From the guitars he sold under his eponymous brand in the 2000s to his current Novo brand, Dennis Fano has presented the guitar world with some of the most distinctive American-made instruments of the past 20 years. The newly redesigned Miris J from Novo’s new Nucleus series is a prime example.
Aside from the major manufacturers, any electric guitar designer and manufacturer faces a double challenge in trying to break into the market: creating designs that look new enough to make an impression, but aren’t so radically unknown that they seem unapproachable. Now entering his third decade, Dennis Fano has navigated this path with astonishing ease.
After several years of making his Alt de Facto line of past-meets-future-meets-fun guitars in his own small shop, Fano joined the Premier Builder’s Guild in California for a while before founding Novo Guitars, now based in Nashville. Since then, his designs have gone from strength to strength.
The entirely original Novo line has received more attention – and more celebrity endorsements – than anything Fano has done before, and has firmly established his work in the more permanent boutiques. During its relatively short existence, Novo has also evolved through various dealer and direct sales systems.
Fano currently uses a more efficient, direct-only purchasing network that includes both standard models – the Nucleus series, which comes with a range of pre-set options and a one- to two-month delivery window – and a custom-built option with a much wider range of bespoke features and completion in around 12 months. Our test model is from the former, but looks anything but ‘standard’.
Although Novo has introduced other body types, including the single-cutaway Solus line (reviewed in December 2020), the large-volume, two-cutaway, offset-waist style is the maker’s signature, as seen in its Serus J model. The Miris J is easily recognizable as its direct descendant, with similar Jazzmaster-meets-Rickenbacker-style lines and proportions applied to a semi-hollow design.
“The Serus J was our most popular model from the beginning,” Fano tells us, “so introducing a semi-hollow version a few years later seemed like a pretty good move, and it worked out well. The Miris is now our second most popular model.”
These solid and semi-solid siblings are particularly popular with indie and alternative guitarists, landing in the hands of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Nels Cline, Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison, and Slider’s Maria Schneider, but Fano tells us he had no intentions or preconceptions when sketching out the Miris J.
“When I start designing a new guitar, I don’t have a specific player in mind, and this approach gives me tremendous creative freedom,” he explains. “I see my designs as reverence for tradition without being traditional. The lack of tradition invites players to pick up a Novo without any preconceptions about what the guitar is or what it does, and I hope that in turn, this allows players of all musical styles to be creative and find their unique, individual voice.”
He’s clearly onto something. Cline, known for his jazz, fusion and indie rock playing, is often referred to as a Jazzmaster player, but he told me two years ago that he was deeply in love with the Miris J that Dennis Fano built for him in 2019. “It’s my favorite guitar,” he raved, “and I have to say it’s hard to blow my mind with new guitars.”
It’s easy to see how a Novo could pull off this trick. It has the feel and vibe of a rediscovered brand from the golden age of the electric guitar, evident in the thin and often pre-aged nitrocellulose finishes, such as Lake Como Blue in our example, which beautifully showcases the grain of the swamp ash body.
It can also be felt in the feel of the play-worn roasted maple necks and other details. In addition, every Novo I’ve played has benefited from impeccable fretwork, precise and clean assembly and setup, and highly functional electronics and hardware.
The newly redesigned Miris J is no exception, adding several appealing nuances to the look and feel without making any serious deviations from the design.
“The 2024 Miris has a few new features that I recently first incorporated into a series of Signature Miris JG guitars,” explains Fano. “These include a ‘cat scratch’ soundhole that mirrors the shape of the control plate, a Serus metal pickguard and control plate, a belly contour and rounded rear edges on the body.”
Perhaps the most significant change is Mastery’s Novo NV vibrato. Fano reveals that he approached Mastery’s designer and owner John Woodland last fall about making his own tremolo. Somehow they got it done in time for the NAMM show in January.
“I’m always looking for new ways to enhance Novo and make us stand out from the crowd,” explains Fano. “I designed a distinctive, oversized base plate with our engraved Tri-Plate logo and a distinctive lightning bolt-shaped vibrato arm with a nickel-plated, machined aluminum tip. The tip feels great in the hand and the new arm keeps the pivot point centered over the vibrato, giving it a super smooth feel.”
The vibrato is accompanied by Mastery’s acclaimed M1 bridge, with a set of vintage-style tuning pegs that anchor the strings at the other end after they pass over a 1.65-inch unbleached bone saddle.
The bolt-on neck has a 25 ½-inch scale and a medium-C profile that’s 0.83-inch deep at the first fret. The rosewood fingerboard carries 22 medium-sized Jescar nickel silver frets with a compound radius of 9.5 to 14 inches. A pair of Fralin P90s route everything to the Switchcraft jack via a three-way switch and individual volume and tone controls.
Tested with a Tweed Deluxe-style 1×12 combo, a 65-amp London head, and a 2×12 cabinet, the Miris J effortlessly revealed the instrument with which Fano wanted to “find his unique, individual voice.”
The Fralin pickups selected for this guitar have the P90’s typical grain and fullness when pushed, making the guitar a fun, growling rock’n’roller when slightly overdriven. But they are also extremely clean, producing clear, articulate tones that suit more nuanced styles.
With a stream-of-consciousness collage of various riffs from retro metal, punk, garage rock, twang, roots rock, shoegaze-infused indie, and even some pseudo-jazz, the Miris J cleared every hurdle and strived for more – and did so with considerably more playability than the Miris Js I’ve played before.
The vibrato works smoothly, the neck feels great in the hand and the whole guitar plays beautifully from the nut to the neck joint. In short, it’s another winner from Fano and the Novo stable and a further reinforcement of this manufacturer’s excellent reputation.
