Coura African Guitars

Double-Wedge-Shaping and the double endpin

This basic shape allows a very comfortable handling, whether you play standing up as well as seated. Besides it eliminates any tendency of top-heaviness.

The rear (endpin-) side is thicker than the front (towards the neck)

The treble side of the body is thicker than the bass side

The double endpin is just a small example of how we try to make your life easier:
1. We all know, a guitar is to be put on a guitar-stand. But in real life? At least, this way it's a little bit safer.
2. Between the 2nd and the 3rd set of a concert it sometimes gets a little warm. You take of your classy jacket and try to look cool in a smashing sleeveless t-shirt. But now your guitar is hanging those important 4 inches lower. Just fix your strap to the lower endpin and everything feels right again.

COURA 3-piece stainless steel bridge

The true and undamped transport of string-vibration into the wood is only one of the advantages of this outstanding custom-made piece of sound-art. Material and shape of the two adjustable saddles make for a long sustain and yet a fast and ringing response, all this without sacrificing a good intonation. This is a sample to prove our motto: Learning from the past, recognizing the demands of today and daring a glimpse into future.

Tone controls
	When asked about the tone-control, new customers often reply: "I never touch it". Here's the reason why: Common tone controls use a pot and a capacitor to cut off highs. With the control turned down, everything above ca. 300 Hz is “dead”. Right below this cutoff-frequency there is a slight boost. The effect is: the guitar sounds dull and muffled. After trying our
	MastertoneLC, many players say: "I can't take my hand off it!" It takes a lot more to get a usable Tone Control. We take the effort of fine-tuning every single guitar, until we and our customers are happy. With our unique passive circuit we can soften the tone by dampening the high mids, but leaving some overtones to give it a mellow, yet silky quality. To add that extra bit we shift the frequency-boost to a region, where we, our customers and their amplifiers like it. A typical frequency response could look like this:
	The Rhythmclean-control is used on the guitars with a P90 in the neck-position. We like this pickup in a slightly overwound version to give it a really round bottom for fat or mellow solo-lines. To clean it up to a sparkling rhythm-tone this control smoothly dampens the low end. It only affects the neck-pickup, so you can adjust a perfect blend of both pickups to match your style of music.

Switches

HB-Switch
In some of our single-coil-guitars we use the HB-switch. It connects 2 single-coil pickups in series as one humbucker, bypassing the pickup-selector switch. Now you can change from any single-coil sound to a fatter humbucking sound by the flick of one switch.

SC Switch
Instead of switching the humbucking-pickups one by one to single-coil mode we use a similar preselection-idea in the SC-switch. Whatever humbucking-sound you select with the PU-selector-switch, one flick of the SC-switch changes to a parallel connection of the inner coils of both humbuckers, giving you that famous funky “inbetween-sound” with just the right loss of volume, but without the hum. Just another flick on the SC-switch and you are back to your previous Humbucker sound.

RealizeR

Put the sound of wood back
into your electric guitar!

Electromagnetic pickups transduce just the vibration of the strings. Wouldn't it be nice to send the sound of the vibrating wood of your guitar to the amp as well? For this purpose we developed the RealizeR. A small sensor is installed into the guitar, which picks up only the sound of wood, not the string-vibration.

In the outboard RealizeR this signal is processed and added to the sound of the magnetic pickup. There is no overlapping of the frequency ranges and therefore no phasing problem.
The electromagnetic sound is in no way altered, there is no active electronic or battery inside the guitar. All you have to do: use a stereo-cable to connect the RealizeR with your guitar and off you go to an exiting new sound-sphere. The output of the RealizeR gives you the choice of a mono-blend of the two sounds or two discreet signals for recording or further processing.
(Without RealizeR and using a mono-cable the guitar acts like a "normal" electric guitar)

What they say:
„ it really sounds like an archtop… it has this very special acoustic touch that hardcore jazz-guitarists cannot do without – and now they can get this from a solidbody without any feedback. In any case, this sounds a lot more acoustic than all common semi-acoustic guitars and so it’s the ultimate choice for jazz-guitarists, who have to play in a loud band.”

Heinz Rebellius (in Gitarre & Bass)