Draco! - Vintage VW5000VMX WARP • 2022 • Satin Black

Meet Draco!

Vintage VW5000VMX WARP • 2022 • Satin Black

Some guitars gently suggest that you might enjoy playing a little metal, but Draco appears to be making a threat.

Released in 2022 as part of Vintage’s limited-edition VMX Series, the WARP was created as a tribute to the gloriously unhinged Metal Axxe guitars that first appeared almost twenty years earlier, and they made just 150 of these worldwide.

Underneath the blackest-of-black satin finish sits a lightweight Eastern poplar body with an aggressively angular single-cut design which manages to look somewhere between an Explorer, a weapon, and something you probably shouldn’t make direct eye contact with.

That enormous lower cutaway isn’t purely decorative either. It gives remarkably easy access right up to the top of his 24-fret rosewood fingerboard, while a 25.5” scale and fast, set maple neck keep things firmly in super-strat territory once you actually start playing him. At the sharp end are a pair of Wilkinson WMSH humbuckers.

There’s no unnecessarily complicated control panel here. One volume, one tone and a three-way selector are all Draco needs to go from surprisingly respectable cleans to exactly the sort of saturated, palm-muted nonsense his appearance promises.

Then we arrive at the bit most likely to upset your neighbours. A genuine Floyd Rose FRTS 2000 Special double-locking tremolo, paired with a 42mm locking nut, means dive bombs, squeals and other entirely irresponsible whammy-bar behaviour can be undertaken without immediately turning all six strings into different interpretations of D-flat.

Wilkinson WJ07 machine heads complete the all-black hardware package, while the pointed six-in-line headstock and pearloid XX motif at the 12th fret provide the last tiny shred of evidence that nobody involved in designing Draco was attempting to make an acoustic folk album.

When he arrived with us he was actually in pretty decent shape, but needed the usual rehabilitation. He has now been thoroughly cleaned, his rosewood fingerboard cleaned and conditioned, his frets attended to and his Floyd properly set up before receiving a full setup ready for his next human, and LOOK at him!

The satin finish has come up beautifully, the black hardware against that enormous angular body is wonderfully sinister and, aside from the odd tiny sign that somebody has actually played him, he presents exceptionally well.

Draco is not going to suit everyone. This is not a guitar for someone who wants to sit unnoticed at the back of the band.

Instead, it is a limited-run, 24-fret, twin-humbucker, Floyd-equipped black metal monstrosity shaped like someone drew an Explorer during an earthquake. We consider that a feature!

Only 150 WARP guitars were released worldwide, and one of them has wandered into our workshop, and Draco is now very much ready to breathe fire again.