Chase Bliss and Bilt Guitars have joined forces for a custom offset electric guitar that has an onboard guitar amp and speaker – and a Chase Bliss’ Habit Echo Collector circuit integrated with its design.
The Chase Bliss x Bilt custom build is a 100 per cent one-off that is being raffled to support Friends Who Stutter, the US non-profit dedicated to empowering young people who stutter and their families.
It’s a good cause and an awesome guitar. We’d say we’ve seen nothing quite like it, and in a sense that would be true. This is wholly unique. And yet this is the sort of bonkers instrument you might expect from these two brands working together.
We all know and love Chase Bliss for its super inventive stompboxes. We all know Bilt for their boutique customisable electrics, a spec sheet is a moveable feast, and for being one of the few companies in the business who have a guitar with onboard effects available at all times in their core lineup, making the Revelator the the choice for the most adventurous players out there.
Sarah Lipstate, aka Noveller, plays one with onboard fuzz, pitch-shifter, delay and reverb – which is ostensibly a whole pedalboard integrated into the guitar’s design.
This collaboration is similarly jaw-dropping, not least because the Habit blew our minds when it was launched as a pedal. As per the Chase Bliss design protocol, the Habit could be called a delay but was very much more.
Chase Bliss call it an Echo Collector, a delay with a memory. We called it “an all-in-one delay pedal, looper, sampler and musical sketchpad” upon the Habit's launch in March 2022. So you could call this raffle prize “an all-in-one electric guitar, delay pedal, looper, sampler, musical sketchpad, amp and speaker.”
“It’s going to be tough for me to give up this guitar,” says Joel Korte, founder of Chase Bliss. “I’ve become very attached to it, but it is so fun to have the controls and the dip-switches all right there. You have it at your fingertips.”
It looks like it has the neck of an S.S. Zaftig and a body taken from Bilt’s Revelator plus effects lineup, but then Bilt’s M.O. is to make its electric guitars so customisable that it is hard to tell where one design ends and another begins.
What is safe to say is that there is no other guitar like this on the market. It is crazy, wacky, nuts… It’s banana yellow, too. It’s like something you would have wanted to take on the Beatles Yellow Submarine (could you imagine what George Harrison would have done with this thing!?)
But it’s also functional custom boutique. Eagle-eyed offset fans will spot some choice aftermarket hardware here in the form of a Mastery vibrato.
“Believe it or not this guitar has a little amplifier in it, and this is a little speaker right here between the pickups, so you can actually play it like this,” and with that, Korte shows us that the electric guitar does still have some evolving to do when it comes to teasing new sounds out of a solid piece of wood with magnetic pickups and steel strings.
If you want to be in with a chance of winning this bespoke doozie, simply make a donation at Friends Who Stutter and send proof of donation to Chase Bliss (chaseblissdonations [at] gmail.com).
Or alternatively write Chase Bliss a short note on how you can support the efforts of Friends Who Stutter. Entries will be filed on a spreadsheet, and close just before midnight on 3 April, whereupon the winner will be chosen at random (Chase Bliss no doubt has a dip-switch to randomise the outcome).
You can donate to Friends Who Stutter here, and find out more about what the Habit does for your sound at Chase Bliss.
