Cort L60CE-NAT — Luce Series Cutaway Electro-Acoustic Guitar

The Cort L60CE-NAT is Cort’s answer to modern acoustic players who demand sophisticated sonics, ergonomic comfort, and tour-ready electronics without surrendering the organic charm of a traditional Grand Auditorium. Nestled within the boutique-inspired Luce Series, the L60CE pairs a solid Sitka spruce top with mahogany back and sides, laces the soundboard with hand-scalloped X-bracing, and finishes the ensemble in a natural open-pore sheen that lets every nuanced vibration breathe freely. The Venetian cutaway on the treble bout invites unhindered access to upper-register passages, making the guitar as ready for melodic soloing as it is for camp-fire chord work. Completing the stage-centric design is a Fishman Presys II preamp with a phase switch and onboard tuner—essentials for the modern songwriter who might track a demo in the morning, livestream in the afternoon, and headline a café set at night.

Design Ethos: Blending Heritage with Modernity

Cort’s Luce Series was conceived as a love letter to the golden-age acoustics of the 1960s, but with subtle engineering touches that reflect twenty-first-century performance demands. The L60CE exemplifies that mission. Its Grand Auditorium silhouette—equally at home fingerpicking lullabies and banging out blues shuffles—strikes a Goldilocks balance between dreadnought boom and concert-size intimacy. Rather than doubling down on nostalgia, Cort adds a sleek hidden dovetail neck joint that trims unnecessary heel bulk; the resulting seamless transition from neck to body renders position-twelve chord inversions noticeably easier on the wrist. A single-ring wood-and-abalone rosette nods to vintage craft, while a minimalist headstock decal underscores the guitar’s workmanlike intent: tone before bling.

Topwood, Back & Sides: A Dialogue of Spruce and Mahogany

Sound begins, quite literally, at the top. Sitka spruce—harvested responsibly from the Pacific Northwest—remains the acoustic world’s most popular soundboard species for good reason. With a strength-to-weight ratio that outperforms steel on a per-gram basis, Sitka couples rigidity with elasticity, allowing it to store and release kinetic energy with startling efficiency. On the L60CE, Cort seasons each billet for nine full months before book-matching and sanding to a uniform 2.6 mm profile. This thinner-than-average thickness shortens the soundboard’s attack time, gifting the guitar a shimmering immediacy that flat-pickers will adore. The back and sides employ African mahogany, whose mid-range warmth cocoons the spruce chime in a blanket of chocolatey overtones. Together, spruce and mahogany create a sonic fingerprint ideal for modern singer-songwriters: articulate fundamental notes framed by subtle, airy harmonics that never crowd the vocal frequencies.

Neck Construction & Playability

Mahogany forms the neck blank, finished in a hand-rubbed satin that feels like a well-worn baseball bat from the first chord. Cort carves the profile to a comfortable “C” that measures 20 mm deep at the first fret and 22 mm at the ninth—beefy enough for thumb-over grip yet slim enough for barre-chord marathons. A dual-action truss rod lives beneath a walnut skunk stripe, letting techs dial relief in either direction without removing the neck or unstringing. The fingerboard is ovangkol, a West African relative of rosewood with a similar oily luster but a touch more high-frequency sparkle. Twenty medium frets, leveled on Cort’s PLEK Pro station to within 0.01 mm, enable sub-2 mm action across all six strings with zero buzz. Side dots glow in low light thanks to a UV-reactive compound—a simple yet gig-saving detail.

Sculpted Venetian Cutaway

Traditionalists often fear that cutaways sacrifice volume, but Cort’s CNC-shaped Venetian design removes only as much material as necessary for fret-seventeen comfort, leaving the upper bout’s structural load path untouched. The net acoustic loss is negligible, while the ergonomic gain is monumental when a solo demands a soulful bend on fret nineteen.

Bridge, Nut & Saddle: The Energy Transfer Triad

The bridge mirrors the fingerboard in ovangkol, chosen for its dimensional stability and matched grain aesthetic. Cort’s bridge footprint is slightly elongated, distributing string pull across a wider spruce surface for enhanced resonance. A bone saddle—compensated for accurate intonation—drops into a precisely milled slot. Bone’s porous micro-structure wicks string energy efficiently into the top while imparting sparkling high-end definition. Up top, a 43 mm bone nut offers a familiar string spacing to steel-string veterans. Cort machines nut slots on a five-axis CNC router before hand-polishing each ramp; the result is friction-free tuning and fewer “ping” noises when bending.

Electronics: Fishman Presys II

Acoustic amplification can be unforgiving, but the Fishman Presys II preamp renders the L60CE’s unplugged personality with astonishing fidelity. Under the hood, a Fishman Sonicore undersaddle piezo captures each string’s vibration at the saddle–top interface, then routes the analog signal to a preamp mounted tastefully on the upper bass-side rim. Here, a two-band EQ (bass/treble) provides broad sculpting ability, while a phase switch combats low-frequency feedback in boomy venues. The chromatic tuner—with bright LED matrix—mutes output automatically when engaged, granting silent tune-ups between songs. A nine-volt battery powers the system for approximately 100 playing hours, and the tray pops open tool-free—a godsend during a hectic soundcheck.

Live Performance & Studio Application

On stage, the L60CE projects a voice that cuts through a mix without overshadowing fellow musicians. Fingerpick an arpeggio and the spruce top snaps each transient forward; dig in with a flat pick and the mahogany’s rounded low end fills the room. Engage a gentle reverb pedal and you’ll discover lush pads that bloom without washing out. In the studio, engineers will appreciate the guitar’s low noise floor; the Presys II’s 20 Hz–20 kHz frequency response reproduces harmonics cleanly, while the phase switch can remedy 180° cancellations when dual-miking. If you prefer microphone capture, the L60CE’s dynamic response translates beautifully under a small-diaphragm condenser positioned at the 12th-fret axis—expect articulate fundamentals wrapped in delicate overtone halos.

Genre Versatility

Though birthed in a “folk” lineage, the L60CE refuses to be pigeonholed. Jazz compers will revel in its balanced mid-range that renders extended chords—9ths, 11ths, 13ths—with crystalline note separation. Country pickers will find the trebles snappy enough for chicken-pickin’ licks, especially with a touch of compression from the front-of-house desk. Blues buskers can yank down the preamp’s bass pot one notch and coax a throaty growl perfect for Delta slide. Even ambient post-rock artists—whose pedalboards rival NASA consoles—will discover that the L60CE’s spruce sparkle slices confidently through lush multi-tap delays and spacious shimmer verbs.

Specification Table