Ciari Ascender Standard Review: The Pro-Level Electric Guitar That Folds in Half

Travel guitars have traditionally been a slightly depressing proposition. Sure, they’re small enough to throw in the car or drag through an airport, but all too often the trade-off is an instrument that feels more like something you tolerate while you’re away from your actual guitars. The Ciari Ascender Standard is a very different beast. This is, to my knowledge, the only genuinely pro-level, high-spec electric guitar you can fold in half and stick in a backpack… Yes, fold in half.

Pull the lever on the back of the neck, the string tension releases, the neck swings backwards over the body, and suddenly you have an electric guitar small enough to fit into its tiny included gig bag, your hand luggage, or the optional backpack. I’ve taken this exact guitar across oceans, on tour, on holiday, camping, teaching, to video shoots and to the NAMM Show. It’s been a warm-up guitar, a backup guitar and a main demo instrument, and through all of that it has never let me down.

The really impressive thing is that the folding mechanism isn’t remotely as terrifying as it sounds.

Lifting the lever withdraws a sliding bolt that locks the neck into place while simultaneously operating the string-tensioning mechanism at the body. The strings slacken just enough to allow the neck to fold, running across rotating cams and into dedicated slots in the fretboard rather than being bent around some horrible string-destroying angle. There’s a small retainer behind the nut to stop everything flapping around in the bag, and a magnet on the back of the headstock keeps the folded neck snugly in place.

It’s an incredibly neat bit of engineering, and it couldn’t really be much easier to use.

Better still, unfold the guitar, lock everything back into position and it comes back basically in tune. That still feels like witchcraft.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes to make that possible. The compact three-a-side headstock uses locking tuners that require barely any string wrapped around the posts, while the roller bridge itself locks into place with a pair of small grub screws. That means it can’t shift around when the string tension disappears during folding, and the whole system contributes to tuning stability that is frankly ridiculous considering what you’ve just done to the instrument.

Once we get away from the Transformer impression, though, the Ascender becomes a surprisingly conventional — and very good — electric guitar.

We have a mahogany neck, an ebony fretboard and 22 medium-jumbo stainless-steel frets. Personally, I like my frets enormous, but these sit firmly in the Goldilocks zone and should work beautifully for pretty much any playing style. They’re also immaculate from the factory.

Obviously there’s a big metal hinge assembly running across the back of the neck, and before playing one you’d be forgiven for assuming it must feel weird. Somehow, it really doesn’t. Under the hand, the mechanism is remarkably transparent and quickly disappears from your attention.

There is one catch, though: metal is cold.

Pull the Ascender out of its bag during a British winter and grabbing that hinge for the first time is not especially pleasant. Once you’re in a normal heated room it’s a complete non-issue, but when the guitar itself is freezing, you certainly know about it.

Sonically, things are much less unusual. The Ascender Standard comes loaded with a pair of Seymour Duncan ’59 humbuckers, with a traditional three-way toggle, master volume and master tone. There are no coil splits, but the ’59s are such strong all-rounders that I’m not convinced the guitar suffers for it. Clean tones are clear and sweet, they respond beautifully around the edge of breakup, and the neck pickup has that lovely vocal quality that works so well for lead playing. Throw some serious gain at them and they’re equally happy.

The surf-style offset body helps the Ascender avoid looking like some bizarre piece of portable engineering too. It’s available in a range of colours, with bound versions offered in off-white or black, while the unusually small headstock is another deliberate attempt to keep the folded dimensions to an absolute minimum.

Perhaps the biggest endorsement I can give the Ascender is that mine doesn’t spend its life waiting for the next flight. It regularly lives underneath my desk so I can pull it out whenever I fancy playing, and I’ve happily used it in situations where portability wasn’t the only consideration.

That’s what separates the Ascender from the majority of travel guitars. The folding mechanism is obviously the headline act, and the engineering required to make it work is seriously impressive, but none of that would matter if the guitar itself wasn’t worth playing.

Fortunately, it absolutely is.

The Ciari Ascender Standard is a proper, high-spec electric guitar with excellent tuning stability, versatile pickups and genuinely impressive playability that also happens to collapse into something you can throw into your hand luggage. If you travel regularly with a guitar, that’s a pretty compelling trick to have up your sleeve.

Find out more about the Ciari Ascender Standard at CiariGuitars.com.