PRODUCT REVIEW
Princess isabella
Baritone
JEnS RittER inStRuMEntS
By PAT SMITh
When you do gear reviews, once in a while
you get handed something that is at once
amazing and confounding. And that’s certainly the case with the Jens Ritter-designed
Princess Isabella Baritone jazz guitar, which is
part of a limited run of 50 instruments.
hometown of Deidesheim. The tuners are
gold Gotoh 510s—the best money can buy.
The bridge is a Schaller GTM custom, which
is much like a Gibson Nashville Tune-o-matic.
It sits on a 24k-gold-plated brass foot that
floats on the guitar’s top over a hollow internal
chamber that is meant to enhance attack.
German luthier Jens Ritter is a trained engineer
who got into building guitars and has since
attained a fair amount of fame as a custom
bass builder. If you have a look at the instruments on his website, you can’t help but be
struck by the fact that they have an artistic look
and give the impression of being well engineered. Maybe that’s why I was a little unsure
what to make of this guitar when it showed up,
but I jumped in to see where it took me.
The pickup, which fits the guitar’s vibe per-
fectly, is made to Ritter’s specs by Häeussel
Pickups. It uses rare-earth magnets that are
quite powerful, facilitating a very thin, good-
looking design. The guitar also has a very
large 24k-gold-plated backplate
that covers the pickup wire
channel as well as the hollow
space under the bridge.
Crowning a Princess
The Princess Isabella got its start when Ritter,
during a trip to New York City, visited Rudy
Pensa at Rudy’s Music shop. Pensa wondered
aloud what sort of jazz guitar Ritter might
come up with, and the wheels started to turn
in Ritter’s mind. When he completed the
design work, he even decided to name the
guitar after a young girl he met on the trip.
But while the Princess Isabella was built to
emulate the sound and feel of an archtop jazz
guitar, it certainly doesn’t look that way. We’ll
get to the sound shortly, but let’s start with
what it is. The most obvious thing about the
PI is that it is white from stem to stern. Every
bit of wood is finished in a lovely white shade,
and while one of my core beliefs is that the
only guitar that looks good in white is a Strat,
the finish work here is flawless. The trim is all
in 24k gold plating, and there is even a faux
f-hole rendered in gold. The body is made of
very thin and light swamp ash, while the neck
is mahogany with a maple fretboard. The striking tailpiece is made of handcast spring steel
that was gold plated by a jeweler in Ritter’s
A Solidbody
Jazz Guitar?
This brings us to the fact
that this is, in fact, a solidbody
guitar. And when I tell you it’s
thin, I mean thin—about an inch
thick. So if you are used to a hollow
body and resting your arm, forget
it. It’s really too thin for comfortable arm resting. But, the
body shape is wonderfully
comfortable and feels
great when you’re
standing. It also
rests very nicely in
your lap. Further,
the body is amazingly resonant
and vibrates like
a living thing in
your hands. Ritter
takes particular pride
in jazz-great George
Benson’s amazed reaction
to this being a solidbody, and
rightly so. And the playability of
