CORT G290 FAT II

15
MAY 2022 GUITARIST
CORT G290 FAT II
Feel & Sounds
While the guitar does veer to the generic
modern ‘SuperStrat’ side, this means it
feels instantly comfortable and familiar.
It’s a good weight for the style, slightly
heavier than the G300 Pro, but that’s not
surprising bearing in mind the different
body wood. The fretwork is superb from
a pretty standard medium jumbo wire
(approximately 2.73mm by 1.14mm high),
and aside from just needing slightly lower
string grooves in the nut, it’s hard to fault.
You might look at the spec and believe
the fingerboard is too flat for you, but it
doesn’t come across like that at all. The
fingerboard edges are lightly rolled and it
feels very similar to Fender’s Player Plus.
In terms of depth it’s pretty mainstream,
too – 21mm at the 1st fret and 23mm at the
12th, slightly thicker in the upper neck
than the Player Plus. It has what feels like a
C-meets-D profile, whose fuller shoulders
make it feel a little bigger than it actually
is. The neck back is satin and will quickly
burnish up to a dull sheen, or you can easily
rub it with a fine Scotch-Brite pad or 0000
wire wool if you can’t wait that long.
The back-routed vibrato floats slightly
above the face of the body, much like
a PRS, and even with pretty energetic
UNDER THE HOOD
Smart on the outside, but what’s it like inside?
T
here’s some clever thinking behind the sounds and the
way they’re achieved here. The four-pole, five-way lever
switch allows the tricky switching from the four-conductor
humbuckers, resulting in two very balanced single-coil mixes, both of
which are hum-cancelling. Both pots are small Alpha 500k types – the
volume has a linear taper, the tone is audio – with a .033 microfarads
tone cap. We’d certainly be tempted to add a treble-bleed circuit on
the volume, but, as is, the circuit certainly works effectively.
We mentioned the rather unusual ‘cushion’ for the pickups and
you’ll also see what appears to be excess wax on each pickup’s
base. “The extra ‘hotness’ of these pickups was causing some sort
of electronic vibrations on the backplate, causing it to create more
feedback than we anticipated,” explains Cort’s Jay Jun. “Normally,
other manufacturers would just leave it be as these are some
of the characteristics of a hotter pickup with louder output and
heightened sensitivity. But for our design – and to better match the
characteristic of the G290 FAT II – we decided to dampen it by waxing
the backplate so that we could keep the feedback under control while
maintaining high output.”
The Alnico V-loaded ’buckers certainly have a healthy reading on
our multimeter. The bridge is wound with 44 AWG and the neck with
43 AWG, resulting in DCRs of 15.44kohms and 9.58k respectively.
The four-pole five-way
switch is the trick to
the G290’s humbucker
and single-coil sounds
Under each pickup
are spring-and-foam
cushions. Note the waxing
of the pickup’s baseplate
The G290 is a 22-fret
design, unlike the 24-fret
G300. While both covered
humbuckers are classed
as ‘hot’, the neck pickup
certainly sounds more
vintage-y… but still FAT!
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