Vintage & Rare guitar of the week: Fibernare Erotic Regime from Hungary

Regular readers of Guitarz will know that we are enthusiastic about East European guitars, particularly those from the Soviet era. It's not often that we look at contemporary instruments coming from Eastern Europe.

Fibernare Guitars are made in Hungary by the Benedek brothers. In the 1980s the three brothers Attila, Csaba and Árpád, disparaged by the price and availability of electric guitars in their country were encouraged by their father to build their own. Other guitarists took notice of their self-built instruments and very soon they were building guitars for others too. Eventually this led to the establishment of Fibenare Guitars Co. in 1998.

The Fibernare Erotic Regime is the Brothers' take on the traditional three singlecoil pickup guitar, and thankfully looks very unlike the most famous exponent of that species of guitar. The Regime is part of Fibernare's "Erotic" series; with those curves you can see where that name comes from. The sculpted fluid-like body design looks as if it could be molded from some kind of high density polymer, but is in fact carved alder. The neck is, appropriately Hungarian alder; it's a bolt on design with a sculpted heel to ease access to the highest of the 24 frets.

The Regime is super lightweight at only 6 lbs and has a cunning control layout allowing the player to morph seamlessly between the most glorious Strat and Tele tones with the greatest of ease. The controls consist of volume and tone pots, 5-way pickup selector, and 3-way rotary switch which allows for the following settings:

1) Front position on rotary: standard strat 5way selection; 2) Middle position on rotary: neck and bridge pickups wired together in the 1st and 5th positions, 2nd and 4th positions is all 3 pickups, 3rd position is middle pickup; 3) Rear position on rotary: neck pickup phase inverted (PI) and wired to the output so: 1st position PI neck pickup, 2nd and 3rd position PI neck with middle pickup, 4th position PI neck with middle and bridge pickups, 5th position PI neck with bridge pickup.