Parker Guitars Fly Mojo Flame

Specs are known by now.

Mine is a Cherry Red Quilted Flame Burts top (pfffew)
Year 2007
Mojo so Mahogany Body & Neck

This baby can be used for anything (really) oh eh maybe except the inbetween strat sounds ...
The piezo sounds are awesome, no tweaks needed, just plug in in a mixing desk or acoustic guitar amp and you are ready to roll!
For the normal pickups (seymour Duncan); screaming les paul sounds, twanging strat sounds and all between but with a very distingtive(?) own character, really usable and too much to name them all.
1 point of dislike: the piezo/mag switch, you can hear the clicks when switching ...
I should give this one a 11 but due the switch it stucks at a firm 10!

Perfect factory setup, pretty low action (a bit too low for me) with no fretbuzz at all.

No flaws at all, just perfect!

no issues yet, it looks stirdy enough.
And when it falls I doubt it will break under its own weight ;-)
It weights btw only 2.2 kg / 5 lbs)

no issues yet, lets give it the benefit of the doubt.
very helpfull dealer/distributer.
One year warranty

Overall: this baby rocks, sings, whispers, screams with a tight full tone.
Good clean sounds with mags, good piezo sound but combined: heaven!
I have my share of very serious guitars but this one kills them all in a heartbeat, finally an evolution of the guitar!
One point of atention, be sure to set the guitar aside if you leave the house, you won't notice the weight hanging on your shoulders ....

For pics: www.wangotango.nl or http://s163.photobucket.com/albums/t300/universe777/

2004 Parker Mojo with Green burst flame top. This is BY FAR the best looking one of all the flames, but regardless these guitars are the real deal. This flat out is the best single guitar I have ever owned. I split the bridge pickup and get huge thunky and chunky super-Tele chords, and overdriven this setting screams. The neck humbucker sounds phenominal with any vox-type circuit (EL84s), especially with my Bad Cat 15. It is unbelievably sweet and chimey, without any harshness. The piezo settings are great, and one tip to note is that you can give yopurself quite a volume boost when needed by setting the piezo volume over half and then switching to the combined humbucker/piezo position for leads. It actually rips even with the piezo mixed in(!?) ... I do it all the time. Great guitar.

Oh yeah, and it ONLY WEIGHS 5 FREAKING POUNDS! I leave my Grosh retro home now and only take the Parker to gigs ... it has that many sounds .... all pro too ...

Can it do Les Paul ... absolutely
Can it do Tele ....... absolutely
Can it do Strat ...... close

Does it wail unconditionally no matter what amp I plug into?
Yes. This is a phenominla guitar.

Perfect.

Looks thin, but believe me, these are sturdier than your PRS.

NA

Outstanding ... the weight is a biggie too, but the tone sold me. It has that crushing LP sound through a Marshall, and that sweet Fender sound through a Vox or Twin.

GGuitars has a green Fly Mojo Flame like mine as of 6-21-05 ... if I had the bucks, I would buy another.

Me again with an update...




(Come on this is 11 really, as I explained....) ;o)

forgot to say: it's all very tidy on the inside too. Would be as lovely as the outside if it wasn't finished in dull conducting paint to shield the cavity to reduce hum....

Umm, thinking about it and the fact it broke by proper mis-use, and the trem can happily be bent up and down vigourously without it breaking under normal use, it's a bit unfair to only have a nine. The fact when it broke the force was hard enough to jam the broken bit into the wood to jam it, and it was about a month (of not really *quite* right) playing before I noticed is quite a testament to it. Admittedly I wasn't really going trem crazy with a broken spring but even so...

If you purposefully tried to smash it up (hell, why would you!), then the neck joint will outlast most other guitars probably. If you drop it accidentally it's light weigh will help it survive it's own drop by not hitting the floor as hard either.

Sod's law, a couple of days after my review they had some.

I was in a bit of a bad mood that day about it and probably shouldn't have been so mean with the 2. The people I spoke to seemed friendly, helpful and knowledgable. They were pretty fast to answer the phone too.

The fact they had a new distributor obviously didn't help that the part wasn't in (I don't think Parker actually had a UK distributor for a short while when I bought it). Hopefully since they hadn't had any spares since becoming the distributor, and now they do, I guess this means they should always have some in stock and no-one else should have this problem.

So they've always answered the phone, and although a couple of my e-mails didn't get a reply, I've never had much more luck getting a lot of music companies to answer e-mails either. I guess I could have phoned if I'd been that desparate for answers to the other questions I had.

Considering the fact it came with 2 springs too, so although it was near the tension limit of the other spring and the tension wasn't to my liking, I could still get away with using it.

So, I'll re-adjust my score by giving a 9, therefore averaged with the 2 gives 5.5!

Yep this guitar still rocks! Lots! I've been playing more jazzy clean things recently again, and got all re-excited about the rich warmth of the neck pickup.

Just for info (fitting the spring reminded me)...

My Fly's strung with 11-52's. I have it tuned Drop-D down a semi-tone (Eb, Bb, Gb, Db, Ab, Db). Because it's downtuned but heavier guage strings the actual tension is about the same as 10-46 in standard tuning so I use the "10" spring.

I used to play my Jackson in the same tuning using 9-46 I think. When I got the fly I found the spring tension was too much even with the "9" spring in the bridge. Feeling slightly worried and confused I then figured I could try heavier guage strings to increase the opposite tension and realised I'd been silly not using heavier guage strings before since the sound better, warmer, and heavier anyway! :o)

If you particularly like playing light strings downtuned for that "elastic band over shoebox" feel tone then you might want to stay away! Lol.

Oh, BTW (in true harmony central style...), if it was stolen I'd kill EVERYONE I came across! Then I'd know I'd definitely got the f&*ker who nicked it! Then when it was found I could sit playing beautiful melancholy songs on it, lamenting my loney world where everyone was dead except me. Sorry! ;o)

this is a brand new mojo flame in translucent blue burst,from the new factory in illinois.you know the deal on the refined flys so i won't bother with details.

this is my fifth fly and my second mojo and let me tell you it is the best sounding parker i have owned.i don't know why,but it is. the notes are all strong and clear and deep and the high e is as full sounding as the other strings. i am using it mainly for jazz .thru a rivera 55 watt or an swr strawberry blonde. ad some boss effects delay and reverb and it's a beautiful non-traditional jazz sound.

everything was perfect.the top was a little light on the flame but nice nonetheless.i would still give it a ten.

these guitars are very solid despite their light weight.

i bought a mojo from hix bros music which believe it or not had a rattling truss rod,very rare. parker took the guitar back and bent over backwards to get me a new one.this took a while because production is not up to snuff yet.but then they sent me this guitar and it had less flame than the bad one so they offered me another one if i would wait,but the new one sounded so great, i just kept it.john page and peter hix were both very accomodating. their main priority was to make me a satisfied customer.i could never see gibson doing the same.

i have been playing for forty years and not to toot my own horn,i am not a slouch of a player. i have a 1989 prs which is sitting in it's case because the parker is the most comfortable guitar i have ever played,bar none. it is light,and the neck is not to be believed.i believe in this design and the people at parker truly do also.from what i have heard ,almost all of the old guys are in the new factory .these guitars are handmade.they are not cut from an automated cad machine like prs. it is very labor intensive to make one.how often do you see that today?

I got mine May 2004 so it must be one of the early flame versions I imagine. Obviously it was USA made.

Right, features! Lets begin at the headstock and work our way down, explaining why it is I spent more than twice as much money on this than I did on my car:

Headstock. Right at the top it has Sperzel locking tuners, meaning you only need a tiny amount of string wound round them. Therefore tuning's very stable without needing a locking nut, making it easy to change tunings (e.g. to drop d and back) on the fly.

Mmm,...the neck. The neck is the greatest neck I've ever played. It's really fast, made of mahogany and has a graphite fingerboard which makes it faster. The longer I play it the faster it seems to get. After hours of playing I want to play more, not rest! Attached to this are hardened stainless steel (not the normal mild steel) frets which are bonded on with special glue. These will blatantly outlast normal frets, but be aware that the guitar has to go back to parker when a re-fret's due. This won't be for a good long while though because they're hardened, so it's a point I'm happy to live with. It also has a special machine tool steel truss rod to make it very stable. This guitar is designed to be very rigid so it resonates well. Part of this is obviously the neck and is therefore very strong looking.

Neck Joint. The neck joint is amazing. Being a carved neck joint and a thin body the neck seems to fade into the body, you can see the curve of the neck finally disappear about a 3rd of the way up the body. It has amazing access, and you can play the 24th fret of the 6th string without much trouble at all. You can play all the other strings up to 24th fret VERY easily. I've actually written a riff on it that I can't play properly on any other guitars! If you sawed the cutaway bigger you could play the pickups it's so easy to reach frets. :o)
It has a multiple finger joint to make it stiff and resonant. It also has carbon glass epoxy reinforcement around the neck joint to further add strength as the body is very thin.

Body. This is one piece mahogany with a flame maple top. More on this in action, fit and finish. It is very thin so weighs next to nothing, but it's designed to be very resonant, so sustains very well.

Bridge. This cunning device can be set to bend up and down, bend down only, or be fixed. I normally have it floating. It's very smooth and a joy to use. It's very easy to change from one mode to the other. It's nice to be able to quickly lock the trem, then you can stick it in a random alternate tuning very quickly. If you cange too much you may need to change the springs though. Also if you break a string live, you can lock the trem and keep playing to the end of the song (unlike if you've ever broken a string with a floyd rose and the rest of the tuning goes miles out). Unfortunately mine is set a bit bendy as you have to change the spring to match the spring guage, and mine has too bendy a spring in at the moment although it's not too bad. It comes with a sring for "9"s (9-42) or "10s" (10-46). I am playing with 11-52s I think at the mo' but it's downtuned a semitone and then in drop D, so the tension balances out fine for a 10 spring, but mine has a 9 in as my 10s broken...more on that in a minute.... On these new mojo's and the "refined" flys it's adjusted by poking a little metal rod through a hole in the back. It's very easy, yet I don't understand why they didn't keep the old wheel and switch arrangement as this needed no tools at all so surely would have been easier. I think it might be so stupid people don't get confused. ~:o(

Electronics. This beast has Seymour JB (Bridge) and Jazz (neck). Also it has a piezo pickup in the bridge to get nice acoustic sounds. It comes with volume and tone for the magnetic pickups, with coil split via push-pull tone knob. The piezo has a volume too and then there's a mag/mag+piezo/piezo switch. These have a mixer circuit so the

I like all sorts. I guess I'm mostly an alternative rock guitar player, but my musical taste is vast and includes loads of jazz, rock, metal, dance, chillout, blues, classical etc. It therefore needs to sound fat and rich, with nice cleans and jangly tones, and have a certain amount of bluesyness and also pounding heaviness when required. This it excels at. The mahognay body makes it sound surprising rich, considering it's so thin. The body shape and rigidity means the wood is made to resonate to really bring out it's tone, rather than the Les Paul "Sledge-hammer-to-crack-a-nut" style of just use a chunk of wood that's 3-4 (maybe more) times the mass, to get the same amount of tone.

It has a Seymour JB bridge and Jazz neck pickups. The JB is what I'd retrofitted to my Jackson. The jazz was what I was gonna put in it too. The JB has a great mix of fat bass and lovely highs and harmonics. I've always liked JBs. The Mojo ands a whole extra warm mahogany tone to them that my Jackson never did though. The Jazz is really rich and warm too. The coil split is great and you can get amazing single coil strat-ish tones too.

The piezo pickups are great too. I'm surprised they can sound this good. It does sound very accousticy. Obviously these aren't gonna sound like a "real" top of the range acoustic but are very passable.

You can then add in various amounts of the two together for very nice tones. Using clean acoustic and mag together yields lots of very nice clean tones.

I don't actually use the piezo *that* much but it's nice when I do. The bottomline is that this guitar really makes the Seymours sing, and the variety of tones is great.

Mine's in Translucent Blue. The finish is absolutely gorgeous. Not a flaw or mark on it. The Flame Maple front is one piece so it doesn't have a join line running down the middle. Just fantastic. I bought this guitar from manchester, so went up there to buy it. They opened the case for me to look at it and try it before I finalised the purchase and it blew me away. The modern hi-tech look of the parker coupled with it's beatiful classic flame maple top really works for me. No bright blue "plastic" looking parkers for me! Yuk!!!

As soon as I got it it was set up by the shop. (or had minor tweaks as I wanted different strings 9-46 (came with 9-42s) and a different tuning. downtuning with light strings means there's not enough tension really with the 9. spring. I now use 11-56 since it's downtuned a bit, and just sounds better. If you're playing light strings downtuned, you should try using heavier ones anyway in my opinion.

Everything on it is incredibly neat and well put together. Have a look on the parker website if you have any doubts about how well thought out and made these are. The way the necks are designed and the materials used mean the necks are very stiff and unlikely to warp. So it should stay as good as it is now for a good long time.

Although this guitar is very light it seems very sturdy, due to things mentioned above. I've played it live a good many times. Everything looks built to last. I'm not aware of any problems with old parkers apart from the very early ones paint finished and input jacks. Apparently these were addressed ages ago though.

One slightly weak point is the bridge spring. It has a flat spring in. I found that if the tension is quite high, then some clown closes the case fully with the trem handle in it can break the spring. (Not me I hasten to add, I was shamefully too drunk to put my guitar away at the time, as it was following the last gig our band played before we split up).
This wouldn't normally happen and I don't think it's fair to judge the guitar by this as it was a mistreating of it. I actually didn't notice as half the broken spring dug into the wood on the inside, and it was only a month or 2 later that I realised what had happened when the tuning seems not quite as stable as I'd hoped (though still very good!) when I opened the back and found the spring was broken in half! I guess this means it's a 9 I suppose. Parker do replacement springs though so it's not a problem, or is it.....

Parker seem to give replies to about 30% of the e-mails I sent them. That's pretty poor. I've tried to get a spring (see above) via the phone in the end. The bloke in the states was pretty friendly, though he couldn't help me as I had to get a spring from the UK distributor, and they couldn't post me one from the US.

I then contacted the UK distributor. They don't have any spares as they haven't been the UK distributor for that long, and Parker haven't sent them any even though they've requested some. I tried again today, and still parker haven't sent them any. Apparently Parker have been having trouble shipping spare to anywhere in europe recently.

So, I have had this lovely guitar for less than a year, and it's had a broken spring for over a quarter of that. I've put the 9 spring in so it works and it still plays very well, but since the tension isn't what it should be for the guage strings I'm using when I do bends the bridge gives too much. This is very annoying as this guitar costs 2 and a half grand! That's more than twice what I paid for my car, and you can buy a Brand New small car for less than 2 and a half of these guitars! If 5th gear in the gearbox broke and you found a spare part wasn't available, you'd think it unacceptable. Same applies here.

Come on Parker, this is poor. After paying that kind of money for a guitar, not being able to play it "fully working" for months is really not very good.

I'll give them a 2 since they were friendly, but when it came down to really needing something they couldn't sell me the bit.

Parker apparently used to have amazing customer support. Is this what happens when companies are bought by big corporations? :o(

I use this with a Mesa Triaxis, Marshall EL34 100/100, 1960A cab, and TC Electronics G-major. This is a great combination (though I'd like a Mesa or VHT poweramp and new cab, or a diezel VH4).

I first found Parkers from trying a friend of a friend's Fly Deluxe. The neck was amazing and I wanted one, but always thought I'd like one with seymours to give it more warmth and grunt. The Mojo then came out and I thought my prayers had been answered. I still couldn't really afford it, but after lots of head scratching and a loan application one was mine. I don't feel disappointed in the least. I still can't put this guitar down when I play it.

It's a shame about the inability to get a replacement spring but obviously I'll get one sooner or later, and hopefully this is a passing phase as they moved and were bought out not long ago (though it doesn't make it any more acceptable, especially the time it's been going on for).

However, this guitar is amazing. Everything from the tuning stability, bridge locking, coil splitting, warmth of tone the spring issue) is amazing. It sounds fantastic, looks fantastic, and plays fantastic.

I used to dream of custom guitars and all the features I'd like. I haven't since I got this as it does everything amazingly well. The ONE thing I wished it could have which was the only missing thing was a kill switch (it doesn't come standard on may guitars and I didn't fancy drilling a hole in the Parker). Then I figured if I put the piezo volume to nothing I could use the piezo/mag switch as one! Splendid! So, in a word, perfect.