The carved and figured top — finished, in this case, in a very attractive vintage sunburst — sits on a 45mm-thick, somewhat Les Paul-shaped, single-cutaway mahogany body and is edged with a flame maple binding. The body also retains the original Swede’s comfort contour at the back of the waist, so your rib cage gets a bit of relief.
The neck is mahogany, and the Resinator fingerboard — with its pearloid and real abalone position markers — also features a flame maple binding. The headstock facing is the usual modern pearloid with a black printed overlay to make it look as though it has been intricately inlaid, and the machine heads are the modern 18:1 version.
The nut is an incongruously thick-looking piece of Graph Tech’s Black Tusq composite, which isn’t well set up. Hagstrom make much of the fact that their guitars are built in a dedicated factory, but you need dedicated workers to make good guitars. On this guitar, someone wasn’t paying attention. The string height at the nut is excessive and the fret ends are well dressed on the bass side, but badly dressed on the treble side. Add excessive neck relief (that would just need a slight tweak of the famed H-Expander Hagstrom truss rod to cure), plus a bridge that’s set too high, and you’ve got a guitar that is destined to stay on a shop wall until it gets a proper setup.
The pickups are Hagstrom’s own Korean-sourced Custom 58 Alnico 5 humbuckers. On the Ultra Swede, the covers are absent, which should make them a bit brighter and more open-sounding than their covered brethren. Controls are volume, tone, three-way toggle and a coil tap, which works on both pickups simultaneously.
The hardware completes with a Tune-o-matic type bridge (which isn’t a clone of the original, but a more modern Tune-o-matic) and the uniquely idiosyncratic, metal-covered, six-brass-blocks-on-an-acrylic-plate Hagstrom stop tailpiece, originally developed for the ill-fated Patch 2000 guitar synthesizer system
PERFORMANCE
Acoustically, this Select Ultra Swede has plenty of resonance. This, combined with the open, lighter sound of the uncovered humbuckers, gives it a very attractive, distinctive and usable voice. The coil tap, as you’d expect, thins the pickups out and drops their output and gives you a single-coil vibe that sits closer to a P90 than a Strat. Tone and volume controls are as effective as you’d expect, and rolling back the volume pot a tad darkens the sound nicely.
I always liked the sound of the old Swedish-made Swedes. Although this Ultra Swede doesn’t deliver the sound that I remember, and the Super 58 humbuckers don’t have the spit and snarl of PAFs, their clarity and definition mean that this Select Ultra Swede is a very good-sounding guitar and offers a real alternative to the usual Gibson clones.
Unlike the standard Swede with its 25.5-inch scale length, the Ultra Swede is shorter at 24.75 inches, and this gives it a familiar feel. Due to the setup issues that I mentioned earlier, I can’t get enthusiastic about this particular guitar’s playability, but as I know just how comfortable a well set up Hagstrom Swede can be, I have no hesitation in recommending this model’s potential playability with a good setup.
Even set up as it is, the review guitar has loads of sustain as a result of its high acoustic resonance, sounds powerful and distinctive in humbucking mode, and in single-coil mode it offers very usable alternative voicing options for rhythm and scooped-mid lead tones.
Conclusion
All in all, the Select Ultra Swede is a well-built, good-quality guitar that, at its retail price, represents significant value for money. This particular example needs a setup, but with that done it will become an extremely playable guitar with loads of sustain. Incidentally, Hagstrom don’t charge extra for left-handed guitars, which is as it should be, and neither do they charge extra for the blonde finish variant.
Despite the niggles, I found myself really liking this Select Ultra Swede, and I’ve got absolutely no hesitation in recommending this model of guitar to you if you’ve got this kind of money burning a hole in your pocket.
As always, you need to get your hands on one, make sure that it has a decent setup and give it a blast. In an age when there are more Les Paul derivatives than you can shake a stick at, the Hagstrom Select Ultra Swede is a good-looking, good-sounding alternative and you really ought to give it a good go. Have fun!