The R2 body is made of solid mahogany, with a tone chamber beneath a solid figured maple front plate. The maple front plate is a functional acoustic component which completes the chamber and provides the right amount of tone and resonance to the bridge. Every front plate has unique figuring. They can be curly (as seen) or quilted, or flame or birds-eye maple. The mahogany can be stained any brown or red before lacquer and polishing. (There are no tone-sapping thick glassy "poly-what-not" finishes on these guitars, nor any lumps of cheap plastic holding the pickups in place with little acoustic connection)

This guitar is designed to be played seriously. Not only to look great! Take a very close look - and compare this with any factory guitar. The ends of every fret on a Rees guitar are rounded in every direction, and polished. Together with a hand finished silk surface to the back of the neck, and an action that goes as low as you dare, this provides ultimate speed and excitement, or relaxed effortless harmony, as the mood takes you.

The Fender LSR Roller nut is the best all-rounder nut technology there is. It is fitted to every standard R2. Why? -
It provides very low friction - so that when you move a tuner a small amount, that alters the tuning by the same small amount immediately, with no later readjustment.
Its tonal characteristic is similar to a well placed finger immediately behind a fret. The pair of roller balls behave as the metal fret, and the small rubber pad on the headstock side of the nut behaves as a finger. So open strings and fretted strings have similar tone. This also eliminates undesirable headstock string discordance.
The nut works at the same action height with any size of strings, and has no dependency on a particular string size. You can change string size up and down as many times as you like, without ruining your nut!

The pickups can be used as humbuckers or single coil (strat-like) pickups. The rotary tone knob has a push-pull switch for pickup type.

Recordings
A series of original studio recording by Eddie Copeland are tabled, demonstrating the various voices of a Rees R2 guitar and playing styles. These are in mp3 format so that you can play them through your computer speakers and hi-fi and IPod. Best to use real hi-fi. Some computer speakers are inadequate to appreciate the quality.

Lost at Sea - an instrumental song by Eddie Copeland. All guitar parts in the recording are played on an R2 using a variety of pickup settings. Being a slow atmospheric song, it demonstrates the magnificent sustain of the instrument. Some fast runs show how fluently it plays.

All following samples were recorded with the same R2 guitar with volume and tone controls on full. The 3 way PU switch selects Bridge/Both/Neck; the push/pull of the tone knob selects Humbucker/SingleCoil.

Music	Bridge PU Humbucker	Both PUs Humbuckers	Neck PU Humbucker	Bridge PU Single Coil	Both PUs Single Coils	Neck PU Single Coil
Clean Funky
Clean Solo
Crunchy
Distorted Chords
Distorted Solo

Recording details are in the Tone Zone page

The R2 wrap-around bridge is set firmly into the heart of the wood by two 11 mm posts. This optimizes sustain and conducts some wood tone into the strings. The bridge height is adjustable at each end. The intonation of each string is individually adjustable. .Changing strings is quick and easy. Having such a short length of string behind the bridge provides instant tuning stability, and a fine responsive playing feel.

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