Every guitar lover has seen the viral video by Canadian musician Dave Carroll, United Breaks Guitars, and winced at the thought of their favorite instrument being damaged or even ruined by a careless airline handler who knows not what he does. Traveling musicians swap horror stories about the unique challenges and ensuing anxiety that sets in while traveling with an electric guitar.
Even Dweezil Zappa, certified guitar royalty, is at the mercy of airlines, which may or may not treat a treasured guitar with the care that it deserves. In 2017, while traveling to Gear Fest in Indiana, the headstock on Zappa’s Gibson SG was snapped clean off the neck during his trip.
While Zappa publicly shared the damage and subsequent repairs with his fans, many other traveling musicians aren’t lucky enough to salvage the Fenders and the Gibsons that are broken once they’ve been checked with airlines.
Even though the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 guarantees that air carriers must permit small instruments as carry-on baggage, traveling musicians are still uneasy about the possibility of damage or loss to their instruments during flight.
So, what’s a traveling guitar player to do? The show must go on. Fortunately, there’s a gig-ready, premium travel guitar available for road weary musicians: the Ascender, the world’s most innovative travel guitar.
The Ascender boasts an ergonomic folding neck, the first of its kind, which makes the guitar carry-on friendly and compact enough to fit underneath an airplane seat. This innovative travel guitar offers foolproof assurance that no damage or loss will be incurred over the course of air travel.
In the past, musicians would have to make a difficult choice. They could surrender their instrument to the airline, purchase an inferior sounding guitar with a detachable neck or try to carry a cumbersome guitar onto an airplane and hope to find an overhead bin to stow it in.
None of these options made sense for Jonathan Spangler, the founder and CEO of Ciari Guitars. Spangler realized that as a traveling musician, he was in a no-win situation when it came to transporting his guitar to his final destination.
Like any creative entrepreneur, he started to think of solutions to his traveling-with-guitar problem. What if, instead of detaching the neck and compromising the sound and tuning of the strings, someone designed a travel guitar that remained intact, albeit, with the strings de-tensioned, while they’re traveling?
Spangler’s idea, fueled by his hard-earned experience of traveling on a regular basis with an electric guitar, seemed plausible. Maybe it was already available. Spangler searched for a premium travel guitar with quality sound, hardware and engineering, and discovered that the travel guitar he’d envisioned didn’t exist—yet.
The Ascender is the travel electric guitar that makes air travel stress free for musicians. With its patented folding mechanism, the Ascender was designed and engineered to travel easily. Simply take out the Ascender, unfold the neck, activate the tension lever, and play a chord. The audience will never know the difference.
Dweezil Zappa has the best guitar techs in the world, and thankfully, his Gibson SG is playable once again. Dave Carroll found humor in a tough situation and gained millions of views on YouTube.
Imagine, if only they had the Ascender!