Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 i Guitarist

Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA Telephone 01225 442244 Email guitarist@futurenet.com Online www.guitarist.co.uk Putting together this month’s feature on Fender offsets and their various offshoots, vintage and modern, you can’t help but think how many guitars were designed for one thing but ended up being famous for another. The Les Paul was, after all, designed as a suave jazz guitar – but gained fame and popularity only after it made Marshalls howl. Likewise, has there ever been a more gloriously misnamed electric than the Jazzmaster? Off the top of my head, I can think of more jazz players who used a Telecaster (such as Ed Bickert or, in more recent times, Julian Lage) than a Jazzmaster, and though I did find some interesting footage on YouTube…

FIRST PLAYGODIN G-TOUR It’s been a little quiet on the Godin front in recent months, but the Canadian giant announced a new UK distribution partner towards the end of 2023, so the expansive range will hopefully be more accessible. And when we say expansive, we mean it. Just under the Godin brand – other house brands include Norman, Seagull and Simon & Patrick – we have regular steel- and nylon-string acoustics and electros, stage-aimed ‘crossover’ models such as the long-running Multiacs, instruments for ‘world’ musicians, and an extensive range of hollow, thinline and solidbody electrics. Before we get to look at some of the new-for-2024 models, we managed to get our hands on a pretty unique model that launched during the distribution changeover period: the G-Tour. This instrument certainly blurs…

FIRST PLAY ACLAM THE MOCKER Barcelona-based pedal company Aclam is continuing its quest to put specific sounds of yesteryear in pedals with The Mocker, another one with a Beatles connection. A couple of years back the company came up with the Dr Robert, a pedal that offered the sounds of the extremely rare Vox UL730 amp that The Beatles had supposedly used on various recordings at Abbey Road Studios, notably on the Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s albums. While that pedal pretty much nailed the sound of the amp, there was one thing missing and that was the sound of the amp’s in-built foot-switched distortion circuit – a typical 1960s fuzz. Now, the company has completed the task with The Mocker, a replica of that UL730 circuit, even down to using the…

Artist: Henry Parker Album: Lammas Fair (Cup And Ring Records) Yorkshireman Henry Parker is a flourishing singer-songwriter and has recently hit his stride with Lammas Fair, his second album, following on from 2019’s Silent Spring. He was also entrusted by Tompkins Square label owner, Josh Rosenthal, to curate a compilation – Imaginational Anthem Vol. XII: I Thought I Told You – dedicated to the much-missed guitarist Michael Chapman. “When I got to 10 years old I realised the guitar was something I really enjoyed doing,” he tells us of how his guitar journey started. “By the end of primary school I was listening to bands like Saxon and Iron Maiden and I’d really caught the bug.” To The Other Side It was several years later that Henry moved from his…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE Over the years I’ve tended to adjust to any guitar I pick up. I take it as read that this is what the builder intended to make and so I work around any foibles. It could come from my days at Gibson/Norlin where we’d often QC 100 guitars a day, then the same with CBS/Fender – plus, of course, the thousands I’ve played over decades of working on guitar magazines. “There are players who are never satisfied with what the guitar companies present. Within days they’re changing pickups, swapping bridges…” But there are players who are never satisfied with what the guitar companies present. Within days they’re changing pickups, swapping bridges, refretting with bigger wire, and so on. Some players I know have a problem with intonation, too.…

SUBSTITUTE There’s nothing wrong with a good honest E, C# minor or B, but sometimes it’s nice to give things a twist – and that’s what we’re doing with this issue’s theme of alternative voicings using open strings. Players such as Joni Mitchell, Steve Hackett and Steve Howe have all demonstrated this with considerable aplomb. In these examples, I’ve used the open first and second strings to keep a jangle at the top-end, while looking to stray from the norm – and perhaps even emulate the effect of using an alternativee/open tuning. In a band mix, it can also be desirable to keep a certain uniformity to the sound, so arranging chords like this can make it easier for the mixer to feature your guitar more prominently. The five examples…

Nobody disputes the fact that the Jazzmaster was designed for jazz guitarists, so it’s hard to understand why Leo Fender imagined all those ‘one tone for everything’ archtop huggers would be drawn to complex control layouts and a floating vibrato mounted on a plank. And if anything, the Jaguar is an even more baffling proposition. Like so many of Leo Fender’s products, these instruments ended up being wildly successful at producing sounds that ran contrary to his intentions and that would not have met his approval. That’s why, first of all, we’re going to take a deep dive into the radical design features, ingenious hardware and innovative electronics that make Fender’s finest offsets more popular than ever and continue to inspire guitar players and builders alike. Offset Bodies The Jazzmaster…

Down in rural Somerset you’ll find a little slice of Matsumoto, Japan at the premises of Gas Station Guitars. The store, which primarily does business online, imports a wide variety of rare and sought-after Japanese guitars. But, as owner Keith Anderson admits, it’s the colourful and quirky offset guitars made by Fender Japan – notably at its famous Fujigen factory – that are his ruling passion. Less wedded to tradition than US Fenders, the guitars made by Fender Japan have always been a riot of colour and modded features, with guitars often made in vanishingly small runs for individual stores. In this hothouse environment, which set a premium on exclusive finishes and unique features, traditional offsets such as the Jazzmaster evolved into truly capable and versatile contemporary electrics. We join…

TAYLOR 50TH ANNIVERSARY 814CE BUILDER’S EDITION £5,939 CONTACT Taylor Guitars PHONE 00800 23750011 WEB www.taylorguitars.com What You Need To Know 1 Is it really 50 years? Indeed, it is! Bob Taylor was a mere 19 years old when he founded Taylor Guitars with Kurt Listug in 1974. They met while working at a guitar store in San Diego called American Dream and when the owner announced he was selling up they bought the business and began the journey that led to the global brand we know today. 2 So, what’s so special about this particular guitar? Well, when it’s your 50th anniversary you’re entitled to make a bit of a fuss about it and the guitars that Taylor is releasing to celebrate are all spec’d out in special party duds…

As I stepped into our cramped rehearsal room, I was expecting the worst. There’d surely be cries of, “What’s that guitar?” and, “Oh, it’s one of those cheapo Vintage copies. Shouldn’t you be playing a Fender like me?” But either my bandmates have become more polite since we last got together for a pre-gig rehearsal, or they actually thought this custom-designed Vintage ‘DB’ didn’t look too shabby. Some might say that it does look a bit shabby, of course, thanks to its pretty lightly reliced finish and aged hardware. But, by design, it’s not OTT and its T-style outline is obviously easy on the eye. As we reminded ourselves of tunes we’d played many times before, I was getting used to my new squeeze, even though it doesn’t feel like…

In late October 1965, Vox designer Dick Denney visited the Thomas Organ Company, who distributed Vox in the US, to advise on the design of a new line of US manufactured solid-state amplifiers. One of these amps was the 100-watt Vox Super Beatle, which featured a resonant boost. In a company summary of their work with Denny, it was proposed that a top-panel selector switch could be used to toggle between “the normal maximum treble boost action and the selected resonant boost characteristic”. It was also observed that “an interesting wah-wah effect is obtained by operating the boost switch between its two positions. A remote control for this at the guitar would be novel, however, the cost and complication would probably be high.” Thomas Organ Company engineer Brad Plunkett did…

“ Elmer Stromberg made maybe less than half of the guitars that John D’Angelico produced. The serial numbers go up to 686, but they appear to start around 300. It was a really small operation with Elmer and his father, Charles, sharing a workshop in Boston, Massachusetts. Charles made drums, banjos and ukuleles, but when guitar became the choice for big bands, Elmer just followed the trend. Elmer probably never imagined he’d end up producing one of the better archtop guitars ever made. “At first, Elmer pressed the tops and made laminated backs and sides, but he then hand-carved solid spruce tops and maple backs. Having started with cross and parallel top braces – the convention for archtop acoustic guitars – Elmer changed to a single brace that ran diagonally…

ISSUE 509 APRIL 2024 DOWNLOAD YOUR EXCLUSIVE MASCOT LABEL GROUP GUITAR ALBUM WORTH £12 *Amount calculation based on the value of single-track digital downloads TRACK #1 WALTER TROUT Bleed (feat. Will Wilde) (Broken) TRACK #2 KENNY WAYNE SHEPHERD Bad Intentions (Dirt On My Diamonds Vol 1) TRACK #3 MATTEO MANCUSO Drop D (The Journey) TRACK #4 STEVE VAI Teeth Of The Hydra (Inviolate) TRACK #5 BRIAN SETZER Girl On The Billboard (The Devil Always Collects) TRACK #6 ROBIN TROWER Burn (Joyful Sky) TRACK #7 JOE BONAMASSA Lazy Poker Blues (Blues Deluxe Vol 2) TRACK #8 CEDRIC BURNSIDE Closer (Hill Country Love) TRACK #9 TODAY WAS YESTERDAY A Louder Silence (Today Was Yesterday) TRACK #10 ERIC GALES You Don’t Know The Blues (Crown) TRACK #11 ROBBY KRIEGER Contrary Motion (Robby Krieger…

FIRST PLAYEVH FRANKENSTEIN RELIC Hands up if you’ve ever tinkered with guitar mods. We’d wager that at some point or other we’ve all singed our fingers trying to replace a scratchy pot, turned the air blue as the spring from a pickup screw flies across the room for the third time, or gingerly winced as we make a twist of the Allen key. The late Eddie Van Halen was one such tinkerer, except his ‘bitsa’ mongrel became his implement for dropping jaws and raising the bar, permanently. As such, you’re most likely already very familiar with the Frankenstein, a guitar that completed Eddie’s jigsaw of mind-melting lead work, telepathic rhythm abilities and groundbreaking manipulation of the instrument itself. Plus, it looked damn cool. “It wasn’t a tape finish, I used…

Gibson J-45 Custom & SJ-200 Custom £4,799 & £8,799 Gibson has always produced the handsomest acoustic guitars. From rich-toned sunbursts to models boasting all manner of cosmetic finery, they surely are some of the coolest stage acoustics of all time. Within its electric line, the company has continually created upmarket versions of otherwise ‘Standard’ models, including the Les Paul and SG Custom, and the ES-355 to which the same fancy appointments and materials were applied, such as pearl, gold and ebony. There are now Flying V and Explorer Customs sporting the same livery, too. However, until now, the acoustic range has escaped these tuxedo-like upgrades. But all-new for 2024 come four flat-tops: the SJ-200 Custom, J-45 Custom, Hummingbird Custom and Songwriter EC Custom, the former pair as featured here. The…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER Twice a year, I run guitar-making courses designed to satisfy the demands of students who wish to experience building an acoustic guitar from start to finish in just three weeks. Given that my processes are predominantly hand-tool led – carving with chisels and smoothing with planes in favour of shaping with routers and power sanders – it’s an intensive lutherie experience that aims to leave my students with a six-string as good as any high-end guitar they might buy from the shops, all the while revelling in the magic and mystery of a master luthier’s workshop. No pressure there, then… It’s easy enough for the students to turn up on day one. But it’s become necessary for me to spend a week preparing the workshop in…

STAR LETTER TAKE IT TO THE BRIDGE… I’ve been playing guitar since the mid-1970s but still consider myself an amateur. A few years ago, a good friend set up my trusty Squier Strat with some new hardware and, although it played well enough, a big chunk of its personality was gone. This puzzled me greatly and sent me on a voyage of discovery. About the same time, a book came out about Brian May’s guitar, examining it closely. I was suddenly hooked on how guitars were constructed, reading about the quirks and failings of different models. I bought more books and watched StewMac videos. I’m an engineer by trade so I had to get ‘hands on’. I built a prototype, made wiring circuits, and at one point I had a…

Watching Tommy Emmanuel play his music live on stage is memorable in itself, but when it’s combined with bluegrass singer-songwriter Molly Tuttle as the support act, it becomes an experience not to be missed. Tommy’s presence on the scene has been one of the wonders of the acoustic world for many years. And while Molly is a relatively new name on the circuit, she is beginning to garner the international fame she richly deserves. In 2023, she won a Grammy with her band, Golden Highway, for the Best Bluegrass Album with Crooked Tree, and this was followed by the gong in the same category at this year’s ceremony for City Of Gold. Both Tommy and Molly are fiery performers in their own right, so when their talents are combined –…

FENDER PLAYER JAGUAR £739 If you’re looking for a blend of traditional and modern features at an attainable price point, the Player Series Jaguar will fit the bill. First up, it has the short 610mm (24-inch) scale length, along with the floating vibrato, but the bridge pickup has already undergone the most common mod, replacing the single coil with a Jaguar Humbucker. The switching is simplified, with the rhythm circuit removed and replaced with a three-way blade, but that slider switch on the upper horn will split the humbucker. Get it in a choice of five finishes. www.fender.com FENDER VINTERA II ’60S BASS VI £1,249 The Fender Bass VI is a curio in the Fender annals, taking Jaguar stylings but doing away with the short-scale performance in favour of the…

PJD ST JOHN STANDARD FROM £1,299 Starting at just £1,299, the St John Standard from PJD represents great value from a UK builder. Ordering is easy, too, thanks to a configurator on the PJD website where you can choose your neck (maple/roasted flamed maple), fingerboard (rosewood, maple) and headstock (natural/painted), plus pickups (P-90/humbuckers), tuners (Gotoh vintage/locking) and finish. Talking of which, PJD will apply a ‘spray-over’, with a three-tone ’burst applied under your top finish, which is then revealed with some light ageing. www.pjdguitars.com HAYNES DEMEANOUR FROM £2,600 At first glance, the Demeanour from Haynes might look ‘vintage’, but dig deeper and it’s anything but. American alder for the body and a one-piece mahogany neck – including graphite reinforcement – set the foundation for the compound radius ebony (or rosewood)…

BOSS RV-200 £259 CONTACT Roland UK WEB www.boss.info/uk What You Need To Know 1 This pedal has a familiar look to it... It’s the latest in the Boss 200 Series range and follows the same form factor as some previous pedals. This time it’s a reverb pedal. 2 Doesn’t Boss have enough reverb pedals already? Well, there’s the compact RV-6 and the full-featured RV-500, but up until now there’s been nothing between the two. The RV-200 bridges that gap somewhat by providing plenty of capability but remaining very pedalboard friendly for a twinfootswitch unit. 3 Has it got all the ’verbs I’ll need? Quite possibly. It’s got an across-the-board selection from the staple stuff to esoteric ambiences, including an all-new Arpverb type. Boss has had the delay and modulation genres…

What was the first serious guitar that you bought with your own money? “When I was about 15 or 16 I did my work experience at Peach Guitars, when it was in Braintree [Essex]. In those days it was a small independent shop, before it became the huge thing that it is now. For the whole week I was just trying as many guitars as I could. My granddad had passed away many years before and had left me some money and, because I was doing my work experience, John Priest, who owns Peach Guitars, gave me a really good deal on a nice secondhand Custom Shop Strat. “I’d been playing for a few years at that point and I was really into music. I think I was just starting…

Last issue we looked at why wood type can be overlooked in cabinet design, and this time we’ll discuss the different types of wood used in speaker cabs and the reasons for choosing them. A designer will often value stability or consistency most highly; after all, if the material doesn’t change from cab to cab, the results will be more predictable and easier to reliably reproduce. The trouble is, a lot of materials that are consistent don’t always sound as pleasing as we’d hope, at least not to a lot of us guitarists. MDF is a good example. Medium-density fibreboard is a material that has been favoured by cabinet makers in the past for its consistent behaviour at a low cost, but there are a couple of major downsides –…

Albert Collins: The Iceman Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Knaggs Choptank & Vox AC15 C1 Difficulty | 15 mins per example KNOWN AS THE ICEMAN and master of the Telecaster, Albert Collins is also revered for his flamboyant stage presence and piercing tone. However, listening back to his early recordings, you’ll also discover a pioneer of electric blues with a distinctive turn of phrase and a driven tone that didn’t become mainstream until several years later. To hear this in action, listen to his debut solo single, Freeze, from 1958 or, continuing with the ice-based theme, Frosty, another great example that became his signature tune (and the inspiration for these example licks). Recorded in 1964 but gaining more notoriety after its reissue in 1969, Frosty was way ahead of…

FIRST PLAY ELECTRO-HARMONIX SPRUCE GOOSE The latest addition to EHX’s extensive range of drive pedals, the Spruce Goose, is based on the pedal circuitry of Marshall’s Bluesbreaker. Here, however, it extends the feature set beyond the recently reissued original to include a choice of three input gain settings, additional output and expanded EQ. The pedal’s input gain options are accessed via a Lift toggle switch that has low, medium and high settings that progressively hit the input to its drive circuitry harder. At its low setting, you can start with a nicely transparent clean boost with the Volume knob set to the high and lower settings of the Gain knob. Advancing the Gain knob will take you through some early break-up sounds and natural low-level drive. The Bass and Treble knobs…

NAMM 2024 Round-Up Last issue, we brought you a few previews of new gear for 2024 and now, with the dust settled on Anaheim’s NAMM Show, there’s a whole lotta gassin’ going on at Guitarist HQ. From long-anticipated signature guitars to the return of classic vintage models, and even some reimagining going on, there’s new gear emerging across a range of price points for this year, and we’re just scratching the surface. Here are just some of the most exciting new releases that’ll be hitting the shelves in the months to come. CÓRDOBA STAGE TRADITIONAL CD £624 2023’s Córdoba Stage brought us feedback-free, nylon-string sounds in a crossover ‘nylon-string for electric players’ format. Now, as the name suggests, traditional nylon players can enjoy the same benefits. The Stage Traditional features…

Artist: Scott Henderson Album: Karnevel! (Mango Prom Music) Since playing with jazz fusion legends Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, Scott Henderson has carved out a reputation as one of the most formidable yet melodically eloquent electric guitarists around. He joins us to discuss his new instrumental album. Tell us about the song that gave the album its name – did it set the tone for the project? “Well, I don’t name songs before I write them. I just listen to the songs after I write them. And sometimes it takes a long time to figure out titles. But that particular song reminded me of a carnival – there’s this particular moment in that song where there’s like a double snare that sounds kind of like a horse-trot. That reminded me…

OpinionRAISING THE TONE Let me preface things by saying that this is neither a scientific paper nor a definitive answer. It’s simply a slice of wholegrain common sense, a meaty layer of builder knowledge, with a dollop of full-fat player experience. To this end, I’ve conscripted music industry friends with bags of the aforementioned to help guide me through the shark-infested waters of opinion. There does seem to be something of an obsession with lighter guitars, though. Ever noticed how many guitar store websites have photos of high-end instruments on scales, so you can see how heavy they are? In my experience lighter guitars do sound different from heavier ones. Consider an 8lb Les Paul versus an 11lb monster. The lighter one is likely to be more responsive: tickle the…

Rising from the Bristol post-punk scene with 2017’s Brutalism, Idles momentarily seemed like route-one firebrands, taking on toxic masculinity, a crumbling NHS and the gamed class system over chippy beats and jawbreaker riffs. But if nobody expected the broadened horizons of 2021’s Crawler – a fourth album that saw frontman Joe Talbot stop rabble-rousing to actually sing, while the band pinballed between glam, soul and brooding electronica – then this year’s Tangk is an even bolder leap, putting acres of distance between Idles and their noisenik roots. That the band now sound capable of anything is largely down to the partnership between Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan: two guitarists who reject anything that’s even on nodding terms with cliché. Their manifesto, as set out in today’s interview in the band’s…

Love ’em or loathe ’em, Fender offsets have some challenging quirks and most of these are related to the bridge and vibrato. While the system can work superbly, some knowledge is required to achieve that. This applies whether you have a vintage example, a Japanese reissue or even a Squier. And there are plenty of upgrades and modifications to take your offset to the next level. 1 NECK ANGLE Jazzmaster and Jaguar strings pass over the bridge saddles with very little break angle between the bridge and the vibrato plate. This minimises friction, but with lighter strings and low action, strings can pop out of their saddle slots and noises often occur behind the bridge. You may also notice a tonal characteristic that’s softer and less sustaining than other Fender…

Maple acoustic guitars have long occupied a respectable, if marginal, place in the world of guitar design. As a tonewood, maple is beautiful and abundant and, in fact, it has greater potential as a sustainable material than traditional tonewoods from the tropics. And yet, over the years, guitar designers have struggled to open up maple’s voice and grant it attractive richness to complement its natural clarity. Now, however, Martin’s design team think they have found a way to unlock the full potential of maple using deft and innovative design that allows it to reproduce a broad palette of sounds. The resulting guitar has been named the Inception. We join Fred Greene, the company’s vice president of product management, to find out how the Inception is spearheading Martin’s push to intelligently…

Like many players of a certain age, my first guitar was a nylon-string. I don’t think it had a brand name, but it was definitely a cheapo. I’d caught the rock ’n’ roll bug much earlier, which meant the poor ol’ nylon string was soon put in the back of a wardrobe while I shredded my fingers on a lowly Gibson copy of equally dubious origin. Some decades later I re-caught the nylon bug and discovered a whole new world. Any of us can use a nylon-string. You might want to dip into the classical/flamenco world, or jazzier bossa nova styles, but, yes, every house should have one. Some time back I’d loaned a Córdoba GK Pro to a friend who fancied trying some nylon flavour for a recording. On…