Cort Viva Gold II
My matte natural wood Cort superstrat, I have a love/hate relation with this thing
| Maker | Cort |
|---|---|
| Model | Viva Gold II (natural satin) |
| Type | Solid-body electric guitar, HSH, double-locking tremolo |
Store
| Store | Price | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| Owned (discontinued) | — | 2026-09-20 |
Description
My electric guitar from Cort's 90s Viva line. I bought it around 2017, mostly because I wanted to understand how micro-tuned guitars with floating bridges work, how I would play one and how I would take care of one. It's not sold anymore, so it's a "collector" guitar in quotes, but it's not an expensive one and it's not something you can't find either.
I always liked it a lot because it's super nice to play, but I had to tune it and configure it and adjust it so many times that it probably spent more time at the luthier than with me. Right now it's broken because I tried to change the pickups and ended up burning them, so there's something wrong in the wiring. I have a project to fix it, I just haven't had the time to pull all the wiring out and put it all back, because it's a big instrument and I need a decent place to work where I don't destroy everything else around it or damage the guitar itself.
What I ended up doing was accepting that I'm going to modify this guitar a lot, so it became kind of my personal project, my custom made guitar. I'm going to change all the pickups myself, all the wiring, the input jack, every part I can, probably the bridge too. It's going to be my lab guitar, my Frankenstein.
Back then I also had an Epiphone SG that I loved, and I should have brought it to Sweden the same way I brought the Viva Gold, but the price didn't justify it. I only brought the Viva because I liked the style of this guitar so much. If I had known it was this cheap and not that good, I probably would have sold it in Brazil and bought a better guitar here.
Impressions
I have a love and hate relationship with this thing. I always thought it was extremely beautiful, it's matte, with that natural wood colour, and it still is. But compared to other guitars it's not marvellous, the pickups aren't great, nothing on it is extremely good, everything is just ok.
The love and hate part comes from what I found out about myself with it. I know now which guitars I don't like, the Les Paul models for example, I think they're horrible to play. I really like SG style guitars, they're super nice to play, and I really like superstrats, which is the style of the Viva. But I hate micro-tuned guitars, and that's something I discovered when I bought this one.
Why? I always had problems tuning it and changing the strings. Basically anyone has, any musician has, including famous ones, I've heard Kiko Loureiro and Nuno Bettencourt talking about how bad these are to restring. So it's more or less natural for guitars with floating bridges, but for me specifically there's no big gain in it. I've even thought about blocking the bridge.
Final thoughts
It's an excellent guitar and it's extremely nice to play, but it's very hard to keep in tune and it's also very hard to adjust. Sometimes it comes with the action too high or too low and you always have to keep adjusting it at the bridge. Every time you change strings, like with any micro-tuned bridge, you need practically a whole day to do it, and even then you still run the risk of throwing the whole thing out of tune and out of adjustment.