There are perks to growing up with a pro guitarist as a dad. “I consider myself extremely lucky,” says Italian virtuoso Matteo Mancuso. “I think we had almost 50 electric guitars at home, so I had plenty of choices when I was a little kid especially.”
The spread was impressive: five Strats, three Les Pauls and plenty of other brands – the young musician got to experiment with an array of sounds, figuring out what spoke to him and what didn’t.
“Once you go past that period of time where you need to know the different guitars, you can have a clear idea of what you really want from [one],” he adds.
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All of that early homework proved valuable for Mancuso as his playing evolved. The fingerstyle master needed a versatile guitar to handle his equally versatile music, which on his latest LP, Route 96, ranges from fiery prog to delicate classical-guitar textures to jazz-fusion workouts.
Back in 2017, he discovered an ideal vehicle for that range: the Yamaha Revstar, which is now his go-to instrument “90 percent of the time”. Two years later, he received a custom shop model, and now he’s taken that partnership one step further with the signature RS20MM, featuring custom inlays and DiMarzio PAF 36th Anniversary pickups.
We spoke to Mancuso about his distinctive technique, the target player for the RS20MM, and why the Revstar is an ideal Swiss Army knife for his style.
You play with your fingers on your right hand, a technique inspired by watching your father play classical guitar. Is there anything about the Revstar that complements that playing style? What makes it a good platform for your technique?
I was just searching for a guitar that was versatile enough to do the rock and jazz stuff. It didn’t have anything to do with the technique itself
I don’t think it’s the specific guitar that helps you, particularly with the fingerpicking style. I think it works for every instrument. For the Revstar, I was just searching for a guitar that was versatile enough to do the rock and jazz stuff. It didn’t have anything to do with the technique itself, let’s say. I was able to play fingerstyle with various guitars.
If there’s a little bit more space between the strings, for example, it usually helps me a little bit for some things – just because I have a little bit more space to have the finger get inside the string and have enough volume as well, and that’s a technique I learned from classical guitar. With electric guitar, you need to develop less volume because you have the amps that help you, of course, and you have distortion as well, and you have pickups.
So the movement is a little less wide compared to classical guitar. It’s not specifically the Revstar that helps me with technique. It’s just that I developed a lot of technique with the classical guitar and then tried to borrow some things from the classical world for the electric.
Derek Trucks is another iconic fingerstyle player, though your techniques are very different. Just curious, though: Have you listened to much of his work?
Oh, yeah! We’ve never met, but I know Derek and his music. Of course, I’m a huge fan of his work. He’s an incredible player. We both play with our fingers, but it’s a completely different approach from my right-hand technique.
Your signature model is based on your 2020 custom shop Revstar. What were the most important specs that you wanted to make sure they got right?
One important thing was the pickups. I’m a big fan of humbuckers, and for the sounds I’m searching for right now, I always get closer when I start with a humbucker rather than a single-coil. But that’s, of course, just preference. In the case of the Revstar, I wanted to have the splitting options just to experiment a bit with how much output I want to have with each sound.
With that kind of stuff, I prefer to have pickups with slightly less output than you’d imagine. My go-to decision was with DiMarzio, and the pickup I’m using now are called PAF 36th Anniversary. They don’t have a gigantic amount of output. It’s the right amount if you want to play clean and distortion stuff as well.
Because they have a solid body, you cannot have the same acoustic volume of a semi-hollow or a hollow body, of course. But the thing with the Revstar, especially the new ones, is that they have a chambered body.
This is for two reasons: for weight relief, so the guitar feels a little bit lighter, and to also have a tiny bit of that acoustic volume that you might prefer, even for solid-body stuff. It’s not a great amount of volume, but you can hear it compared to a full solid-body, you know? Plus the weight relief is great for me. I don’t want to have a heavy guitar.
I can’t play a Les Paul for two hours straight because my back will hurt so much. I prefer to have lighter guitars with small bodies as well. I’m a small person, so I don’t want to have a big guitar with me. I’m more on the ergonomic side of things.
Of course, you also need to like it, aesthetically speaking. I’m a really big fan of gold hardware, so I really wanted to have gold hardware. It sounds like a very small feature, but it’s actually big for me – I have Luminlay dots on the fretboard.
That’s actually very useful if you have a really dark stage in some moments, and you need to know where the 12th fret or 5th fret is. That’s way more important than you can imagine for a lot of concerts. There are a lot of features that I really like on this guitar.
How long did this process take? Was there a lot of back and forth and experimenting? Did you add anything new?
To be honest, the first thing we talked about was the price range. [Laughs.] [Then] I immediately knew what I could have and could not have – and what would be the best solution in that price range. I’m super-happy with the guitar because the most important things are already there.
Of course, if you have an unlimited budget, you can go crazy with it, but at the end of the day, the most important things for a guitar are: It needs to be reliable; it needs to be always in tune; [the wood] needs to be great quality; and of course you need to like the tone.
Once you have those things, everything else is just secondary. Then we tried different neck shapes, and we even tried a very thin neck shape for one of the customs. Even if it was maybe a little more comfortable with the left hand, the sustain was not the same.
Let’s say the quantity of wood in the neck should be the right amount to have the sustain you want. I prefer to have, let’s say, a bigger neck – not too much because I don’t have huge hands – but the right amount of wood to have a great sustain for that kind of guitar. That was very important to me.
Has the Revstar unlocked anything new in your playing?
I’m so used to it that I don’t know if it pushed me to do things differently from other guitars. Of course, if you have a Telecaster in your hands, it will influence you to do things that are associated with the Telecaster. It all starts with the music that is recorded with that guitar – not so much the instrument itself.
When I have a Telecaster in my hand, I immediately think about Brent Mason or Brad Paisley or Johnny Hiland – those kind of guys, because I’m a big country fan. That kind of material can be inspired more with a Telecaster because the sound is already there and closer to what you have in your head, if you want to go that route.
Same with a Les Paul and other guitars – some have such a great character that you can’t deny that you’re influenced by it. I always have music in my head that I want to translate into the real world. Whatever instrument is available to me in the moment can be the right choice.
With the Revstar, of course I tend to have more humbucker-inspired sounds. If I want to do more of a Hendrix-inspired rhythm section, of course the Revstar is not the right guitar to do that kind of stuff. The Revstar is my go-to guitar 90 per cent of the time.
I consider myself extremely lucky because my father is also a guitar player. I think we have almost 50 electric guitars at home, so I had plenty of choices when I was a little kid especially. [Laughs]
We had like five Stratocasters, three Les Pauls, and various brands. We had Gibson, Fender, Squier – actually my first guitar was a 3/4-size Squier because I was a very little kid. The full-size was too big for my body to handle. I got super-lucky because I tried every famous guitar since I was a little kid, and I’d already tried a wide variety of sounds.
Once you go past that period of time where you need to know the different guitars, you can have a clear idea of what you really want from [one], especially if it needs to be a custom model or a future signature model. As a matter of fact, I have two guitars on tour with me: a Yamaha Pacifica, which is a Strat-style guitar, and I play it for more single-coil kind of stuff. If I need to use the whammy bar, it’s my go-to guitar as well.
Of course, I also have my Revstar. That’s it. But in order to get there, you need to try a lot of different guitars and amps, and I got lucky because my father basically did my same job when he was my same age. He was touring a lot, and that was super-useful, having a professional with you when you were a kid.
The Revstar is unique in that doesn’t have that super-famous lineage that some brands might have. It gives you kind of a blank slate.
You can achieve very traditional sounds with Yamaha as well. If you want to get Hendrix stuff with the Pacifica, it can be totally done. If you want to sound like Santana with a Revstar, it can be totally done. But the thing is that I’m not searching for these particular sounds.
I’m just searching for a guitar that is versatile enough to do a lot of things in the same moment. My kind of music goes from heavily traditional, jazz-oriented stuff to almost metal-sounding stuff. So you need a guitar that can have the best of both worlds and be super-versatile for these reasons.
Plus, Yamaha are concentrating on the innovation side of things, and maybe if you go with other brands, there are a lot of people attached to the tradition as well. They want the guitar that is always like the ’60s or ’70s model, and you don’t want to change that if you’re searching for that.
The people who go with Yamaha aren’t those kind of people who say, “I want the old-style version.” I think there’s a level of freedom if you’re a brand that doesn’t have that same baggage. There’s a higher level of freedom if you want to experiment with the newer models, as opposed to maybe other, more popular brands in the guitar community.
Your music covers so much ground stylistically – it’s very difficult to describe, in a great way. Do you think the Yamaha is a good canvas for that versatility? How much of your latest album, Route 96, were you able to record with it?
Black Centurion, for example, was totally recorded with the Revstar. Of course, different amps, different digital stuff for every sound, but I think I pretty much recorded everything with just one guitar on that particular tune.
There are some other tunes I recorded with different acoustic guitars. I remember that I used a Guild for some of the acoustic sections. I also have a Yamaha Grand Concert, a great classical guitar, which I used for some pieces on the album.
And the Pacifica, as well. I don’t think there are many electric guitars, maybe just two or three, and maybe there’s more variety on the acoustic and classical stuff. I recorded a lot of stuff just with the Revstar and the Pacifica.
When you created this signature model, did you think much about the target player? It’s obviously a versatile instrument.
First off, it’s a great, versatile guitar for everything. It can be for the intermediate player as well, not just professional people. You don’t need to take too much care of the guitar because it’s very stable by itself, and that’s a very important thing I wanted to achieve. I don’t want to touch anything. I don’t want to touch the truss road or adjust the action. I want to do this just one time and then it’ll be okay for the next 10 years.
This is a guitar where you can actually do that. It’s super-stable. It plays everywhere from the last fret to the first one. I think it can be a really good guitar for someone who’s studying music and wants to have a guitar for all kinds of gigs – the more jazz-oriented stuff or the pop stuff.
That can be totally done with the Revstar. It’s a great chunk of people, maybe more toward the rock player because this guitar can be very aggressive as well. A little bit less toward the jazz player because, of course, in the jazz community there’s still a huge number of people who prefer to have the semi-hollow. But I think it will be a great guitar for everyone, from intermediate to advanced musicians.
