Donner HUSH I EVO2 Travel Guitar

Really bad strings, snapped within the first week. But if you just assume you are gonna buy new stings its a pretty good guitar

I’ve been piddling with guitar for a few years now and consider myself and advanced novice. This is a nicely spec’d Instrument, and I was really surprised by the overall build quality. The body is solid mahogany, the fretboard is nice and smooth, the frets are decent and nicely rounded on the ends, and the matte finish is good. Weight is a bit more than I expected, but it’s not too heavy for travel. I didn’t expect actual body binding or mother-of-pearl fret dots. The tuners are sold and seem to keep the instrument in tune. The overall design is very well thought out down to a magnetic holder for the tool used with the tuners and for installing the screws for the extenders. The electronics are also nice with a built-in tuner, tone controls, and volume. Truss rod adjustment is easy with the included Allen wrench. It has built in strap buttons, one also serving as a jack for your instrument cable should you choose to plug into an external amp (it doesn’t require an amp if you prefer using headphones). I definitely didn’t expect real mother-of-pearl fretboard dot inlays or a bone saddle and nut. All-in-all, I am really impressed with the build quality and design, especially for the money.Donner includes everything you need to play out of the box, including an 9v battery and decent ear buds. All of this packs down into a nice semi-rigid nylon case and all of the accessories neatly fit in their own designated pockets. Even the bag carry strap can double as the instrument strap (I suggest a separate dedicated guitar strap though). I like to play mine through a Spark Go mini amp due to the size and the app’s acoustic tone settings. I find you can also add some other effects to get more of an electric guitar tone even without the coil pickups.THE SETUP: Here is the big caveat for this acoustic electric: plan to do a setup to make it comfortably playable. This setup is something you should be able to do yourself if you’re somewhat knowledgeable with guitars. First, the neck truss rod needed major adjustment out of the box. Based on what others have said online, this is not unusual. I had to significantly tighten the truss rod, probably around 3 or 4 full turns, to get it straight enough. Next, the factory strings aren’t the best. I found they really squeak when doing chord changes, so it’s worthwhile to swap them out with coated strings or flatwound strings. I kept acoustic strings on mine, but others have successfully used electric strings or nylons.The other most important part of the process is the saddle towards the bottom of the guitar. Out of the box, the action on these guitars is really high, and a main reason is that the saddle is really tall. To fix this, folks sand the bottom of the saddle down to get the string height down to a much more manageable height. I did this by hand sanding it on 220 grit sandpaper on top of a flat solid surface. I took of around 1/3 of the original height, but did it a little at a time to make sure I didn’t take off too much. The goal is to keep the bottom of the saddle as flat and square as possible. It’s easy to remove the saddle by hand once the strings are removed or sufficiently loose. Within less than an hour, I had my guitar action nice and low, similar to the action on my other guitars.Overall, if you’re looking for a small and convenient travel guitar, this one is a great cost-effective option.

It is a well made travel guitar with a nicely padded gig bag. Accessories and extra parts are included for attaching the wings. A nice set of earphones are also included. I made a few adjustments to lower the action. It is well made and will serve its intended purpose. Check out the video and sound sample.

Works great

The guitar is portable in the sense that you can remove the frames (no tools required), but you obviously can't disconnect the neck, as it still has actual strings. The frames make it feel like a bigger guitar, and look a bit more 'normal'. The neck is slim and has a headless design. It comes with a compact material case and strap, which also has a big pocket on the front that has plenty of space to store things. It's really lightweight, so it's definitely ideal for travelling. There is a built-in tuner on top, and it has an LED display (it requires a 9V battery, which is included). There's also a hidden magnetic T-wrench on the back to manually tune as well. You can plug headphones in if you don't want to annoy people, or you can connect it to an amp if you want to play out loud. It comes with all the accessories you need, from the 9V battery, to headphones, an audio cable, etc. It's a shame I received the wrong colour, but overall it's a nice guitar if you're after something portable.

This arrived very well packaged in a gig bag with compartments for all of the extras and a Velcro neck strap to hold the guitar firmly. This is the newest in Donner's line of headless travel guitars. There is a piezo pickup under the bridge. And the electronics include a tuner this time and it works well. The electronics work off of a nine volt battery and they function exactly as they should. There is an auxillary output and a headphone output. So, you can silently practice with the pickup activated. As usual for Donner, the extras are all very good. The cable is not the typical low end cable you find in guitar packages. The strap is a good quality strap and it doubles as the strap to carry the gig bag, which is something I have only found on Donners. The "body" of the guitar consists of two metal inserts, which now insert into the body and are held by pins that you screw in with your fingers, then tighten with the included magnetic allen wrench that sits in a hole in the back of the body. This is a good design, although I had a difficult time dislodging the wrench and ended up using a needle nose pliers to remove it from its perch. This is a bit of a problem because it is also the fine tuner to tune the guitar. I ended up jamming a soft plastic switch tip into the hole to keep the wrench from sitting down in its recessed hole. That way it was held firmly, but able to removed more easily. The gig bag is the typical well thought out Donner headless guitar bag. It has pockets and holders for all of the extras. The guitar itself is a good one. It's very light, which is great for me. And the neck is wonderful, which is typical for Donner travel guiars. The scale length is the Gibson 24.75 inches, which is great. The fret work is very good. The nut is cut well and just a hair over 43 mm. There was more than a little relief, so I tightened up the truss rod, which worked well. The action was a bit high for me, but acceptable at 2.5mm low E and 2.25mm high E at the twelfth fret. I'll likely file down the bridge just a bit in the future to lower the action. The pickup sounds really good when amplified, both clean and with some dirt. The guitar comes with ear buds. Solid plus. The lower strap button doubles as the output jack. It was difficult getting the strap onto it, but it is doable. What I continue not to love is the lower metal "body" piece. I don't like the shape of it. I like the Strandberg/classical position for headless guitar play, and extending and bending the metal piece to fit against the right leg would do wonders for this guitar. But, alas, Donner seems married to the shape that doesn't allow that. I think there might actually be a nice aftermarket for a differently shaped lower body metal piece that allowed the classical position to be an option. But overall, this is a really nice playing and well planed out headless travel guitar system.

I’ve been piddling with guitar for a few years now and consider myself and advanced novice. This is a nicely spec’d Instrument, and I was really surprised by the overall build quality. The body is solid mahogany, the fretboard is nice and smooth, the frets are decent and nicely rounded on the ends, and the matte finish is good. Weight is a bit more than I expected, but it’s not too heavy for travel. I didn’t expect actual body binding or mother-of-pearl fret dots. The tuners are sold and seem to keep the instrument in tune. The overall design is very well thought out down to a magnetic holder for the tool used with the tuners and for installing the screws for the extenders. The electronics are also nice with a built-in tuner, tone controls, and volume. Truss rod adjustment is easy with the included Allen wrench. It has built in strap buttons, one also serving as a jack for your instrument cable should you choose to plug into an external amp (it doesn’t require an amp if you prefer using headphones). I definitely didn’t expect real mother-of-pearl fretboard dot inlays or a bone saddle and nut. All-in-all, I am really impressed with the build quality and design, especially for the money. Donner includes everything you need to play out of the box, including an 9v battery and decent ear buds. All of this packs down into a nice semi-rigid nylon case and all of the accessories neatly fit in their own designated pockets. Even the bag carry strap can double as the instrument strap (I suggest a separate dedicated guitar strap though). I like to play mine through a Spark Go mini amp due to the size and the app’s acoustic tone settings. I find you can also add some other effects to get more of an electric guitar tone even without the coil pickups. THE SETUP: Here is the big caveat for this acoustic electric: plan to do a setup to make it comfortably playable. This setup is something you should be able to do yourself if you’re somewhat knowledgeable with guitars. First, the neck truss rod needed major adjustment out of the box. Based on what others have said online, this is not unusual. I had to significantly tighten the truss rod, probably around 3 or 4 full turns, to get it straight enough. Next, the factory strings aren’t the best. I found they really squeak when doing chord changes, so it’s worthwhile to swap them out with coated strings or flatwound strings. I kept acoustic strings on mine, but others have successfully used electric strings or nylons. The other most important part of the process is the saddle towards the bottom of the guitar. Out of the box, the action on these guitars is really high, and a main reason is that the saddle is really tall. To fix this, folks sand the bottom of the saddle down to get the string height down to a much more manageable height. I did this by hand sanding it on 220 grit sandpaper on top of a flat solid surface. I took of around 1/3 of the original height, but did it a little at a time to make sure I didn’t take off too much. The goal is to keep the bottom of the saddle as flat and square as possible. It’s easy to remove the saddle by hand once the strings are removed or sufficiently loose. Within less than an hour, I had my guitar action nice and low, similar to the action on my other guitars. Overall, if you’re looking for a small and convenient travel guitar, this one is a great cost-effective option.

I needed a guitar I could practice freely in my apartment and this is really great. I could have used an electric unplugged, but I like acoustic better, and this feels much more like an acoustic, so that's great for me. And the quality is surprisingly good for this price.

I’m impressed. After putting some work into this guitar it plays great and sounds fine. Not the best preamp but for the price it’ll do. Be prepared to work on it though! Out of the box the action is unbelievably high to the point of being unplayable. They seem to all come like this. You’ll need to sand down the saddle A LOT to get it where it should be.

Bought this to take with me when I’m not able to practice at home, I love the fact that it’s easy to assemble at any given time and playability and setup out of the box is awesome. I highly recommend this. Great price very good quality.

I bought the Hush-1 Evo2 thinking it might better mimic an acoustic guitar after recently buying the Hush-X. The two guitars are very similar. The Hush-X sounds better, but the strings on the Evo2 are thicker and more like an acoustic guitar. I thought it would be good to use hand screws for the frame supports, but they’re actually a hassle to use, and the Hush-X support frame system is faster and easier. The built in tuner is handy and works pretty well. The string tuners on the Evo2 are very difficult to adjust without using the little T-wrench. I wouldn’t have a problem with this except the T-wrench is extremely difficult to remove from its little magnetic slot in the body of the guitar. I wanted to buy another T-wrench from Donner so I could try to modify it to make it easier to access, but Donner doesn’t sell it separately. So, don’t lose it or you’ll have to use an Allen wrench. The storage case is pretty good. The guitar strap is terrible and next to impossible to attach to the guitar. It’s only utility is as a carry strap for the case. Bottom line: if you want a good practice guitar, spend a few extra dollars and buy the Hush-X.