Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i Guitarist

Are famous guitars imbued with some of the spirit of the people who played them? Perhaps that’s too much like magical thinking for some, but certainly there’s a relationship between the player and these old planks of wood we love that involves a kind of alchemy. No guitar typifies that better than ‘Greeny’, the ’59 Les Paul that, successively, Peter Green, Gary Moore and now Metallica’s Kirk Hammett (see page 56) have made music with. The people who built that guitar at Gibson would have been astonished if you’d told them three of the biggest guitar heroes of all time would all find inspiration in the very same Kalamazoo-built electric over the course of six decades. So is there truly something about Greeny that is a bit magic? The answer…

FIRST PLAYJWJ GUITARS PARLOUR & ORCHESTRA We have to admit that we weren’t aware of JWJ Guitars until a few months ago when luthier Rich Jones visited us at Guitarist HQ in order for us to sample his wares. Based in Shropshire, Rich began building guitars as a hobbyist 20 years ago, turning fully professional around 2018. With guitars a passion since his youth, Rich had found that his early builds were attracting a lot of attention on his local music scene with players queuing up for new instruments. Eventually, the decision was made to make guitar building his full-time occupation. “I was running a restaurant,” he tells us. “I’d always run pubs and restaurants and it was just hard work, doing all those hours and never being at home.…

FIRST PLAY WALRUS AUDIO FABLE It’s only a few months since the release of the Lore Reverse Soundscape Generator, but Walrus Audio is back with another ambience pedal that shares exactly the same format with an identical set of controls. This time, however, what you’re getting is a ‘Granular Soundscape Generator’ based on the digital processing technique of micro-sampling, where short samples called grains are read from a delay buffer and can then be manipulated in a number of ways to achieve a range of effects. Utilising two onboard DSP chips, the signal runs through two separate effects in series, the Feedback and Regen knobs providing feedback paths for each, and there are five different selectable granular delay programs. Program 1 offers Reverse Delay into a Reverse Granular algorithm that…

Artist: Louis Campbell Album: You, Golden (Spafford Campbell Records) London-based guitarist Louis Campbell already has an impressive CV, studying under the guidance of Martin Simpson and being a key player in folk artist and fiddle player Sam Sweeney’s band. Still only in his early 20s, it feels like Louis was born holding a guitar. “My dad played, he did a lot of flamenco,” he begins. “He was also into Bert Jansch, so that was always around the house and I thought it was cool. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. There’s so much scope with the guitar; you can play classical or acoustic music on it or use lots of pedals. That’s why I love it.” Classical Start Louis’ already accomplished playing has been distilled…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE Of all the guitars that anyone who knows me would imagine I’d owned, an Epiphone Casino like the one John, George and Paul all played in The Beatles is surely it. And yet, just as I’ve never had a Rickenbacker 12-string or black Gretsch Duo-Jet, this particular model has always escaped my grasp. Until now! When I reviewed the USA-made E230TD Casino reissue in issue 475 it drove that somewhat incomprehensible point home. I loved it, so when one came up recently I had to bag it. “McCartney’s Casino, although being left-handed, has the exact spec that I like… Thus, a plot was hatched to ‘McCartney-ise’ mine” The thing is, all three of the Fabs’ guitars were slightly different from one another. Indeed, Keith Richards’ Epi was different…

Elixir Phosphor Bronze Nanoweb 12-53 £19.99 They’re expensive, but these coated strings have excelled in all the studio sessions we’ve used them for. The main benefit is the reduction in squeaks and other handling noise offered by the Nanoweb coating, which also extends string life. Don’t be scared of coated strings, they can be really flattering. Curt Mangan Medium Light Phosphor Bronze Coated 12-54 £23.99 /An American brand known for its attention to detail, Curt Mangan’s coated acoustic strings impress. For fingerstyle, the warmth of phosphor bronze always seems a natural choice, though this set seemed, to our ears, to be a little more detailed than the Elixirs above, if a smidge less squeak-free. Stringjoy Foxwoods Coated Phosphor Bronze 12-54 £16.99 Based in Nashville, the home of all things guitar,…

INTERVIEW RIVAL SONS No wonder Scott Holiday wants the webcam on. As engaging as the Rival Sons guitarist undoubtedly is, it’s hard to stop yourself peering past him at the treasure trove that is his home guitar room in Los Angeles. Over his shoulder, you’ll spot rarities, antiquities, prototypes, esoteric one-offs and several hundred stompboxes stacked into a true-bypass Hadrian’s Wall. “This is an opportunity to show off my toys,” beams the man nicknamed Mr Fuzzlord. “It’s a guitar magazine. You actually want to see this stuff.” Holiday is the best kind of connoisseur. Rather than keep his collection under glass cloches, swiped only with a duster, the 47-year-old has used his gear in anger on the Rival Sons catalogue since 2009’s debut, Before The Fire. And while atmospheric seventh…

BAD CAT BLACK CAT 1X12 COMBO £1,899 CONTACT Bad Cat Amps PHONE +011 (714) 630-0101 WEB www.badcatamps.com What You Need To Know 1 Where does Bad Cat come from? Bad Cat was founded by James Heidrich in 2000 in Southern California, producing handmade valve designs to satisfy the demand for high-end guitar tone. Early models were designed and built by Matchless’s Mark Sampson, with later Bad Cat products evolving into their own distinct character. 2 What’s the difference between printed circuit and hand wired? The only real difference today is cost. A hand-wired amp takes much longer to build. In terms of tone, there’s no real difference – properly designed PCB amplifiers boast better consistency and reliability, and your pocket will thank you. 3 What’s special about…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “The first nice guitar I bought was an Epiphone Les Paul. My parents realised I was obsessed with the guitar so they [also] purchased me a Stratocaster from this place called Mars Music in Plano, Texas, and from then on, I just wanted to have all of the guitars, you know? “My first expensive guitar that I bought was a 1956 Gibson ES-125 and I still have it and I still use it all the time. I think it was about $1,000, which seemed like an incredible amount of money at the time. But I’ve had that guitar since I was 14 or 15 years old.” What was the last guitar you bought and why? “Well, the last…

If you ever get the chance to play through an early guitar amp, such as a 1930s Gibson EH-185 or a late-1940s V-Front Fender Dual Professional, you may be surprised by the ferocity of the overdrive they can generate. Combining them with an early Goldtop Les Paul reveals that proto-metal guitar tones would have been achievable as early as 1952. There are various reasons that these early amps break up so quickly, but a key factor is the way the input sockets are connected to the grid of the first preamp valve. The ES-185’s microphone input, and all the V-Front inputs, are directly coupled to the grid and there are no grid stopper resistors. These resistors became the norm during the early 1950s and they’re used to prevent radio frequency…

Vintage Icons “This is a really neat Gibson ES-335. It’s a ’68 by serial number and features a green-to-yellow sunburst. At Well Strung Guitars, we just call the finish ‘Greenburst’ – I sent some pictures to Gibson, and they had no idea what to call it, either! The sides of the guitar are a very deep green/black colour. I say ‘green/black’ because from a certain angle it looks black, though it’s actually a very dark green. But the finish is translucent, and if you look closely, you can see the grain through it. The same translucent colour is also on the back of the neck. “Another interesting thing is that it’s never had a label [normally visible through the bass-side f-hole]. It was never there. Under black light [ultraviolet light]…

Tyler Bryant The Texan rocker has some wise and hard-earned advice on buying guitars to pass on, plus some nice tone insights on p110 Sister Act One of the prime pioneers of blues and early rock ’n’ roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe deserves more credit for her contribution to music p76 Jason Lollar He’s the man behind some of the most widely admired aftermarket pickups you can buy and he shares his tone secrets with us on p102…

FIRST PLAYEPIPHONE JIM JAMES ES-335 Just over a year ago, back in issue 482, we looked at Jim James’s signature Gibson ES-335. With its calibrated T-Type pickups and light weight, it proved to be one of the most playable and vibrant-sounding 335s we’d encountered for a while. The signature guitar for My Morning Jacket’s frontman came across as a real journeyman ES thinline, a guitar that sits comfortably in pretty much any musical genre. And if this new Epiphone version comes anywhere near close, it’s game on. Lifting it out of its large, owl logo’d hard case it’s an encouraging start. Like the Gibson it’s inspired by, which weighed a trim 3.55kg (7.81lb), our Epi JJ tips the scales at a very close and still light-for-the-style 3.62kg (7.96lb). Of course,…

Extreme Six Ear Music (release date: 9 June) 9/10 Stunning return to form by Boston’s top rockers It’s been more than 30 years since Extreme’s second album, Pornograffiti, hit the shelves and established the band as rivals to Van Halen for the top rockers slot. It also saw Nuno Bettencourt’s rise to guitar-superhero status via some of the early 90s’ most breathtaking guitar playing. And, of course, the public at large soon became entranced by the mega-hit from the album, More Than Words, guaranteeing the band arena status. The follow-up album, III Sides To Every Story, seemed to seal the deal: this band was here to stay. But the fourth album, ’95’s Waiting For The Punchline proved to be the soundtrack to a band falling apart, with a truly terrible…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER One of the great difficulties in lutherie is figuring out exactly what causes a favourite guitar to sound as good as it does. There are normally too many variables involved to be able to pin down one aspect over another; it could be the woods used, the type of neck join, the finish, the hardware or even the setting in which you’re hearing it. However, one of the benefits of enjoying a guitar-making career that spans more than a decade is I now have enough builds under my belt to be able to spot some connections between my top-sounding guitars. In particular, it’s the short-scale guitars that invariably prove to be the most successful. “The scale length is fundamental to a guitar’s sound and playability. In…

SUBSTITUTE Let’s start with a bit of jargon-busting: a dominant chord is the ‘full’ name for a 7th chord, the type with a b7th rather than a major 7th. When we describe a chord as ‘altered’, this means one (or more) of the notes has been raised or lowered away from its normal diatonic position – which, by the way, does not include the b7th itself! It’s perfectly possible to alter regular major and minor or major 7th chords, too, but we have to start somewhere and altered dominants are by far the most widely used. Played on their own, the examples below may seem quite dissonant. Where they really come to life is in a chord progression, and you’ll often hear them ‘resolving’ to other more ‘standard’ chords. See…

Kirk Hammett’s wiry, wah‑scorched lead tones have been a core component of Metallica’s sound since the band reshaped the landscape of metal in the early 80s. Now 60 years of age, Kirk’s youthful looks mask the fact that he’s been recording at the sharp end one of the world’s biggest acts for 40 years, after he replaced Dave Mustaine in the band in the spring of 1983. And though Metallica’s juggernaut touring and recording schedule has clearly made extraordinary demands on the band’s members, four decades of music‑making has also left Hammett with enough room to reflect on and evolve his sound far more than some might credit. You might think, for example, that he still builds his sound primarily around active pickups. But, as our free‑ranging conversation with the…

Peter Green Collection When the guitar collection of a legendary guitarist goes on sale, it’s normally dominated by guitars that garner record sums. From electrics that were used on platinum-selling albums to vintage unobtainium, such auctions are generally composed of instruments that average guitarists can only dream of – partly because of their provenance and partly because rockstars tend to own vertiginously high-end equipment. The late Peter Green’s guitar collection is a more interesting proposition, however. Though it contains many highly sought-after instruments, it also reflects the tastes of a man who maintained a broad and unpretentious interest in guitars throughout his life. Some were played daily, while others were bought seemingly on a whim to form a collection of well over 100 instruments that includes many rare vintage guitars…

DOD COMPRESSOR 280, ENVELOPE FILTER 440, GONKULATOR & OVERDRIVE PREAMP 250 £105, £105, £129 & £99 CONTACT 440 Distribution PHONE 01943 818599 WEB www.digitech.com What You Need To Know 1 I thought DOD had gone for good… DOD and DigiTech pedals disappeared from parent company Harman’s website some time ago, but the DigiTech/DOD brand is back with a series of updated classic DOD models, having been acquired by Cor-Tek Corporation, maker of Cort and many other-brand guitars. 2 So, are the pedals the same as the originals? Well, Tom Cram – who has worked everywhere from the manufacturing floor to marketing in the DOD fold – originally resurrected the brand for Harman with a bunch of pedals updated for modern usage. He’s now back in control and these…

A common topic among new guitar owners is quality control, aka QC. We touched on this in our previous issue, but that was specifically about getting your new guitar to play and stay in tune. What happens if the guitar you’ve just acquired isn’t actually to specification and/or the sounds it’s supposed to make aren’t what you’re hearing? Such an enquiry came from a player who’d purchased a Supro Tri Tone that was going for a good price, one of the later Indonesian-made reissues, not a relic from the vintage Valco years. He was enjoying the guitar, but there were a few quirks and he wondered if his guitar might have been mucked about with. He, too, had had some problems with tuning stability, which he’d fixed by slightly opening…

Stereotypes are largely something to be avoided. Even identifying general trends requires context, but in the speaker world we often refer to two groups: American- and British-voiced speakers. This issue, we’ll look at whether this is a lazy identifier and if we can add some meat to the bone instead. I’m from the North of England, and although I do like pigeons, I don’t have a whippet or a flat cap. We’ve all seen marketing campaigns where ‘Britishness’ invokes imagery of a three-piece suit, bowler hat and a cup of tea, while the American side has a cowboy hat and someone trying not to fall off an angry cow. If we translate this stereotype to speakers, and therefore music, it means British speakers must be great for classical music and…

Slow Gospel Blues Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Lewis Pequeño Bastardo, Vox AC15 C1 Difficulty | 15 mins per example ANOTHER TITLE I would like to have used here would be something like ‘Slow Major Gospel Blues With Off-Grid Timing And Lots Of Other Blues Trademarks’… But that, quite understandably, wouldn’t have made it past the editors. Nevertheless, you will find all these things in the example solo. There are a few tips of the hat to John Mayer, Stevie Ray Vaughan and BB King among others, but I’m not attempting to emulate anyone in particular. Let’s talk about some of the blues ‘trademarks’ mentioned earlier. Many of these phrases occupy a space between major and minor. This is achieved by sliding or trilling between the minor and major…

FIRST PLAYFENDER AMERICAN VINTAGE II TELECASTERS By the early 1970s, the Telecaster had already been around for more than 20 years. Five decades on and this seems like nothing at all. But back then it made Fender, still under relatively new management, feel that a change of direction was needed in order to refresh the range and perhaps chime better with the tougher music scene that was emerging. The company was experiencing a dip in popularity, since everyone from The Stones’ Keith Richards to Wishbone Ash, Aerosmith, Mick Ronson with Bowie, Phil Manzanera with Roxy Music, Adrian Fisher with Sparks, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Martin Barre with Jethro Tull and, of course, a still massive Led Zeppelin were all mainly toting Gibsons. So perhaps those once all-conquering single coils had become the…

FIRST PLAYJ ROCKETT ARCHER SELECT Ah, the Klon Centaur, that mythical pedal that’s likely to set you back silly money for an original. We recently saw one for sale in the UK at an asking price of £6,800! Of course, you don’t have to pay that amount of money to get the Klon experience because there are a number of ‘klones’ on the market, seemingly built around the same circuitry… But do those units have the ‘magic’ diodes found in the original? While Klon mainman Bill Finnegan maintains that his stock of particular 1N34A germanium diodes are essential to the true Klon sound, there are arguably other aspects of the circuitry that are more important to the end result than the type of diodes used, especially as the clipping diodes…

NAMM 2023 Report Gear brands traditionally flock to Anaheim for the AGM Of Tone in January, but this year, with the show itself pushed back until April and some big players choosing not to exhibit, there was a risk of this being a quieter year in terms of releases. Fear not, there are still rafts of new stuff to unbalance our current accounts. Following last issue’s preview, we’re now delving deeper to bring you even more highlights of GAS-inducing gear. [SW] EASTMAN JULIET LA CELESTINE BLUE £1,659 The latest solidbody from Eastman certainly caught our attention. The Juliet LA in Celestine Blue picks up where the previous P-90-VR and PB models left off. This time, the one-piece offset okoume body and neck get a Pelham-ish blue lick of Truetone Gloss,…

Artist: Graham Nash Album: Now (BMG) At the grand old age of 81, and with seven years passed since his last studio album, it was hard to shake the impression that Graham Nash had withdrawn to the creative hinterland where rock legends go to wind down, play the hits and tend to their back catalogues. We should have known better. Half a century since he mobilised the Woodstock generation with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the songwriter is brimming with new material on this year’s Now, squaring up to a modern world that didn’t get the ‘peace and love’ memo, and still in possession of an underrated acoustic touch that weaves among his ageless vocal. We called Nash at his home in California to find out more. What subjects came…

RAISING THE TONE Over the past five years, I’ve begun playing more and more fingerstyle acoustic and, with no special goal in mind, I gradually built up a dozen finished pieces that I was pretty happy with. Eventually, I realised that I easily had enough for a long EP, maybe an album, but I wondered if anyone would really want to hear instrumental songs I’d written in our kitchen at home after the family had gone to bed. The thought merited a kind of mental Gallic shrug, but not much more. But a watershed moment happened when I interviewed fingerstyle master Gordon Giltrap a few months back. Learning one of Gordon’s pieces note-for-note from tab in Guitarist in the 90s set me on the path to playing fingerstyle acoustic to…

STAR LETTER FORGOTTEN GEMS The other day I saw a reference to the New Zealand band Split Enz. I recalled being given their Mental Notes debut album at Christmas 1975 and loved it, especially the track Time For A Change and the guitar solo at the end. The solo was, I believe, played by Wally Wilkinson, but he was chucked out of the band soon after the album’s release, and I can’t find any mention of his subsequent, or previous, career anywhere on the internet. I started to think back to other solos I loved back then but haven’t heard since. For example, Caleb Quaye’s quite remarkable solo at the end of Ralph McTell’s Old Brown Dog, from the 1971 album You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here. How many of your…

PIONEERS Sister Rosetta Tharpe Rosetta Nubin was born on 20 March 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, a small town sandwiched between the Midwestern and Southern states. Both parents were cotton workers, although Rosetta didn’t know much of her father except that he sang in his spare time. Her mother, Katie, was deeply ensconced in the local church as both deaconess, vocalist and mandolinist. Clearly a child prodigy, by the age of six Rosetta was performing with her mother, singing and playing guitar under the name Little Rosetta Nubin as part of a travelling evangelical group. Even at this early stage Rosetta was spoken of as a formidable talent on the guitar. Throughout the 1920s, she further honed her skills after relocating with her mother to Chicago, performing in gospel music…

Companies that successfully make both acoustic and electric guitars under the same roof are not common. And for acoustic-maker Alister Atkin, who founded his company back in 1995 in Canterbury, adding electric guitars to his catalogue started as, well, an April Fool’s joke back in 2020. “We made two of our Eighty-Five models, proper Jackson-style with a paint job based on the surfboard in Back To The Future: green, pink and yellow,” Alister tells us. “We just thought, ‘Let’s do something stupid that people would never associate with a brand like ours: two guitars made by hand by some of the lads here who are absolute geeks over that stuff.’ It was just after Covid and we were up for some light-hearted fun, but I think they generated more publicity…

BLUEPRINT: Lollar Pickups Poised and responsive, with a sonic vibe all of their own, Lollar is one of the few pickup brands whose products we could identify almost blindfold. Whether it’s P-90s we’ve played in an Eastman semi on review or Tele pickups fitted to one of our Mod Squad creations, Lollars always seem to pull off the trick of being balanced yet never bland, clear yet never clinical, classic but never clone-like. So when founder Jason Lollar said yes to an in-depth chat about his approach to designing and building pickups – both traditional and progressive – we were intrigued to find out more. We join him to delve deep into Lollar pickups from A to Z, ranging from his earliest days as a designer to his most recent…

As its name implies, the Fender Bassman was designed with the electric bass in mind – specifically, the Precision Bass – though it has been wholeheartedly adopted by guitarists. Indeed, Fender’s current ’59 Bassman LTD amp is aimed at the six-string market, featuring in the ‘Guitar Amplifiers’ section of its website. This 45-watt reissue-style amp harks back to the game-changing 5F6-A circuit (one of many versions the Bassman has appeared in since its 1952 introduction) that was the basis of Marshall’s 1962 debut JTM45 amps. Although these designs are extremely similar in terms of electronics, Marshall’s 12-inch Celestion-loaded, closed-back speaker cabinets create a markedly different sound to the quad of 10-inch Jensens found in 1950s open-back Bassman combos. But the Bassman’s set of Jensen P10R speakers (superseded by the P10Q…