The guitar that could replace your entire collection!

“Unparalleled tonal versatility, unique playability.”

That’s the first thing you read when you visit the Relish Guitar’s website. Unparalleled tonal versatility, unique playability. Yea, that sounds about right.

Relish is a Swiss guitar company that’s not very well known in New Zealand. I had never heard of them before. I stumbled across the guitar while browsing Trademe (New Zealand’s version of eBay) and Conway from Guitars Rock was nice enough to bring it around for me to check out. I’m always down to play interesting instruments and this one has the potential to single-handedly replace my entire guitar collection!

Wood with benefits

Looking through the Relish Mary A One.

Most guitars are made out of wood. The Relish Mary A One I tried is also made out of wood; but wood with benefits. The entire back of this guitar is removable and attached to an aluminium frame via magnets. You can actually see through the guitar if you look at it carefully from the side.

On their website, Relish explains that this floating aluminium frame sandwiched between two high-pressure veneers is similar to the principals behind how a piano is designed. They explain that the ‘rubber rings around the magnets make sure the middle layer can vibrate as freely as possible.’ This is supposed to give the guitar a unique sound and extensive sustain. It sounds great both unplugged and through the pickups, but I didn’t notice a hugely significant difference between the guitar I reviewed and any other high-end electric guitar. Regardless of how it’s constructed, I expect an expensive guitar to have a great sound and decent sustain.

The Relish Mary A One is surprisingly heavy for a guitar you can actually see through. I’ll admit, I haven’t been hitting the gym as much as I probably should have been recently, but I had thought a guitar that is mostly hollow would be much easier to pick up than my Tele. Having said this, the Mary A One isn’t actually a heavy guitar. If you’re doing a home workout, you’d probably use for your warm-up set before you getting stuck into bicep curls with your Les Paul. 

Bamboo is the perfect fretboard wood

I mentioned that the Relish Mary A One was made out of wood with benefits. On their website, they make a big deal of these benefits in regards to the neck; a bent neck which they claim is almost unbreakable and a fretboard that is made of bamboo. The Relish website describes a woven bamboo fretboard that is married to the maple neck. They say this adds a wealth of sustain and tone, is extremely resilient to changes in humidity, and requires very low maintenance. It’s hard to judge all this from only playing it once, but it did look good and felt great to play. 

The fretboard looks like palisander and plays like ebony (https://relish.swiss/innovation/bamboo-fretboard/).

Points for a piezo with secret features

The neck is a good size and feels at home in your hand, regardless of whether you’re playing through the magnetic pickups or using the piezo. I’m not a huge fan of trying to recreate an acoustic sound on electric guitars that feel nothing like their more-traditional counterparts. However, the size of the neck on the Relish Mary A One makes sense in piezo mode.

The piezo has a mid-boost system that is hidden behind a push-pull knob. We only discovered this while I was playing it. The previous owner had the guitar for years and didn’t even realise it was there! Engaging the mid-boost changes the tone in a way that reminds me of the difference between a cedar and spruce top acoustic guitar. I preferred how it sounded with the mid-boost engaged, but the fact that it’s there gives you a ton of options in regards to tone!        

The world’s most versatile guitar?

I’ve played a lot of electric guitars in my life so far, including quite a few with interesting switching systems. In my opinion, the Ibanez AZ series (specifically the HSS) has the most versatile pickup switching system I’ve ever seen, allowing you to get all the main pickup configurations we’re used to.

The Ibanez AZ switching systems allows you to dial in all the classic guitar pickup configurations (https://www.ibanez.com/usa/products/detail/az2204b_00_01.html).

The only way you possibly get more versatile than the system in the AZ would be if you could swap out the actual pickups on the fly. And, on Relish guitars you kind of can. Pop the back off, pull the pickups out, and replace them with a flavour more appropriate for the next song. Maybe this is as versatile as you can get? I didn’t have any of Relish’s other offerings to test, but on their site you can explore the whole range of pickups that can be bought and swapped with the ones shipped in the guitar. 

The Mary A One also has one of the most unique pickup switching systems I have ever seen. A 17 position LED touch strip. This switch is unusual and definitely has its pros and cons, but in my opinion, the pros outweigh the issues I had with the system. On a regular 5-way pickup selector switch you have to be quite intentional about which position you are selecting. However, on the touch strip, it’s a little challenging to quickly find position 13. Think of this pickup selector as a fader rather than a switch. When you start to think about it this way you realise that all of a sudden you have a lot more control in terms of blending the pickups. Personally, I’m a one volume, one tone kind of guitarist. This doesn’t give me the same level of tonal control that you get on a guitar with two of each, but it’s simple. I felt like the Mary A One went out of its way to give me the tonal versatility I was missing, while still allowing me to keep the single volume and tone setup I’m used to. The touch strip is also what you use to engage the coil-split in the humbuckers. These can be split independently of each other which - combined with the blend switch and the ability to engage the piezo - gives you a ton of options. My only criticism of the pickup selector switch being a touch strip is how difficult it is to change mid-strum. If you’ve got a good quality 5-way selector switch you can learn how to hit it to select the right position even if you’re going for something other than position one or five. But having the touch strip flush with the body means you will always have to look down to change it. If I could make one suggestion to improve this design, it would be indenting the touch strip to give it a more tactile feel. This would make switching on the fly a lot easier and get rid of the only issue I have with the system.

The inovative pickup selector touch strip on the Relish guitar (https://relish.swiss/innovation/touch-control/)

A flexible guitar

The  Relish Mary A One is certainly a polarising guitar. I feel like most guitarists are either going to love it or hate it. And, depending on what side of this fence you’re on, its biggest issue might actually be it’s the best feature. The Mary A One is flexible. We’re not talking about tonal versatility anymore; this guitar actually bends. You have to have quite a light touch while you’re playing the Relish because the slightest hug makes it sound like you’re hanging on to a Bigsby. It doesn’t have any kind of tremolo system, so you could use it’s bendiness to your advantage here. I generally have a pretty light touch when I’m playing guitar, but it still took me some time to get used to how it responded. If you’re not careful, it will sound like you’re pulling it out of tune with every chord (you can see this happening in parts of the video where my tuning is questionable).

Regardless of how you feel about Mary A One’s innovative features, Relish have built an objectively excellent guitar. The build quality is high-end and it looks and sounds awesome. The question is, would you play it?