Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i Guitarist

In 1968 and ’69, the legendary French yachtsman Bernard Moitessier was sailing in the prestigious Golden Globe Race for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the planet by sail. He stood to win a large prize pot and instant fame if he won the race and was well placed to do so. However, after rounding Cape Horn, he pulled alongside a passing ship and used a slingshot to fire a message onto its deck. It contained a statement to the effect that he was pulling out of the race, with immediate effect “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul”. Then he set a course for the Pacific, with no other goal than complete freedom. It’s a fitting coincidence that, almost at the same time, Jeff Beck…

FIRST PLAYBOSS KATANA-ARTIST II HEAD Now in its second evolution, Boss’s Katana range is securely established as the go-to digital modelling amp solution for many players at all levels, from beginners to professionals. Topping out the current range is the Katana-Artist II, with expanded features and speaker enclosures loaded with the Waza G12W loudspeaker. The combo version has been available for some time and, now, for those ready to stamp some real authority on their tone, Boss has introduced the Katana-Artist II head, together with a matching 2x12 G12W-loaded speaker cabinet. This new head features similar visuals to the rest of the range, clad in smart black vinyl accented with silver trim and white control-panel graphics. The particle board case surrounds a robust open-ended steel tray chassis containing the Katana’s…

Artist: Jared James Nichols Album: Jared James Nichols (Black Hill Records) Jared’s new self-titled album was recorded in Nashville at Blackbird studios with a three-piece band, tracking live in the studio, straight to tape. “No computers were harmed in the making of this record,” he quips. “It was my longtime drummer Dennis Holm and my old friend Clark Singleton on the bass guitar, and it was produced by a young Englishman named Eddie Spear.” The end result is a furious journey into the realms of modern-day heavy blues-rock. What were your go-to guitars for the album? “My red Les Paul was the primary guitar, then I had a 1956 Les Paul Junior, a fantastic guitar – these old P-90 guitars have their own sound. I had one of my Epiphone…

RAISING THE TONEOpinion In recent years, advances in digital modelling amps have, at last, offered a variety of non-valve amps that most of us would be happy to use in one context or another. But prior to the digital revolution, the much-maligned analogue transistor amp was generally regarded as a poor relation to classic valve amps. There were, however, some honourable exceptions… BB King used Lab Series amps at one point, as did Allan Holdsworth, and British-made Award Session amps were used by Clapton on his 1986 August album and remain well respected. But the undisputed king of solid-state amps is Roland’s beefy 120-watt, chorus-equipped JC-120 – which became standard kit in studios around the world and has appeared on scores of hit records – primarily for its pristine-yet-warm clean…

Among the golden generation of British guitarists who rose in the sweatbox clubs of 60s London, Jeff Beck was the great magician and lifelong contrarian. While peers such as Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page certainly boasted an eye-popping virtuosity and knack for melody, their playing was not unfathomable but squarely rooted in the American blues, revving up its stock vocabulary of slides, bends and pentatonics. Beck could match his circuit-mates at these traditional Delta-derived shapes: revisit such masterclasses as Steeled Blues or Going Down. But while most Brit-boomers approached their work with a scholarly deference, their scarecrow-haired contemporary had a renegade streak. “If I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song,” Beck once reasoned, “then I’m not doing my job properly.” On a good night, when…

We heard a story that John McLaughlin, you and Jeff Beck were all recording on David Gilmour’s boat in London. You were producing Jeff at this point [for an unreleased album]. What happened to the tapes? “What happened back then was John had written a piece for the three of us to play, but it ultimately didn’t work out. Jeff ’s just trying to find his way and I was trying to help him as we’re friends – he’s my favourite guitar player in the whole world. I volunteered to help him and we checked out a whole bunch of stuff. Some of the stuff we did on Gilmour’s boat was pretty amazing; I was surprised he never wanted the stuff to come out. But he got into this techno…

One of the many, many guitarists obsessed with Jeff Beck was a young Seymour Duncan. Here’s what he told this writer back in the 90s: “I first heard Jeff Beck in the summer of ’65, I was playing in a talent show with a local band. The local radio station played a recording of Heart Full Of Soul by The Yardbirds, their second hit. The unique guitar sound was from Jeff Beck. I tracked down many of their recordings and saw them performing on 60s TV shows such as Hullabaloo, Shindig! and Ready Steady Go!. “I’d noticed Jeff was playing a Fender Telecaster but without the neck pickup,” he added, “making it an Esquire [from 1954]. Originally it had a white single-layer scratchplate that Jeff changed to a black phenolic…

VIDEO DEMO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra PRS SE DGT £979 CONTACT PRS Guitars Europe PHONE 01223 874301 WEB www.prsguitars.com What You Need To Know 1 Another signature guitar from an artist we’ve never heard of? Well, Texas-based David Grissom has played with an A-list of artists over the years, including Buddy Guy, John Mellencamp , The Allman Brothers Band, Chris Isaak, Robben Ford and John Mayall. He’s been a PRS player since 1985 (the first year of the company’s production), and along with being the primary driver behind what was to become the PRS McCarty Model in 1994, David has had his own signature guitar since 2007. He also has a signature PRS amp, the DG Custom 30. 2 It looks like a PRS Custom with an extra knob… The…

VIDEO & AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra Open D Tuning Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Atkin J45T Difficulty | 30 mins per example LET’S CLARIFY THE TUNING USED before we start. I’ve gone for classic open D (from low to high): D A D F# A D. This stacks up like an E major chord in regular tuning but dropped down a tone. Using open D as a starting point obviously means the goalposts have moved regarding fretting hand fingering and chord shapes, but what is lost in one sense is certainly made up for in opportunities for chords and melodies that would be virtually impossible in regular tuning. It’s also great for bottleneck and can be heard on many old blues recordings. Rather than break this piece into excerpts, I’ve…

Going Underground As bassist in The Jam, Bruce Foxton formed an uneasy but inspirational alliance with the Modfather, Paul Weller, he explains on p72 Modern Classic The DGT model by PRS, designed for feted US player David Grissom, is now available in affordable new SE spec. Reviewed on p84 Black Gold Dave Friedman has become the go-to maker for hot-rod, British-inspired amps. He tells us why his brutal gain tones have the edge on p114…

FIRST PLAY When it comes to dealing out boost and EQ, the only card you might need is Flattley’s The Ace The latest from Flattley Guitar Pedals, the Gloucestershire-based effects company, is The Ace, a clean boost/buffer with the advantage of having a Tone knob to target the boost. It features a blue halo light ring showing its engaged status and a topper on the footswitch, giving you a bit more to aim for when switching. The Ace’s tone stack is the same as that in Flattley’s Solaris Pro fuzz and boost pedal and is designed to deliver an effectively flat sound when the knob is central, with a bass boost to the left and a treble boost to the right. The most neutral position of the Tone knob isn’t…

PRS 2023 releases From £899 CONTACT: PRS Guitars Europe PHONE: 01223 874301 WEB: www.prsguitars.com A DECADE TO REMEMBER S2 Anniversary models As the PRS S2 range celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, the company has issued 1,000 Custom 24 and McCarty 594 anniversary models (both £2,499) to celebrate. Cuban mahogany necks, mother-o-pearl bird inlays and USA humbuckers are all included. New guitars across all of its catalogue? It seems as if PRS has been busy… Indeed. The NAMM Show might not be for a couple of months yet, but PRS isn’t waiting. Hot on the heels of the DGT SE (reviewed in full this issue) comes a clutch of new releases across the brand’s entire product range. There are Core and S2 models, SE signatures and more. Okay, what have…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE One of the few good things about being my age – and I’d guess that of a good many Guitarist readers – is that we got to hear some of the best music ever made as it came out. Thus I heard She Loves You when I was 13, Purple Haze when I was 17, and so on. But in 1965, already aware of The Yardbirds due to the recent hit For Your Love, when their new song came on the radio it floored me; I’d never heard a sound like it. It was Beck, on his Telecaster, plugged into a fuzz box playing the intro to Heart Full Of Soul. Soon came the fabulous slide solo on Evil Hearted You, then Over Under Sideways Down with licks…

SUBSTITUTE AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra The term ‘soundtrack’ in our title doesn’t refer to music theory, it’s just a broad description of the type of chord we’re looking at in this feature. These chords evoke the soundtracks from the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood, even though this type of music was usually an orchestral arrangement, rather than solo guitar. It’s an interesting challenge to see how harmonically detailed we can get with just six strings and even fewer fingers Here, we’re looking at extended and altered chords based around minor, major and dominant 7ths. Often, the guitar need only extend up to the 7th and leave further extensions (9th, 11th or 13th) to the strings, woodwind or brass. However, if you’ve ever listened to great players such as George Barnes, Martin Taylor…

MARTIN BARRE “I first met Jeff when I was recording music with Hilton Valentine of The Animals in around 1967 in London. We didn’t know he was putting a solo on the song, so when he walked through the studio, my jaw hit the floor. He borrowed my guitar, found an old amp in a corner of the room and the room came alive! “Tull played with Jeff and Rod Stewart in the States in 1969 and, again, I was very much in awe of his presence. To hear him play and then have to follow on the same stage was one of the hardest lessons that I ever learnt. He inspired me and, unknowingly, helped me come to terms with performing alongside the best musicians on the planet. “To…

HIS FIRST GUITAR (Guitarist, Summer 2009) “My first experience with a guitar was as a kid when I was at a friend’s house who was slightly spoiled, he had a record player, a tape recorder, a guitar – all the toys. He’d got bored with the guitar and it only had a couple of strings on it. I started playing around with it and he said, ‘Do you wanna borrow it?’ I said, ‘Yes, please!’ I remember carrying it home in the rain and taking my coat off to wrap around it to protect it. Right then, I felt a kind of protective thing towards the guitar. I didn’t have any strings so I used some model aeroplane control line wire, the kind that made the model fly round in…

When You’re Young “Most kids want to be professional footballers or firemen. I just wanted to play music and I thought guitar was a good start – the piano was a bit too big and expensive. My mum and dad, bless them, they saved up their pennies and bought me an acoustic guitar to start the ball rolling. I was a bit clumsy, just dabbling to start with. But if you want to do something good, you’ve got to do it on a regular basis. And I just went on from there.” Trading Places “I joined The Jam as rhythm guitarist. They had a lead guitarist in Steve Brookes and Paul [Weller] was on bass. But when Steve left, we auditioned a few players and they either weren’t good musically…

STRYMON V2 PEDALS FROM £329 CONTACT MusicPsych PHONE 0207 607 6005 WEB www.strymon.net What You Need To Know 1 Haven’t we seen these before? You could be forgiven for thinking that because there are no V2 logos to be seen on these chassis, but look closer and you’ll see that each pedal has changes in its control surface from the original incarnation. 2 You mean these V2 pedals have got more knobs? Yes, apart from the Flint, however, which looks pretty much the same. Every one of them, though, has increased socketry and major upgrades under the hood. 3 So they’re improved versions… That’s the idea – these replace the original pedals and offer increased flexibility plus improved sound and playability while retaining the essence of what…

There is nothing worse than a headstock break, apart from when it’s happened a couple of times before. A local-to-me pro blues guitarist has long used a late-60s Gibson ES-335 (already repaired on a couple of occasions) and despite pleas from my good self – and said guitar player’s family – he was still taking it out on tour. Until, that is, it suffered another headstock break. And looking at the pictures it’s going to need some divine intervention to fix. I suggested we could probably mod a beater to fulfil some upcoming dates, but as neither of us had a suitable donor guitar, that was as far as that idea went. The thing is, once you plant a seed it’s hard to shake off and so I began to…

It’s been a while since we featured a Godin electric in these pages, actually just over two years, back in issue 467. And you don’t need us to tell you that quite a lot has happened since then. World events, factory shutdowns and the rising price of raw materials, parts and shipping have all played their part. So you have to doff your cap because if Godin is to retain – or, perhaps more accurately, regain – some market share, then this new Radium-X is quite a statement of intent. Multi-voice, innovative guitars have been a cornerstone of Godin’s output over recent decades: instruments built with purpose in mind. The Radium-X falls bang into that category with its blend of pickups – standard magnetic with less-standard piezo – creating a…

FIRST PLAYMXR M249 SUPER BADASS DYNAMIC OD This pedal is the fifth from MXR with ‘Badass’ in its name, and the third of the compay’s ‘Super Badass’ pedals, completing a trilogy of dirt alongside the Super Badass Distortion and Super Badass Variac Fuzz. Based around MOSFET clipping diodes, it’s a basic three-knob pedal with Output Volume, Gain and Tone knobs plus a two-way toggle switch that gives you Cut or Boost. The Dynamic OD pedal sounds tonally most neutral and transparent in the Cut position with the Tone knob set close to midway. With the Gain knob set at minimum, you’ll get unity gain and clean sound around 11 o’clock, leaving plenty of knob travel for dialling in some clean boost that you can liven up by turning the tone…

Artist: Samba Touré Album: Binga (Glitterbeat Records) Leading Malian singer and guitarist Samba Touré is an adept player, crafting licks to support his sharp blues songs, but he arrived at the guitar later and without any formal background. “I began music as a singer in a band in [Malian capital] Bamako,” Samba tells us. “But when I started as a solo artist, I quickly learned the guitar. I would say it was in quite an intuitive way,” he continues. “I don’t know anything about music theory; everything happens between my head and hands, by feeling.” Speaking To Tradition It is only fairly recently that Malian music – a traditionally oral form that served as education and information, as well as entertainment – incorporated the Western guitar. “My style is Songhoy…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER When I consider my recent guitar repair jobs, the common thread over these past few days has been the troublesome topic of guitar nuts. This humble strip of bone or plastic is actually one of the most crucial links in the chain when it comes to high-performance guitars, but, fortunately for the home luthier, replacing one can be an easy upgrade to perform. The reason for replacing a nut can be as simple as replacing a low-quality plastic nut with a hard-wearing bone one, but life on the road means nuts are also easily damaged and chipped. Buzzing open strings are the symptoms of a nut with slots that are cut too deep, or grooves that have become worn through decades of tuning and retuning. Sometimes…

RARE BIRD For the attention of Neville Marten: I read with interest your article in Guitarist 493 with your recollections of guitars that you have bought and sold that with hindsight you should have kept (or sold sooner) if you had then had the luxury of the internet. Although you mention at the end if anyone has any guitar horror stories, my story is of amplifier regret! Back in early 1973, I was 16 and in my last year at school and had scrimped and saved the princely sum of £39 for a better amp. One evening the local rag had an ad: Vox AC30 for sale £40. Off I went to have a look, out in the middle of nowhere, inside a mobile home with the AC30 next to…

For Bernie Marsden, Jeff Beck’s sudden and unanticipated death on 10 January cut especially deep. Bernie got to know Jeff through a friend, drummer Cozy Powell. When they met, Bernie was already a devoted fan of Beck’s playing, but, soon enough, he was able to call him a friend as well. Bernie’s admiration for Jeff ’s guitar work did not diminish with familiarity, however, and Bernie says that the bombshell news of Beck’s death felt “like losing a member of the family”. Here, Bernie shares his memories of the great guitarist, including Beck’s often-overlooked sense of humour, and recalls gigs when Jeff ’s genius on the instrument moved him to both laughter and tears. When did you first become aware of Jeff’s playing? “As soon as I heard Heart Full…

Think of Jeff Beck, guitar in hand, and you might well think Strat. Not a surprise, given that was his main instrument for the last 40 or so years of his long career. We talked about this as Jeff and I sat in the kitchen of his 16th century Sussex pile enjoying a nice cup of tea and a chat about guitars, one of his favourite subjects. He reflected on the timeless qualities of a Strat. “You don’t get kids saying, ‘What’s that old guitar? Ain’t you got a new one?’ It still looks futuristic,” he said, smiling at the idea, “and it’s still an unbeatable shape, as is the Tele. I don’t think you can improve on those two guitars – the all-time great rock guitars.” In fact, he…

Django Reinhardt The story of Django Reinhardt’s life is as well known as it is legendary. Born in Belgium in 1910 to Manouche Romani parents who wintered there each year, his gadjo (non-Romani) name was Jean, but to everyone in Romani culture he was Django. Surrounded by music from birth, Django was a quick learner, a prodigy, and was playing professionally in Le Bal-Musette by his mid-teens. The tragic accident that almost ended his life, let alone his career, is part of guitar folklore. At the age of just 18 he had returned to his caravan after a gig where his wife had prepared a batch of cellophane flowers to sell at market the next day. Django, having knocked a candle over, was confronted by a sudden inferno and suffered…

As PRS’s Jack Higginbotham tells us, building this SE wasn’t straightforward, not least that the guitar had to satisfy the “uncompromising soul” that is David Grissom. “The DGT is the result of a lot of years and a lot of gigs,” Jack tells us. “I think the difference is that David says, ‘This is what I want.’ David knows what he wants; he approaches the guitar like a guitar builder. He speaks our language.” Let’s take a close look at the differences between the SE and Core DGT. Headstock Style The very identifiable PRS headstock dates back to the first production guitars made in 1985. Both guitars appear to have the same back angle and pretty much the same thickness at just under 16mm. While many Core models use a…

BLUEPRINT: Friedman Amplification Over the past 25 years, Dave Friedman has built, tweaked and modded amps for some of the world’s most renowned players. A quick glance through the extensive roster of Friedman Amplification reveals a who’s who of musicians from Eddie Van Halen, Steve Stevens and Jerry Cantrell, to Richie Sambora, Joe Bonamassa, Dave Grohl and Bill Kelliher. Although known mostly for his modded Marshall-style high-gain tones, Friedman is no one-trick pony. In fact, his impressive line of combos and heads has plenty of tonal light and shade. Dave joins us to discuss the incredible journey that elevated him to the status of amp guru. How did you get started in the business? “Well, I’m a guitar player – originally from Detroit – and I aspired to be a…

Nobody can deny that Leo Fender revolutionised the process of mass-manufacturing guitars. Routing out planks of wood to form bodies and attaching necks with screws represented a paradigm shift in 1949. A couple of innovative vibrato designs soon followed, but the fundamentals of Fender guitar construction were in place from the get-go and carried through into Leo’s work with Music Man and G&L. Everything, that is, besides the pickups. Competitors such as Gibson and Gretsch tended to use just one or two pickup designs for all their guitars, but every new Fender model had bespoke pickups that weren’t used on any other instrument. Leo Fender’s pickup obsession lasted throughout his career, and his approach to pickup design continued to evolve. The pickups that graced the Stratocaster design when it was…

Gibson’s debut solidbody line got off to a great start following the release of the Les Paul Model/ Goldtop in 1952. By 1957, however, Les Paul sales had tailed off significantly. Facing stiff competition from Fender, company president Ted McCarty and his design team doubled down on their efforts to come up with exciting, innovative products. Diving deep for new ideas, Gibson surfaced with a plethora of now iconic designs in 1958. Among them were the Explorer, Flying V, ES-335 and electric double-neck guitars (the Double 12 and Double Mandolin). Also that year, the Goldtop was revamped with a sunburst finish and renamed the Les Paul Standard. Meanwhile, the single-P-90 Les Paul Junior and TV guitars changed from single- to double-cutaway bodies. Easy access to the upper frets was a…