Top-shelf tonewoods, top-drawer components
As do all Reverend guitars and basses, the Club King 290 comprises only the finest tonewoods and components — materials you expect to find on boutique, custom-shop instruments costing considerably more. From its ultra-stable roasted maple neck and proprietary pickups to its genuine Bigsby roller bridge and vibrato tailpiece, the Club King 290 is designed from the ground up for high performance. Even the parts you don’t see are top drawer, such as premium 10% control pots and polyester capacitors and a robust Pure Tone Technologies jack with custom 4-screw jack plate. Reverend uses high-grade korina (white limba) — coveted for its consistency and harmonic richness — for their guitar and bass bodies. For the Club King 290, a slab of korina is chambered; routed out from the top to create the back and sides before being capped with a solid spruce top. The korina/spruce combination is highly resonant, a quality that is further enhanced by the Club King 290’s chambered semi-hollowbody construction.
Semi-hollow resonance, solidbody sustain
The Club King 290 delivers the best of both worlds — the warmth and woody vibrancy of a semi-hollowbody, along with the sustain, punch, and pronounced attack of a solidbody. Although it handles like a solidbody, its body cavity and comma-shaped soundhole impart a liveliness to its tone that solidbody guitars typically lack. This, combined with the instrument’s korina/spruce body construction and P-90 pickups, gives the Club King 290 a unique tone that’s eminently sculptable, thanks to the instrument’s flexible tone-shaping control setup.
Powerful electronics package
This Reverend Club King 290 is loaded with a powerful passive electronics package that includes two proprietary custom 9A5 pickups — Reverend’s take on the classic P-90 — which offer a unique tonal palette that is distinct from (and complements) humbuckers and traditional single-coils. One of the first successful single-coil pickups, the P-90 can be heard on countless iconic recordings. With its biting treble and high output, the P-90 cleans up nicely when you roll back your guitar’s volume pot. It’s an amazingly versatile pickup with its own brand of grit — a bit brighter, leaner, and less refined than a humbucker, and almost as hot. Hit your amp hard, and the P-90 really wails. Plugged into a proper high-gain tube amp, you can elicit grind, sizzle, bark, and bite that would be impossible with humbuckers — or with other single-coils, for that matter. Reverend winds their 9A5 pickups to be slightly hotter and thicker-sounding than classic P-90s, which takes them nearer to humbucker territory; however, the Club King 290’s Bass Contour control lets you quickly tighten up the low end to revoice them like vintage P-90s — or even conventional single-coils.
Roasted maple neck for enhanced stability
Reverend Guitars uses a proprietary torrefaction (roasting) procedure on the maple neck of the Club King 290. Heat treating the neck at over 300°F, the process removes sugars, impurities, and almost all the moisture from the wood and collapses the cell walls, which dramatically increases stability, making your guitar much more impervious to humidity and climatic changes; while optimizing resonance, sustain, and overall tone. If you gig far and wide, you’ll appreciate this the next time you play Phoenix after a week in Miami. As roasting removes moisture, it also removes weight, so you can play marathon sets without next-day visits to your chiropractor. Roasting also imparts a rich caramel color for a warm vintage look. But if you ever do need to perform a neck adjustment, Reverend’s dual-action truss rod makes it fast and painless.
Tech Specs
- General
- Number of Strings6
- Left-/Right-handedRight-handed
- Body
- Body TypeSemi-hollowbody
- Body ShapeClub King 290
- Body MaterialKorina
- Top MaterialSolid Spruce
- Body FinishGloss Polyurethane
- Color Midnight Black
- Neck
- Neck MaterialRoasted Maple
- Neck ShapeMedium Oval
- Neck Joint6-way Bolt-on
- Radius12"
- Fingerboard MaterialRosewood
- Fingerboard InlayBlack Dots
- Number of Frets22, Nickel Alloy
- Scale Length25.5"
- Nut Width1.692"
- Nut MaterialBoneite
- Hardware
- Bridge/TailpieceRoller Bridge with Bigsby B-50 Vibrato
- TunersPin-Lok
- Electronics
- Neck PickupReverend 9A5 Single-coil
- Bridge PickupReverend 9A5 Single-coil
- Controls1 x master volume, 1 x master tone, 1 x bass contour
- Switching3-way blade pickup switch
- Miscellaneous
- Strings.010-.046
- Case/Gig BagSold Separately