Sommaire pour August 2020 de Guitarist

I recently broke one of my own rules and bought a guitar sight unseen from a private seller over the internet, which always carries the risk of disappointment when the guitar arrives (if it arrives…). Happily, the guitar, an American Vintage ’52 Telecaster, proved to be a nice instrument. There were a few niggles, though, which explained its very tempting price. The guitar’s original case was AWOL, the switch tip fell off, and the nut around the shaft of the jack socket had worked loose, meaning the whole assembly was loose and crackly. The guitar also came strung with nines, which I felt didn’t really deliver the full twangy majesty of that Tele tone. A sliver of gaffer tape wrapped round the end of the pickup selector solved the loose…

Parlour guitars: Back in the day (we’re talking late 19th century here), parlour guitars were almost exclusively owned and played by women. That partly explains the smaller body and lighter string tension. The other reason these guitars were so diminutive was volume. This wasn’t live at Budokan. When one was entertaining convivial company in one’s own parlour, shredding one’s way through Greensleeves or some such, volume was of little concern. Therefore there was no need for a larger model.…

Guitarist was saddened to hear of the passing of American bluesman Lucky Peterson, who died on 17 May, aged 55. He had been celebrating his 50th year in music, having begun his career at the age of five when he tracked his first album, Our Future, with some of the tracks produced by the legendary Willie Dixon. Over the years he backed Etta James, Little Milton and Otis Rush, in addition to having a prolific solo career touring the US and Europe. His most recent album, 50: Just Warming Up! was released last year. Mark Tremonti has revealed he’s writing a song with the player he once suggested “could be the best guitar player on Earth”. In a recent interview with Metal Wani, the Alter Bridge man was asked about…

If, like many of us lately, you’ve been living your life through the various digital channels available, you’ll have noticed the plethora of ‘post a pic of this or that, one a day for 10 days, no explanations or descriptions’ on Facebook and other social media platforms. Most of us on the magazine have done our 10 albums, and some are currently on their 10 black-and-white photo posts. When I listed my most musically influential listening, many of my friends were perplexed that my first three choices were by Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. They’d expected guitar stuff. But my first musical influence was my mother, who played classical music and jazz albums on the ‘radiogram’ when we were kids. Of course it seeped into my subconscious, as…

This month’s column was prompted by a debate I saw unfolding on a Facebook thread this month. Someone had posted about upgrading the nut on their guitar, but, as people will, someone else soon commented that it was nonsense that nut material was a big influence on tone because most notes played on the guitar are fretted – in which case, the nut plays no role in forming the sound of the note. “Bone nuts aren’t all created equal. There’s going to be so much variation in terms of the quality of the material” Now, obviously, not all notes played on the guitar are fretted. I, for one, love to include as many shimmering open strings in my chord voicings as I can – and who could deny the power…

Back in March, John Smith was in the middle of an Australian tour when the country announced restrictions on mass gatherings due to the Coronavirus. Shortly after, he found himself on the first flight home to the soon-to-be-locked-down UK. A little over a month later, however, and John had released his latest album, Live In Chester, and was set to embark upon a ‘virtual world tour’, a new landmark in his career so far… Music has been part of John’s life from an early age. When he was only five or six he began playing the piano, then the drums. The guitar came a little later, entering his consciousness when he saw the movie Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey around the age of 11. “That big guitar duel at the…

PRICE: £3,239 (inc case) ORIGIN: USA TYPE: 14-fret Grand Auditorium electro cutaway TOP: Mahogany BACK/SIDES: Urban Ash MAX RIM DEPTH: 117.4mm MAX BODY WIDTH: 406.4mm NECK: Mahogany SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”) TUNERS: Gotoh 510 Antique Gold NUT/WIDTH: Black Tusq /44.8mm FINGERBOARD: West African Ebony, Italian acrylic compass inlays FRETS: 20, medium BRIDGE/SPACING: West African Ebony w/ compensated Micarta saddle/56mm ELECTRICS: Taylor Expression System 2 w/ volume, bass and treble controls WEIGHT (kg/lb): 2.1/4.62 OPTIONS: None RANGE OPTIONS: The Taylor Builder’s Edition instruments range from the 324ce reviewed here through to the 517 (£2,999) and 517e (£3,179), the 652ce (£4,319) and extends to the 912ce (£6,479) LEFT-HANDERS: No FINISH: Tobacco Kona Burst Silent Satin 8/10 PROS A well-built, tonally satisfying instrument with its environmental credentials well in place CONS No left-handers…

PRICE: £3,745 (inc case) ORIGIN: Germany TYPE: Single-cutaway solidbody electric BODY: Red alder NECK: 1-piece maple, Twangmeister ‘standard V’ profile, bolt-on SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”) NUT/WIDTH: Bone/42.39mm FINGERBOARD: East Indian rosewood, sterling silver ring inlays, compound 254-356mm (10-14”) radius FRETS: 22, medium HARDWARE: Mastery MV vibrato and M1 bridge w/ MT stainless thimbles, Nik Huber logo’d Gotoh 510 open-gear tuners with keystone buttons STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 52mm ELECTRICS: Häussel P-90 ‘foil style’ single coil at bridge, Häussel Broad-N at neck, 3-way lever pickup selector switch, master volume and tone control WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.24/7.13 OPTIONS: The base price is £2,676. Upcharges here are the Mastery vibrato (£595), vintage neck tint (£237) and custom color (£237). Other options (£POA): “Whatever you want, a swamp ash body, oil finish on the body, I…

Back in 2000 we ran a review of the Nik Huber Dolphin – Nik’s first product review since he’d started building in 1996. This snippet from that review tells the story of his mentor… Attending the Frankfurt music trade in 1994, Nik Huber, who’d just completed his first handmade electric guitar, managed to show the instrument – an oil ’n’ wax-finished Les Paul-style – to Paul Reed Smith. “He said that I was talented but had to improve. He said he wanted me to ‘dip the guitars in glass’ and that he would teach me. I started asking him questions by letter and got the answers right away. He told me later that I reminded him of himself when he would ask Ted McCarty for help.” Huber showed Paul his…

MANUFACTURER EFFECTRODE MODEL BLUE BOTTLE INDUCTORIZED BOOSTER PRICE £259 Effectrode, the UK company that specialises in valve-based pedals, has come up with a new limited-edition booster pedal. The Blue Bottle is a signature pedal designed for Argent guitarist John Verity who specifically requested a pedal that could fatten up the tone of the single-coil pickups on his Strat. The pedal draws its inspiration from the valve-based Pultec equalisers found in high-end recording studios and, as such, features a real inductor in the circuitry alongside its new-old-stock Sylvania 6021 sub-miniature triode valve. The Volume knob delivers up to 18dB of gain, while the mid-boost is dialled in with a separate knob that offers a flat response at its lowest position but can add up to 12dB of midrange boost centred around…

This year’s NAMM Show in January – where the world’s guitar brands large and small display their wares – was one of the busiest I can remember in recent years. It was impossible even over four days to see every exhibitor, but I couldn’t help noticing the continued rise (in terms of numbers, at least) of small makers. A unifying theme is that the guitars these craftspeople are producing are not cheap. In writing up our show report for issue 457, with limited time and limited space, I realised I could have written the same number of words again purely focused on this high-end artisan market. There was a time when Paul Reed Smith’s guitars were, seemingly, so expensive only ‘doctors, dentists and lawyers’ could afford them. As of 2020,…

I don’t think I’ve ever asked a Master Builder at Fender – or indeed any other luthier – whether, after years of making guitars, they still get excited about the prospect of the outcome. I can honestly say, even though I built my first electric guitar back in the early 70s, the excitement is still there. The temptation to throw it all together bish, bash, bosh Jamie Oliver-style is very strong, but even with a basic build like this vintage-style ‘T’, I’m reminded by previous cock-ups to take my time. In our last issue I’d prepared the neck and body, which boded well – the apparent quality of both parts is extremely high. With my aim to simply evaluate the kit, I’d left behind thoughts of a posh sprayed or…

Gibson ES-225 By the mid 50s, the demand for electric guitars had gained serious momentum. In 1954, Gibson’s electric models outsold its acoustics for the first time, and it became clear that big changes were afoot in the guitar world. In the first half of the decade, Gibson introduced the 1¾-inch-deep Les Paul range alongside its standard 33/8-inch-depth electric archtops, and the new solidbody form began to dominate the market. Nevertheless, opinions remained divided between the heavier – albeit sturdier, thinner and less feedback-prone – Les Pauls and the more traditional hollowbody electric archtops that many players still enjoyed. In an effort to reach a happy medium, company president Ted McCarty and his team set about prototyping the first Gibson thinlines with feedback (no pun intended) from some of the…

1954 Fender Telecaster In the pantheon of all-time classic guitar models, it doesn’t get much more iconic than a Blackguard Tele from the 1950s. Comprising early Telecasters, highly coveted pre-Tele Broadcasters and ‘Nocasters’ made during the first four years of production, Fender’s ‘Blackguard’ label serves as shorthand for the absolute top shelf of the vintage Telecaster library. It was in mid-1954 that Fender switched from a black to a white pickguard on this and other models, making today’s featured guitar one of the last specimens from the original Blackguard era. This particular example, which is currently listed on Reverb by No.Tom Guitars of London’s Denmark Street, has experienced some modifications in its lifetime that take it out of that top-shelf pristine category of collector fare. As No.Tom describes in the…

Some electric guitars come with baggage. There’s a ‘reputation’. Unfair as it may seem, guitars can be judged on the company they keep. We look them up and down and instantly decide whether or not we want anything to do with these characters. Gretsch? Easy. Rockabilly throwbacks. Next. Rickenbacker? Lovable mop tops. Jingle jangle. End of. And what of the Charvel Pro-Mod DK22 minding its own business on this page? C’mon, you’d have to be some bearded slab of tattooed meat to bother shredding on one of those things. Right? Imagine for a second you got this six-string Goldilocks all wrong. Maybe it isn’t just for those who only got a clean sound that one time the battery in their metal pedal fizzled out. With some gentle persuasion on our…

PRICE: £1,789 (inc case) ORIGIN: USA TYPE: Single-cutaway solidbody electric BODY: Ash NECK: Maple,‘Medium C’ profile, bolt-on w/ Micro-Tilt SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”) NUT: Bone FINGERBOARD: Maple, black dot markers, 241mm (9.5”) radius FRETS: 21, vintage tall HARDWARE: Vintage-style strings-through-body Tele bridge with plain steel rod saddles, Vintage ‘F’-stamped tuners – nickel/chrome plated ELECTRICS: Fender Vintage-Style ’70s single coil Tele (bridge), Tim Shaw Authentic Cunife Wide Range humbucker (neck), 3-position toggle pickup selector switch, individual pickup volume and tone controls OPTIONS: Rosewood fingerboard (3-Color Sunburst only) RANGE OPTIONS: Other Teles in the American Original range: ’50s Tele (£1,699); ’60s bound Tele with rosewood ’board (£1,749); ’60s Telecaster Thinline (£1,879) LEFT-HANDERS: Yes, ’50s Tele Butterscotch Blonde only (£1,699) FINISHES: Vintage Blonde (as reviewed), Mocha, 3-Color Sunburst – gloss nitrocellulose Fender Musical…

THE WOLFMEISTER GIG-SHELLS £410 TO £575 “To carry a vintage/ high-end guitar around in a black plastic bag (ie, pretty much any gigbag) doesn’t feel right,” says Wolfgang Ritter of his high-end brand of guitar protection. “We were looking to create something as cool as an old tweed case that was easier to handle and offered excellent protection.” The result is Gig-Shells. Designed in Australia, Gig-Shells are not your typical hard case or soft gigbag. According to Ritter, The Wolfmeister’s designs “provide better protection than most other products due to the patent pending protection system. As the name suggests, the system encloses the instrument between its layers. These layers create a resiliently flexible shell, offering sufficient protection against top impact forces and create a spring-like effect to protect against side…

Last issue we asked you to send us your lockdown recording projects and you didn’t disappoint. Here are three that caught our ear. Big thanks to everyone who sent something in – we’ll share more next month, so fear not if you missed the cut this time. TRACK 1 theDirt3 Winning George Blacklock sent us this moody, evocative track by his outfit theDirt3 that channels TheThe and The Afghan Whigs to brooding effect. We loved the swirling flange/phase tones on the edgy, effective guitar parts, too. https://bit.ly/461feedbacklick1 TRACK 2 Maarten Jansen Always With Me, Always With You Subscriber Maarten Jansen bravely tackled the North Face of Satriani’s back catalogue with this self-assured cover of Joe’s yearning ballad Always With Me, Always With You. Jan’s girthy tones and confident…

“The tuning I use most often, if I’m just noodling, like the one that I’m guilty of just leaning on all the time is drop D – DADGBE. Then, after that it’s DADGAD. Those are the two main ones. If I’m playing a full gig, then I have to have a guitar in CGDGAE, because my song Undone is in that tuning and I haven’t figured out any other way to play it. It’s a good one, you know. Most of it comes from DADGAD or open G and just trying out shapes and finding that they don’t work, so you have to alter a string here or there. I really like having a low C. “Winter would probably be in there as well: CACGAE, which is like A minor…

RON THORN With more knowledge than most of us could ever dream of, Fender Custom Shop’s principal master builder gives us the lowdown on how to make Fenders perform at their absolute best. JIM DECOLA A master builder with Gibson, Jim also hosts the company’s hugely popular Tech Time videos. If you want to make a Gibson play and sound on point, this is the man to turn to. MATT GLEESON London-based Matt is the founder of Monty’s Guitars, a top-flight setup, hardware and repair company that knows how to fettle any guitar to playing perfection.…

What’s ‘Urban Ash’ all about, then? 1 Also known as ‘Shamel ash’ or ‘evergreen ash’, the trees are found in cities across Southern California, providing shade, windbreaks, wildlife habitats and so on. After 70 years or so they reach the end of their cycle and need to be removed. Taylor’s master designer Andy Powers experimented with various urban species and found that Shamel ash, “in almost every physical way I can measure it, is reminiscent of really good Honduran mahogany”. That’s a big claim… 2 And it wasn’t made lightly. There are many species that have reached the end of their lives as part of the “green infrastructure” of California’s cities, and Andy Powers was invited to test a few. After several prototypes, he settled on Urban Ash to lead…

Fender is the home of the original offsets, the Jazzmaster and Jaguar. The Player Jazzmaster kicks things off at £609, the vintage-specific American Original is £1,749, then expect to pay from around £3,500 upwards if you fancy a Custom Shop model. Deimel Guitarworks, another high-end German maker, has the classy offset Firestar (from around £3,500) that sort of melds a Jazzmaster with a non-reverse Firebird as well as the more Jazzmaster/ Jaguar Bluestar model – both are available with myriad options. Dennis Fano’s Novo range, from around £3,000, offers plenty of offset style across the models. Superb distressed finishes, too, plus lots of options.…

PRICE: £3,508 (inc case) ORIGIN: Germany TYPE: Single-cutaway solidbody electric BODY: Okoume NECK: 1-piece maple, Twangmeister ‘standard V’ profile, bolt-on SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”) NUT/WIDTH: Bone/42.39mm FINGERBOARD: East Indian rosewood, sterling silver ring inlays, compound 254-356mm (10-14”) radius FRETS: 22, medium (Dunlop 6105-style) HARDWARE: Mastery MV vibrato and M1 bridge w/ MT stainless thimbles, Nik Huber logo’d Gotoh 510 open-gear tuners with keystone buttons STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 52mm ELECTRICS: Häussel P-90 ‘foil style’ single coil at bridge, Häussel Broad-N at neck, 3-way lever pickup selector switch, master volume and tone control WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.24/7.13 OPTIONS: The base price is £2,676. Upcharges here are the Mastery vibrato (£595) and vintage neck tint (£237). Other options see Piet #0 3263 (left) RANGE OPTIONS: See Piet #0 3263 LEFT-HANDERS: Yes, same price FINISHES:…

THE BACKGROUND LAURA MICHAELS, via email During lockdown I have been unable to make music during the day out of respect for my neighbour who is a key worker and works nightshifts. My usual practice location is closed, so I’ve been recording ideas through plug-ins on my Mac. This works to a point, but I miss my amp and pedalboard, plus some of the sounds I use aren’t available as plug-ins. I tried plugging my ’board directly into my interface, but it didn’t sound or feel right. Is this as good as it gets? THE QUESTIONS 1 IS THIS AS GOOD AS IT GETS? 2 HOW DO I RECORD MY RIG SILENTLY – WITH AN AMP? 3 HOW DO I RECORD MY RIG SILENTLY – WITHOUT AN AMP? THE…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “It was a Fender Telecaster and it was probably in the mid-70s. I couldn’t afford a Stratocaster at the time, but I did have a Marshall amp. But with the Telecaster, even though I could put a distortion unit between the guitar and the amp, it didn’t sound anything like what I was hearing from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and all the great players, but I got along with it. At the time – I was about 16 or 17 – I didn’t have the experience to get a good sound out of it, because at that age you kinda think if you’ve got a good guitar through a good amp, you’re going to sound like Jimi…

1923 First f-hole archtop (L-5) 1936 First electric f-hole archtop (ES-150) 1952 ES-295 released (same body width & length, Florentine cutaway, combination bridge/tailpiece) 1955 Single pickup ES-225T released; c. 470 guitars shipped 1956 Dual pickup ES-225TD released; c. 1,800 guitars shipped (both models) 1957 c. 2,000 instruments shipped (both models) 1958 c. 2,000 instruments shipped (both models) 1959 Production declines: c. 1,700 instruments shipped (both models) 1960 Discontinued; superseded by ES-125TC and ES-125TCD models…

PRICE: £949 ORIGIN: Mexico TYPE: Double-cutaway solidbody electric guitar BODY: Alder NECK: 2-piece caramelised maple with hand-rubbed urethane finish, graphite reinforcement and Luminlay side dots, bolt-on SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”) NUT/WIDTH: Graph Tech Tusq XL/42.86mm FINGERBOARD: Caramelised maple with rolled edges and small dot inlays, 305-406mm (12-16”) radius FRETS: 22, jumbo HARDWARE: Chrome recessed Gotoh Custom 510 six-saddle floating bridge with screw-in arm, Charvel die-cast locking tuners STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 53mm ELECTRICS: Seymour Duncan SHR-1B Custom Hot Rails humbucker (bridge), SSL-6 Flat Strat single coil (middle), SSL-6 RWRP Flat Strap single coil (neck), master volume, No-Load master tone, five-way pickup selector lever switch WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.4/7.5 OPTIONS: Hard case (£108); padded gigbag (£43) RANGE OPTIONS: The Floyd Rose-equipped Pro Mod DK24 HH FR twin humbucker with Floyd Rose vibrato and…

While it was an astonishing decade for music, the 1970s was a bit of a low point for the electric guitar, certainly from the cornerstones of the industry, Fender and Gibson. Fender’s CBS era is especially reviled, with accountant-led manufacturing leading to poor quality. But 50 years on, many of the designs from that period are viewed in a different light and numerous (once derided) models have long since found their way back into both fashion and Fender’s catalogue. A great example from that era is the humbucking-loaded Telecaster trio of the early 70s: the Thinline, Custom and Deluxe, a clear and obvious attempt to gain some market from Gibson. Various versions of these models have regularly been – and still are – available, constantly fuelled by new generations of…

PRS SE P20 & SE P20E £399 & £499 CONTACT PRS Guitars Europe PHONE 01223 874 301 WEB www.prsguitarseurope.com FINGERBOARD There are a few luxury appointments on these guitars, not least the ebony fingerboard and iconic PRS ‘bird’ inlays ELECTRICS It’s not just a clever name. The SE P20E comes loaded with a Fishman pickup and matching active GT1 preamp BODY The spec is high with a solid mahogany top and ebony bridge. The back and sides are formed from sheets of laminate mahogany NECK PRS has shipped its new SE Parlor models with the popular Wide Fat neck profile found on its electric guitars Q&A What am I looking at here? So, PRS stands for ‘Paul Reed Smith’ – we’re sure everyone gets that bit – and SE is…

12 Bars In A Video What started as a moment of lockdown boredom on 5 May has since become a fascinating insight into improvisational approaches. “I want to hear how differently my friends take one chorus in A,” Josh Smith posted on Instagram alongside a video performance, which tagged a number of friends in a list that looks like a who’s who of contemporary guitarists. “Give me 12 bars in A, guitar straight into amp,” were his conditions. And the community delivered. Highlights include Jason Isbell, Mark Lettieri (using Smith’s Vemuram Myriad signature fuzz), Greg Koch, Matt Schofield with his ’61 Strat into a Two-Rock, Andy Wood (who even made a lesson teaching his on YouTube), Seth Rosenbloom, Joey Landreth (who did two), and, of course, Smith himself. Add your…

One thing I’ve never owned – that many guitarists consider their most essential possession – is a Strat that I’ve really bonded with. I’ve always found it easy to bond with Telecasters, and Gibsons, especially 335s, but for some reason the ideal Strat, the archetypal electric guitar, has eluded me so far. I’ve had several Custom Shop models, all of which have been nice guitars, but none of which I stuck with – despite always having to take one on sessions, because they are the sound of electric guitar that people expect to hear and (sometimes more importantly) see when they hire a guitar player. This week I’ve been sent some tracks to record for production music company Audio Network, and the charts have been marked up with suggested sounds…

When it comes to handmade guitars, I love a bit of aesthetic flair, but beyond the fancy details, for me it’s all about the wood. And I’m not sure there are many guitarists or luthiers out there who would disagree. It might be the exotic allure of cocobolo, the Englishness of a piece of indigenous walnut, or a slab of reclaimed timber with a story, but what’s certain is for today’s discriminating guitarist there is certainly plenty of choice. Fortunately for a one-man-band luthier like me, life in lockdown has been a relatively unchanged affair with the exception of some socially distanced repair drop-offs, alongside the disappearance of teaching and gigging. And so it was a pleasant surprise to pick up a couple of commissions soon after the shutters dropped,…

There’s a definite jazzy, summery feel to the chords this issue – you’ll get the hint when you play through these shapes and hear that they are part of a harmonised chord scale, from which you can make a fragment of the classic Summertime. The melody would appear on the first string. However, this isn’t a lesson on how to play Summertime. Instead, it’s a demonstration of how small or fragmented chords can be moved around in order to create both harmony and melody. Players such as Joe Pass, Barney Kessel and Martin Taylor manage to add bass lines in, too, but there isn’t space to get into that here. In any case, we only need the open fifth string to give a root for the A-based chords and the…

Jennifer Batten Solo performer and ex-Michael Jackson and Jeff Beck guitarist “My brain went back and forth between the perception of being in the apocalypse to having a sabbatical. But then it switched to thinking this was more of a forced sabbatical. I’ve been swimming in tutorials on streaming software and I’ve been making way more content for my YouTube channel. I made a playlist called ‘Jennifer Batten’s Riff Kitchen’ where I upload riffs played fast and slow and broken down, and another playlist of behind-the-scenes storytelling called ‘K So This One Time OK?’, which is released on Mondays. In episode seven, I did a breakdown of playing the Super Bowl. “I got a green screen and lights and OBS streaming software and signed up for Castr software that allows…

A wipe with a very slightly damp clean cloth will do wonders to remove everyday muck, but cleaning up a used and dirty fingerboard might need a little more than just elbow grease alone. A simple yet quite ingenious product is Boogie Juice. A large felt-tip pen as the dispenser means that you can attack pretty serious grime while releasing a citrus-based natural cleaning preparation that’ll not only help remove gunk but will lightly condition your fingerboard, too. Boogie Juice and its apparently now patented felt-pen dispenser were conceived by Stephen Delft who was a big-wig in the guitar making and repairing world in the 70s. His reviews and columns in International Musician And Recording World were essential reading to any budding maker/repairer back then. The product is now made…

“First port of call is actually to have a look at the machinehead – not the machinehead itself but how the strings are wound around it,” Matt explains.“If there are too few winds then you can sometimes get a tendency for the strings to slip, depending on the model of machinehead. On the other hand if there are too many – and you haven’t stretched the strings in properly – that can also cause slippage and wandering tuning. “Once you’ve checked those things, it’s time to look at every point of contact between the string and the guitar. Take a high E string on a Strat, for example: the ball-end goes into the block and then it comes out of the block and goes across the plate of the top…

Guitars, Guitars, Guitars “I wasn’t immune to music before the rock ’n’ roll revolution started. My parents had Les Paul and Mary Ford records on 78, you know, singing How High The Moon and The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise. Amazing recordings. I heard them and they were just part of my life. There was also a guy called Tennessee Ernie Ford and he had a couple of great players on his records called Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West. Those records were pretty exciting. And then rock ’n’ roll and Chuck Berry came along and I was just thinking, ‘Guitars, guitars, guitars…’ I was moaning at my parents, ‘I want a guitar! I want a guitar!’ and I finally got one for Christmas in 1959, when I was 12…

The biggest rival here is Martin, and its Modern Deluxe OM-28 comes in at just over £3,661, but we’ve seen them street at £3,166, too. Also, the Martin Standard D-18 is a whole lotta guitar for £2,375, and well worth investigating. At this price, you’re also nosing into the bespoke market with a Fylde Oberon (£3,500) or Orsino (£2,500). Alister Atkin’s 000 models are priced around £2,399. If off-the-peg is your thing, then Yamaha’s LS56 ARE II and LJ56 ARE II both come in at £3,495.…

Guitarists are notoriously conservative, but Taylor – as a brand that started life in 1972 not 1872 – has always enjoyed the freedom to create the guitars that it wants to make, not the guitars that tradition dictates it should build. Over the years, founder Bob Taylor has made good use of that freedom to move the guitar maker’s art forwards – usually in the direction of greater sustainability and an open-mindedness about tonewoods. Bob Taylor may have taken a step back from hands-on guitar design at the Californian company in recent years, but Taylor’s master luthier Andy Powers has embraced the same mission to work with progressive materials and minimise the company’s impact on pristine forests. Taylor is already well known for its efforts to make ebony and koa…

There have been numerous Firebird reincarnations since they were discontinued in 1970, but during their original run at Gibson’s Kalamazoo factory in the 60s, the Firebird I, III, V and VII models appeared in two different forms widely known as ‘reverse’ and ‘non-reverse’. The Explorer-like reverse Firebirds appeared first in 1963 and were superseded by their non-reverse counterparts in 1965. As if eight different Firebirds emerging within this short time isn’t convoluted enough, the waters muddy even further with some instruments having left the factory during the ’65 transition phase with both reverse and non-reverse specs. Nevertheless, in this issue’s Dazed & Confused – the first of our two-part focus on Firebirds – we aim to clear things up and make it simple to identify all four of the early…

1. SERIAL NUMBER Factory order number prefixed with ‘V’ (denoting 1956) ink-stamped on interior side of back 2. HEADSTOCK Unbound; no ornamentation; Gibson logo pearl inlay; black nitrocellulose finish 3. HARDWARE Nickel-plated hardware: Les Paul combination bridge/trapeze tailpiece; individual single-line Kluson Deluxe tuners 4. NECK One-piece mahogany neck; 24¾-inch scale length; single-bound 20-fret Brazilian rosewood fingerboard with pearl dot inlays; 14th fret body join; nitrocellulose finish 5. BODY Arched laminated maple top; two unbound f-holes; single Florentine cutaway; laminated maple back and sides; 16¼ inches wide; 20¼ inches long; 1¾ inches deep; single-bound top and back; Sunburst nitrocellulose finish 6. PLASTICS White oval tuner buttons; two-ply (b/w) ‘bell’ truss rod cover; two black ‘dog-ear’ P-90 pickup covers; five-ply (b/w/b/w/b) bevelled edge pickguard; four gold bonnet knobs; white selector switch tip…

Difficulty  | # 15 mins per example Tutor: Richard Barrett | Gear used: Knaggs SSC, Audient Sono, Friedman BE-OD, Mad Professor Sweet Honey Overdrive Deluxe Peak Intensity SOMETIMES, WE WANT TO MAKE A BOLD STATEMENT in a solo. This could be either as a dynamic device to take centre-stage before settling into a more laid-back melody line, or to assert our presence against a dense mix, as I’m doing here. The idea behind these examples is to demonstrate long sequences across the strings and/or the fretboard that might form the pinnacle of a solo. With this in mind, I’ve played four examples, rather than stuff too much information into one overwhelming solo. The examples are drawn from different ideas: pentatonic shapes, arpeggio fragments, angular intervals and classic blues licks –…

JOE BONAMASSA Dust Bowl This album sits between blues, rock and country in the same way I was going for with the examples. Check out Black Lung  Heartache with its acoustic/mandolin intro and Heartbreaker, with its shades of Free and Deep Purple – no doubt helped by Glenn Hughes on vocals! Finally, Prisoner takes a more laid-back but no less epic approach; it takes a confident soloist to ‘bring the fight’ to arrangements and production like this. DICKEY BETTS Live at Rockpalast 2008 Dickey brings driven, sustained notes and intricate phrasing with careful note choices to tracks such as Nothing You Can Do and Blue Sky, which has some tricky harmony guitar, too! Havin’ A Good Time also demonstrates a soloing style, which takes as much from country and rock…