Traveler Guitar Escape EG-1 Electric Travel Guitar

I’m a person who travels quite a bit by airplane, and a travel guitar is a necessity if I don’t want to check my guitar and hope for the best when I arrive at my destination. For that reason, I purchased a Traveler Speedster a couple of years back. I take it with me on all of my longer work trips which last a month or more. I’ve been very happy with the Speedster, and that contentment gave me the confidence to purchase the Traveler EG-1 to supplement my travel guitar stock.

It’s interesting that this guitar comes with a Pocket Rockit headphone amp built in because I purchased a Pocket Rocket V2 for my other Traveler guitar. It works nice as a simple headphone amp, but I wish that the built-in Pocket Rockit had some of the features of the V2 – most importantly, the tuning feature. The lack of a tuning feature means that a tuner will still be required for those like me who do not tune by ear.

When I plugged my headphones into the guitar for the first time, the sound was very bad. My instinct was to blame the built-in amp, and I plugged into an external amp. It still sounded pretty cheesy. I decided that a pickup change was in order. I changed out the pickup with another, and now the guitar sounds wonderful.

The build quality of the EG-1 is both good and bad. Mostly everything on the guitar is put together and finished well. My guitar didn’t have the best example of a flame top, but I can overlook that since the transparent finish isn’t very transparent at all. The tuning pegs are inconsistent. Some are easy to turn while others are pretty difficult. When I changed the humbucker out, I was able to get a better look at its build quality. I’ve never seen a poorer humbucker. There’s not one good thing I can say about the quality of the included pickup. Every element that goes into making a pickup from the wiring to the wrapping was abysmal. This is why I subtracted one star from this guitar. I would have subtracted more if installing a new pickup was impossible or difficult, but that wasn’t the case.

As for portability, this guitar does not compare to the Speedster, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good travel guitar; it just doesn’t suit my travel needs. This guitar is about three inches wider than the Speedster because the Speedster has a section that can be broken down for a narrower footprint. The EG-1′s case, while well-built and of high quality, is significantly larger than the Speedster. While its probably possible, I can not imagine putting this guitar in the typical overhead bin of a regional jet, much less under my seat. This is just my opinion on this. Others may be fine with its bulk, but I can see that the Speedster will be a lot less hassle on flights. Still, this guitar is good for car or train travel as it is significantly smaller than traditional-sized guitars. Also, a plus for this guitar and other full-scale guitars like it is that one is more likely to want to pick this up at any time to play versus grabbing a larger, heavier guitar and getting all set up with it. I think that this guitar’s biggest quality is its accessibility, and whatever gets people to play more is a very good thing.
Rating: 4 / 5