The new Tri Tone is inspired by the extremely rare, vintage Supro Triple Tone guitar. This tuxedo-black, 3-pickup, art deco masterpiece made its original debut in 1959 and was produced for only a single year. Sixty years after the release of the original Triple Tone, Supro is re-introducing this unique instrument for 2019 with modernizations like set-neck construction, tune-o-matic bridge and increased access to upper frets—now making the Tri Tone a serious player’s guitar with authentic vintage mojo. The Tri Tone shares its distinctive, single-cutaway body shape with the best-selling Dual Tone model, played by Link Wray and David Bowie. The body of the Tri Tone is made of solid mahogany. The fully bound neck is constructed of hard rock maple, sporting a seductively smooth, black satin finish on the back, and a 12”-radius pau ferro fretboard on the front.

Along with the distinctive jet-black color, reverse stairstep tailpiece, brushed gold hardware and stylized double pickguard, a defining highlight of the original instrument was the trio of Ralph Keller-designed Vistatone pickups. Although they look like humbuckers, Vistatone pickups are in fact noise-cancelling single coil pickups that deliver a ton of output. For the brand new 2019 Tri Tone, we’ve used the triple-pickup format to combine a pair of authentic Vistatone pickups in the neck and bridge position, with an overwound Super Alnico unit in the bridge. Custom-made for the 2019 Tri Tone, these powerful, vintage-correct single coil pickups deliver a wide variety of Supro tones, ranging from warm jazz and smoldering blues to southern rock and fuzzed-out psychedelia. The full sonic palette of the Tri Tone can be accessed using the dedicated volume knobs for each pickup, the 5-way selector switch and the master volume control.