Catalyst Instruments Panthera

Dutch made guitar, it's not wood but graphite - ceramic compound. H/S/H passive pick ups with piezo pick up under the Wilkinson - style Fishman VC-100 bridge. 1 Tone + 1 volume control, 5 position switch, split control for the humbuckers, mixing control for the piezo pickup, allows you to mix electric + acoustic sound. Strat - style body, black finish with perloid pickguard. Sperzel USA locking tuners.

It has a very powerful output signal. You have lots of possibilities thanks to the split control and piezo pickup mixing control. With high gain sound, the notes are not "muddy", you can hear every note. "Twangy" feeling with clean sounds, but different compared with the classical Strat sound. It has its own personality. The piezo pick up has a very bright and sparkling sound, it needs to be correcty equalized.

The action was too low, so I changed string gauge from 0.10 to 0.09 and raised the action. The neck is fast and straight. Very comfortable to play. Lots of sustain, no bolt-on or glued neck, no neck thru body: it's just one piece of Sound compound, very resonating.

It seems a solid guitar, I think I can depend on it even playing live.

No problems by now.

I started playing guitar 13 years ago and played lots of genres: thrash metal, hard rock, rock-blues, etc... I play this guitar thru a Line6 Pod Xt Pro and a rackmount stereo valve amplifier. I can easily obtain tons of different sounds, from the acoustic-like sound to a high gain metal sound. I just change preset on the Pod and turn 2 knobs to pass from one to another. Great versatility, I think it's better for modern rock - metal sounds. I prefer my Steinberger GR4 to play old school hard rock and rock-blues.

This is a pre-production prototype, handmade by the Vox Humana custom shop. Features include schaller locking tuners, ebony fretboard, Seymour Duncan pickups in H-S-H configuration (I had the original custom replaced with a Jeff Beck for the bridge position to obtain a more resonant sound). The humbuckers are wired to a variable coil blend that can dial out the inner coils of the hb's. This is a lovely feature!

Other than this, this panthera is quite like the production model:
a strat-style guitar with ceramic composite body and neck.

The sound is unbelievable: the guitar seems to sustain for ages and it's quite impossible to find notes that don't ring out. The tone is very warm, but with a glassy quality to it that makes every note ring out with definition. The coil blend feature makes it possible to dial in your perfect blend of humbucker and single coil on every pickup position, and noise free operation is guaranteed. The only thing that I might put against this guitar is that it is perhaps too perfect: every once in a while (but not too often) I'll find myself wishing for a dead spot or a little more character of wood. It can altogether not distract from the fact that this is a great guitar!

The guitar was set up with the lowest action I've ever encountered, and thanks to the compound fretboard radius this goes without any buzz. Everything else was top notch, as you might expect from a handmade instrument. Only thing is I prefer 0.11 strings, instead of the 0.10 that were installed

This guitar is built for live playing, it never detunes and has all the definition you could ever wish for. The sound-compound material is a thousand times stronger than wood, so I'm not afraid of lugging this baby around with me. Also it is totally immune to temperature-changes.

I have never tried nor needed their service on this guitar.

I've been playing guitar for well over ten years, and I have owned (and still own) a whole fleet of guitars. This is however my main axe, and quite capable of replacing my Fender Strat Plus and My PRS CE22 when I can only take one guitar to a venue...
I would try and find a new one if this one were lost/stolen, but I imagine it would be hard to find another one like this. I tried the factory line once but it cannot nearly compare to the prototype.

It's pretty new - made later than 2000 I think. I've had it for about 3 months now. I'm still amazed at how solid this axe sounds. It's a ceramic composite strat-style axe. It's got HSS pickups and a Wilkinson vintage pitch bar.

Holy crap! This is the most resonant and beautiful sounding guitar I've ever played! It's not wood, so it doesn't really sound exactly like wood. It has a very warm(but still very detailed w/ a glassy top end) sound. And man is this thing powerful! It makes my whole upper body just shake when I play. The only thing I didn't really like was the middle single coil. It sounded a little quieter than the other pickups. The humbucker was really impressive, though. I'd say it's good for most anything except the heaviest of metal.

I like my action high, so I just raised it from the factory standard, which was pretty damn low. It wasn't low enough to cause string rattle, but I like my action super high(I play a lot of piano parts when I record, so I like to really let the notes ring).

Keep in mind that this is not a wood guitar, so you won't have to worry about warping, dead spots, or truss rod adjustments.

The only thing there is to worry about with this axe is broken strings.

They take a while to get back with an email reply and once either they ignored me or my message ended up in the wrong place. But, they're not too bad.

It's absolutly awesome. It handles anything from standard tuning down to C#. Any lower than that you'll have to try on your own, b/c I don't play that low. It might sound like I'm giving an inflated review here, but this is really a super guitar! I've even got an nxt on the way from Ed Roman(oh boy I bet this deal will be a lot of fun!) and I'm stoked.