Lerxt Amps collaboration with Canadian guitar brand is really delivering the goods for Rush fans, and having “reimagined” his iconic Hentor Sportscaster earlier in 2024, it has now brought us Grace, a true replica of the original electric guitar.
A limited edition run, with all 200 instruments available solely via online gear retail giant Reverb, this is what many people of when they think of Lifeson’s Sportscaster, and it has been designed and launched to celebrate 40 years of Rush’s 1984 classic Grace Under Pressure.
We have the red finish – sorry, ‘Red Sector A’ finish – plus the mirrored pickguard, which, Lifeson jokes, “comes in handy for late night sessions when you need, um, to check, ah, your hair or something”.
And as you would expect from a Lifeson signature guitar, we have the versatility, too, with a Mojotone Lerxst humbucker at the bridge, a pair of Mojotone Lerxst single-coils at the middle and neck positions.
These custom-wound Mojotone electric guitar pickups are controlled with a three-way toggle switch, mounted on the guitar’s lower cutaway, and skirted Strat-style master volume and tone controls.
Lerxst is offering players a choice of hardware, both of which are high-end/premium. You can have this with a Vega tremolo or a double-locking Original Floyd Rose, engineered in Germany and you can be guaranteed it’ll be a super-stable platform for dive-bombing and assorted whammy bar madness. There is a set of 18:1 locking tuners to help keep things in order.
This, of course, is not a million miles away from Lifeson’s Limelight – different finish, and the pickguard on the Limelight is black. As Lifeson explained at the time, the idea behind the Limelight was not to reinvent the wheel; it was to present a modern update of the Hentor Sportscaster.
"The original Hentor brought together a mix of tone and playability that empowered me to explore sounds and styles of playing that I had never attempted before,” he said. “Ultimately these things became signature parts of my style. When the idea came to reimagine this guitar it made sense to partner with innovators like Godin who I knew I could trust to utilise the advances in technology and manufacturing skill to create something that could power a new generation of players looking to push their own boundaries.”
Grace is constructed in a similar spirit. It has a swamp ash body, with a sculpted heel to make it a little more high-performance in the upper registers.
It has a bolt-on maple neck topped with a 12” radius ebony fingerboard, housing medium-gauge stainless steel frets.
“We were blown away by the positive feedback we got from the release of Limelight earlier this year and knew that we wanted to do another one,” said Lifeson. “With Grace, we wanted to pay tribute to the 40th Anniversary of Grace Under Pressure by building off of my favorite guitar from that period and – much like Limelight – evolving the concept to create an instrument with a sound and playability that would speak to modern players.”
The Lerxst Grace is made in Canada by Godin, priced $3,999 (£3,240), and available now from Reverb.
