Wechter Pathmaker 3000 Series wins Guitar Player Editors' Pick Award

"Offering outstanding playability and super-flexible electronics, the Wechter Pathmaker is a smart choice for hardworking pickers and songsmiths who need an all-in-one writing, recording, and gigging tool. It sounds particularly wicked plugged in, and it’s currently the only acoustic-electric in its price range with three points of amplification. Innovative and affordable, the Pathmaker nabs an Editors’ Pick Award."
Guitar Player Magazine, November 2003

September 22, 2003 - Guitar Player magazine honored Wechter Pathmaker™ 3000 Series with its distinguished Editors' Pick Award in the November 2003 issue. These awards recognize those products that the Guitar Player editors deem "innovative, technologically advanced, and exquisitely rendered."

In order to qualify for this prestigious award, a product must be evaluated in a Guitar Player Bench Test and receive at least one top score in the review's overall rating categories. Once the product qualifies, Guitar Player editors meet to discuss its merits and vote on whether it gets an award. Approval must be unanimous. The Wechter Pathmaker™ has met all of Guitar Player's strict standards and earned top honors from the magazine's editorial board.

Excerpts from the review

Guitar Player Senior Editor Andy Ellis writes: "Most budget acoustics are knockoffs of instruments pioneered decades ago by Martin and Gibson. It’s cheaper to emulate than innovate, which explains why the world is long on wannabe D-28s and J-45s, and short on low-priced original designs. It’s this reality that makes the Wechter Pathmaker ($399 street, deluxe gig bag included) such a standout. Created by noted luthier Abe Wechter, built in China to his specifications, and set up in his Michigan workshop, the acoustic-electric Pathmaker combines decent materials and construction with radical engineering, cool electronics, and remarkable playability. The result is a bold, versatile 6-string that performs far above its price class."

Construction Details

"The Pathmaker’s most innovative feature is its patented neck joint, a clever design that yields two huge dividends—unimpeded access to the 19th fret, and an uncommonly stable union between the neck and body. At the heart of this junction is a curved, wooden block. Nearly 3/4" thick and laminated for strength, this crosspiece runs from the tip of one cutaway to the other, defining the cutaway contours and 81/2" span, and establishing the body’s 4" upper-bout depth. The neck is fitted and glued to the center of this block using three wooden dowels. Together, the neck and block form an inverted T—a rigid frame that prevents lateral neck twisting, and allows the instrument to be lightly braced. In terms of fretboard access, the Pathmaker lies somewhere between a Gibson Barney Kessel archtop and an SG—unreal for a flat-top."

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"Wechter has taken two steps to maximize the Pathmaker’s resonance. First, using violinmaker’s planes, workers scallop the braces to let the top and back vibrate more freely. Second, the finish is applied sparingly—just enough to seal the wood, but not imprison it. On our test Pathmaker, the wood grain showed through the high-gloss finish, the way it does on many boutique flat-tops. These two procedures are worth the effort."

"Sporting sealed, diecast tuners, the curvy headstock lets the strings fan out gently after they cross the bone nut. Coupled with a moderate downward headstock angle, this spread keeps the strings firmly in their slots without causing undue binding. The tuners turn smoothly, and the nut slots are carefully cut so the open-string height tracks the fretboard radius—a detail often overlooked on mass-produced instruments."

"The neck has a moderate, rounded profile that stays at a uniform depth until you reach the 14th fret, where the heel begins its downward journey. Boasting a generous 251/2" scale length, a gentle 12" radius, and well-crowned medium fretwire, the rosewood fretboard offers an inviting playing surface. Some fret ends are awkwardly cut, but they’ve all been filed smooth, and there are no sharp edges."

Totally Wired

"The Pathmaker’s sexiest feature is its electronic package, which comprises a preamp/mixer, a condenser mini-mic on a flexible stem, a single-coil magnetic soundhole pickup with adjustable polepieces, and an undersaddle piezo transducer. The sidemount preamp allows you to manipulate the level and tone of all three signal sources using a minimum number of controls."

"The Pathmaker has two outputs—a low-impedance XLR jack and a high-impedance 1/4" jack—mounted on a plate near the endpin. These jacks carry identical mono signals, so you can’t split the pickup and mic outputs. But what you can do is feed your sound simultaneously to a P.A. and stage amp, and then wrangle the results independently. In the studio, the dual outs suggest creative options like recording a clean signal from the XLR jack, while connecting the 1/4" jack to an effects unit and then bussing the processed tones to a second track. If you gig a lot, you’ll really appreciate how the system runs happily on 48-volt phantom power supplied from a mixer via the XLR cable—slick! A dedicated LED indicates when the phantom juice is flowing."

"Plugged in, the Pathmaker has a huge repertoire of blended mic and pickup sounds. Whether you’re after crunchy chord riffs or warm lead lines, you’re bound to find what you need—plus variations thereof. The guitar’s mag and saddle pickups sound clean and robust, but it’s the hot mic that provides the magic. Some claim that a mic placed inside an acoustic picks up more sonic garbage than useful timbres. However, I found that by pulling the capsule out of the soundhole—so it hovers between the soundboard and the bass strings, angled toward the treble strings—the Pathmaker delivered a very credible miked tone. This proved especially useful in a studio setting, where I’d often let the mic do most of the work. Onstage, the mic is forced to play a more subservient role to avoid feedback. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much mic signal to animate the direct pickup tones."

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