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I suppose then I’d just complain about the wings folding vs being removable, and I suppose I can see not wanting to have the name Hellcat, but who doesn’t love a Corsair? Hell, Guild loved to name guitars after planes so maybe a folding-wing aircraft like the Corsair or the Hellcat would have been a fun choice. Marketing, being what it is, likes to play fast and loose with the meanings of words, so I get it, but I still maintain that X92 Citron was a better name. This guitar is designed to break down which is defined as to take apart especially for storage or shipment and for later reassembling. That is absolutely not what this guitar is designed to do and I just can’t get past the image of smashing this guitar on stage Pete Townsend style in the hopes that the body would separate on impact so that I can get it back into the case.
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I mean, she was two years old in 1984, so…Īnyway, the term breakaway in this context is defined as an object made to shatter or collapse under pressure or impact.
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The term breakaway has a special meaning which has nothing to do with the Kelly Clarkson song that was the top result on Google when searching for the word. On the topic of the name, I kind of take issue with the term Breakaway and think they should have just stuck with X92 Citron even if that disagrees with my previous notes on the name. Still, the fact remains that this guitar is smaller than a regularly sized guitar and it is definitely could be considered travel sized, though what travel sized actually means is up for discussion. Hell, some planes have different sized bins within the same aisle! Some planes like the Embraer RJ145 have bins that are so small that I wonder if the guitar would fit with the body parts separated and without the bag! There is, in fact, no standard for overhead bin size that I could find. While the guitar in its case is indeed quite small, overhead bins on airplane differ not only by airline, but by airplane as well. In the Guild flyer the guitar is billed as fitting in the compartment above the seat on a plane, and as a formally frequent flyer (pre-Covid) I feel the need to comment on that. In the title of this article I used Guild X92 Citron Breakaway because I primarily write about Guilds and that’s how Guild described it in the catalog. In talking with Harvey Citron I learned that the proper name of the guitar should be the Guild-Citron X92 Breakaway which honestly makes the most sense due to the collaboration between the two companies. I’d venture a guess that the guitar (and the Steinberger to a degree) were more of a symptom of a trend around smaller guitars, but even that’s not entirely right.īut wait: the flyer calls the guitar the Guild X92/Citron while the catalog states the name of the guitar as the X92 Citron Breakaway. It’s not a Steinberger copy it’s a unique guitar that superficially resembles another brand while really having nothing in common with it aside from maybe the size and the pickups. The brief Steinberger history is just to show that there really wasn’t anything to copy when the X92 Breakaway was being developed. Steinberger had been selling bases since the early ’80s (you can see Sting playing one in this video from 1982), but the TransTrem version of the guitar (the one Eddie is playing) was introduced in 1984, and though other guitarists used them I could easily argue that Eddie made them famous enough that every guitarist (myself included) instantly wanted one. According to this fabulous article, this Steinberger GL2T guitar was built for Eddie Van Halen in November 1985. As a guitar player, I first heard about Steinberger when this guy showed up with a wacky looking guitar, the likes of which I’d never seen before.