Innholdsfortegnelse for September 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 This issue’s cover feature about the upcoming sale of Rory Gallagher’s guitars got me thinking about what it means to own – and eventually let go of – treasured instruments. Unlike objects such as a lamp or a dining chair, a guitar has a special connection to the person who played it. Maybe because we pour our emotions into our guitars – or maybe because we play them at memorable moments, such as a wedding or a big gig. Or maybe it’s just that they can seem, if we play them all the time, like a physical extension of ourselves. It can, therefore, be an emotional moment when guitars pass on to new…

FIRST PLAYAUDEN 632 SERIES CHESTER 000 & BOWMAN OM Auden acoustics have featured many times in these pages, even claiming top spot on the winners’ podium for the Austin 12-string in issue 441’s Gear Of The Year. And so we always keep a keen eye open whenever the company lets us know that a new model is in the offing. Such is the case with the pair of acoustics before us now, the 632 Series Bowman and Chester models. These two models have been in the Auden catalogue for some time, the name descriptive of specific body shapes of which there are already a number of variations in terms of timber and turnout. Here, the two instruments are very close cousins to Auden’s Artist Rosewood Series in general terms, save…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER Although people know me as a maker, repairer and educator of guitars, it’s not uncommon to see some unusual instruments pass through the workshop. Anything that has strings and requires plucking tends to qualify for my attention and this month alone I’ve already seen a couple of banjos, a mandocello and even a Turkish saz cross the workbench for some TLC, alongside the usual slew of six-string axes of both electric and acoustic varieties. Understandably, you are unlikely to find specialists repairing such instruments (even in a big city like Bristol, where I am), and so it was that this week I found myself scratching my chin over an Arabic oud. It arrived in a desperate state, with the distinctive right-angled headstock broken off, scarred with…

STAR LETTER SINGLES CHART Why do most single-pickup guitars have the pickup at the bridge and the more jazz-oriented guitars have theirs at the neck? I wish some manufacturers offered a middle-position, single-pickup guitar model like my cool 1950s Kay-built, single-pickup electric guitars. In the middle position, you get a fatter sound than bridge-only pickup, and not too dark like neck-only pickups. Pictured are my 1954 Silvertone 1361 [top and bottom right] and circa-1957 Kay K-136 electrics [top left], featuring through-neck neck/body construction, 25 3/4” scale length, Kay pancake pickups and cool paint finishes. Also pictured [bottom left] is a rough prototype/copy of my own, using a humbucker with coil-split/tap switch, for humbucker in-series, humbucker in-parallel, and neck-coil only options. I have all controls and jack socket mounted on the…

For this issue we photographed Rory’s guitars, for perhaps the final time, in the Royal Albert Hall – the scene of some of Rory’s most glorious moments. So perhaps it’s only fitting we share a story about the one occasion where Rory, the consummate live performer, was lost for words and paralysed by stage fright at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of his childhood musical. “To Rory, Lonnie Donegan was the first guy [to inspire him to play roots American music] – even though he wasn’t an electric guitarist,” explains Donal Gallagher, “But it was that introduction to blues music and Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, you know – Lonnie really was bringing it through… he was the guy who was passing the torch down the line. “In…

Rory had a lifelong affection for single-pickup student guitars that he often modded with more powerful pickups then played on the major stages of the world. Arguably, this guitar – serial number 60937 – is the most famous guitar of that style in Rory’s collection. Ironically, however, it was found by chance by Donal Gallagher while Rory browsed a nearby guitar store. “This guitar was found on one of the many trips to LA we made over the years. We were there for just a few hours in the afternoon, and Rory said he wanted to visit a guitar store, I think it was called Valley Sound, and he knew the guy there. So I said, ‘Okay, Rory, let’s go down. But it’s a nightmare parking because there’s only a…

“John Hammond Jr is the son of John Hammond, the great A&R man at CBS who signed Bob Dylan. Oddly enough, he never signed his son, but Rory loved John Hammond Jr’s albums and his playing, and one of his ambitions, once he got out to the States, was to meet up with him. This was on the ’69 tour, and Rory was trying to track him down in New York. “[Rory’s] beautiful thick Irish accent could melt anyone’s heart. And the lady ended up selling the guitar to him for $50” “In the end I think Eric Clapton provided a number for John, but Rory didn’t connect with him on that tour – it was when we went back in ’71. Rory called him up and had a chat…

HISTORIC Gibson had used the ‘Electric Spanish’ or ‘ES’ designation since the launch of its first electric guitar, the ES-150, in 1936, but it would later become synonymous with the thinline double-cutaway ‘semi-acoustic’ ES-335T, which first appeared on the back cover of Gibson’s spring catalogue in 1958 (along with the initially short-lived Flying V). A quick word on ES nomenclature before we continue: T stands for thinline, so applies to all models; D is for double-pickup, redundant for all but the 330; N is for Natural, C for Cherry and W for Walnut); S for stereo; and V for Vari-tone. Some now call the later, longer variant a 330L, but that was never official. Back to the ES-335, then, and this model had a pair of Gibson’s new and improved…

Beck At The Bar Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Knaggs Choptank, Keeley Boss SD-1 & Vox AC15 C1 Difficulty 30 mins per example THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT for this Headlines was going to be ‘Some Useful Vocabulary For Slide Using Standard Tuning’ – or words to that effect. Then I happened to have a play over the backing track using the whammy bar, instead of a slide, and realised I was channelling (or trying to channel) something like Jeff Beck’s solo in Jon Bon Jovi’s Blaze Of Glory. Jeff was extremely adept with a bottleneck, but he could also manipulate the whammy to get a slide effect when the mood took him. The four examples shown here were played separately but with the intention of forming a complete solo when…

FIRST PLAYFENDER PLAYER II STRATOCASTER & TELECASTER The fact that several of our own magazine and website staff have owned and gigged the original Player Series guitars is testament to how much Fender got right in 2018, when they replaced the previous Standard range. So, following in the footsteps of the US-built American Vintage II Strat and Tele, these models from Ensenada, Baja California were eagerly awaited. Most obvious of version two changes is a choice of new colours. Among the various models are four original Fender custom finishes that had lain undiscovered in the vaults, so it’s great to see something other than the same old suspects (we love them, too, of course). Our Tele’s finish is called Birch Green, while the Strat is Hialeah Yellow and with its…

FIRST PLAYJ ROCKETT AIRCHILD 660 The Fairchild compressor was designed in the 1950s and is still in use in top-flight professional studios these days (Abbey Road has several). In fact, it may just be the most highly regarded compressor ever made. The 660 (single-channel) and 670 (twin-channel) Fairchild units are large, intricately engineered boxes that are full of many valves and transformers, although that hasn’t daunted J Rockett, who describes its Airchild 660 – a stompbox barely big enough to contain a single valve or transformer! – as a sonic interpretation of the famous compressor. The Airchild’s four-knob interface offers plenty of flexibility, but it’s really easy to dial in. Compression is increased by turning the Threshold knob, which is interactive with an Output knob that has plenty of capacity…

Artist: Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown Album: Electrified (Rattle Shake Records) Was there a particular track that kicked off your latest record, Electrified? “One of the tunes that kicked it off is a deep cut, which is a song called Moving. With this record, I wanted to keep it true to what the band is: a couple of guitars, a bass and drums. There’s always a temptation in the studio to make things bigger than they are, but with Moving, it’s just a Telecaster plugged into a Princeton Reverb. I’ve been on a Blackberry Smoke and Black Crowes kick of late, so Moving was kind of a tip of the hat to that sort of blues and roots rock ’n’ roll.” You mentioned the Telecaster, which is interesting as most…

RAISING THE TONEOpinion With the prices of classic-model and boutique amps going up a fair bit in recent times, I thought I’d offer an informal round-up of relatively inexpensive combos, heads and amp-like devices that have impressed us a lot at Guitarist over the past few years. Please note, what follows is not exhaustive – the recommendations here are merely a personal ‘greatest hits’ of amps that, without being especially pricey, have sounded much more expensive – or just offered an impressive amount for the money. The first under-appreciated amp that comes to mind is Fender’s Hot Rod DeVille 60-watt combo. Tellingly, when we did an extensive shootout of boutique amps a few years ago, we used a 410 Hot Rod DeVille as the ‘normal amp’ control group in a…

JOHN MAYALL 29 November 1933 – 22 July 2024 On 22 July, blues legend and bandleader John Mayall died at his home in California. He was 90 years old. Mayall was born in Macclesfield in 1933, and first courted music by scouring his father’s imported collection of blues 78s, before teaching himself piano, guitar and harmonica. After completing national service in Korea, Mayall returned to Britain in the 1950s, unimpressed by, according to Classic Rock magazine, “a monopoly of trad-jazz bands all playing the same tunes.” As Joe Bonamassa shares in his tribute, “John’s importance in music is as profound as the guitarists he hired.” This is a pertinent comment before we even consider the careers Mayall nurtured, and the calibre of musicians that were attached to his bands across…

Rory Gallagher’s ’61 Stratocaster is one of the most iconic guitars of all time. Fender’s Custom Shop replica of it is a good guitar, make no doubt, but no craftsperson could truly recreate what that guitar has been through, where it’s travelled and what it represents. Bought in Crowley’s music store in Cork when Rory was just 15, the guitar was purchased when his mother took a leap of faith to underwrite the hire-purchase agreement for an instrument that was, at the time, beyond the means of most pro musicians. And yet how he repaid her trust – the 14 solo albums that Rory recorded before his untimely death in 1995 remain a benchmark for all guitar players. Not only for the headlong, ecstatic energy of tracks such as Big…

Rory’s 1959 Fender Esquire, the earliest photos of which date from live gigs in Milwaukee, 1971, saw many changes over the years. A crude engraving on the guitar’s neckplate, still visible today, gives a clue to the guitar’s origins, reading: “Property Of Buzz Harding, Greensburg Kansas”. But once in Rory’s possession it would never leave his side. In fact, the only time its place in his collection was in serious jeopardy was when it was crushed on a runway and then inadvertently refinished in a colour Rory hated. Donal Gallagher takes up the story. “The guy did a full circle to go back – and drove straight over the guitar! And I thought, ‘That’s it – dead…’” “Back in the early 70s, we were touring America. We had arrived at…

It’s well known that Rory used an electric Coral Sitar for tracks such as Philby, but less well known is how much his devotion to its atmospheric sound ended up costing. The 19-string instrument, made by the Danelectro sub-brand Coral in collaboration with session guitarist Vinnie Bell, was surprisingly rare and reputedly only around 50 were ever made, many of which were already owned by well-known players such as Pete Townshend. So Rory simply hired one for touring. But, being a scarce item, doing so cost him an arm and a leg. “I’d got to the point of frustration with touring costs and budgets,” Donal Gallagher recalls, adding that he tried to find Rory a Coral Sitar he could buy and so do away with hire costs. To Donal’s further…

1967 VOX MARK XII SPECIAL ESTIMATE £10,000–15,000 Bought by Rory in honour of Brian Jones of the Stones 1971 ECCLESHALL ELECTRIC MANDOLA ESTIMATE £1,500–2,000 Mahogany solidbody made for Rory by Chris Eccleshall 1965 AIRLINE ‘JB HUTTO’ STYLE ESTIMATE £12,000–15,000 A stage-used cult-classic with a Res-O-Glas body 1990 NATIONAL R-1 RESOLECTRIC ESTIMATE £2,000–3,000 A feedback-proof modern successor to Rory’s Triolian 1963 SUPRO DUAL TONE ESTIMATE £5,000–7,000 Another plastic-bodied blueser with juke-joint mojo 1959 GUYATONE LG-60B ESTIMATE £2,000–3,000 An early model that inspired Rory’s custom Guyatone 1966 FENDER STRATOCASTER ESTIMATE £120,00–150,000 A Brazilian-’board Tele that was pivotal in Rory’s career 1940s OAHU LAP STEEEL ESTIMATE £1,500–2,000 Charming WWII-era slide machine with floral decals 1960 DANELECTRO 3021 SHORTHORN ESTIMATE £12,000–15,000 Rory’s love of Dan-Os found expression in this classic 1968 MARTIN D-35 DREADNOUGHT…

LINE 6 POD EXPRESS £185 CONTACT Yamaha Music Europe PHONE +49 (0) 4101 3030 WEB www.line6.com What You Need To Know 1 That’s a bit colourful! Yes, guitarists get the red chassis as opposed to a black version for bass players, but the coloured legending and LEDs do give it a certain toy-like vibe. 2 What’s onboard? There’s some serious amp and effects modelling going on here, but that colourful appearance ties in with the impression that this is a unit that’s easy for anyone to use. 3 So does this sit on my desktop or pedalboard? Either. It can deliver a full amp/cab plus effects sound or you can turn the amp/cab simulation off and use it as a multi-effects pedal. The original Pod was the unit that started…

What was the first serious guitar that you purchased with your own money? “My Jackson… no, my BC Rich Bich 10-string.” What was the last guitar you bought and why? “I just bought a Gibson Les Paul Silverburst; it’s the second guitar in my collection. I just started collecting guitars once I went to Gibson because… honestly, all of the guitar companies I’ve been with [have enabled me to play] really wonderfully made guitars. The collection I’ve got now includes a Les Paul Junior and the Silverburst – it’s kind of changing colours because it’s so old.” What’s the most incredible bargain you’ve ever come across? “I don’t know… I really haven’t bought many guitars up until the last guitar I bought, which was the Les Paul. Gosh, I can’t…

Electronic tremolo employs circuitry to mimic musical effects that have traditionally been produced by playing techniques on certain instruments. If you were ever required to memorise Italian terms for music theory exams, you may be familiar with the word tremolando, and there’s even notation for tremolo on musical scores. Tremolando from Italian translates as ‘trembling’ and can refer to fluctuations in volume, the fast repetition of a single note or rapid alternation between two notes. A string player might achieve these effects by quickly moving a bow back and forth, and a balalaika, mandolin or guitar player may employ fast alternate picking using a plectrum. And we’re all familiar with the hammering on and pulling off that so many blues and rock players use to get that two-note trill. Church…

FIRST PLAYBOSS KATANA ARTIST GEN 3 As a sibling to the famed Roland Corporation, Boss began its own ascent in the mid-1970s with the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble pedal, an effect that, until then, had only been available in Roland’s Jazz Chorus amps. Very quickly, the Boss CE-1 found its way onto the pedalboards of Andy Summers and Alex Lifeson, among many others. By 1980, the much-loved (and still current) compact effects series was following in its footsteps. However, over the years Boss has also expanded into different areas – with multi-effects/modellers and, of course, amplifiers – with great success. The Katana series has been around since 2016 and represents an all-in-one solution for players who need a roadworthy, affordable rig with all the effects and connectivity you could ask for.…

FIRST PLAYBLACKSTAR POLAR 2 Blackstar certainly knows a bit about guitar amplification and then some, so when the brand releases an audio interface that it says is “designed by guitarists for guitarists”, it’s time to take notice. The new Polar 2 is a solidly compact, bus-powered USB audio interface with two identical inputs, each one equipped with a combo socket for a standard guitar cable or XLR mic cable. For monitoring, you have a standard pair of outputs to connect to your speaker system, plus a front-panel headphone jack with its own volume knob. Blackstar tells us that it identified three specific areas in audio interface design that needed to be addressed, with ease of use being one of them. The other two are more guitar-specific: the feel and response…

Artist: Cash & Carter Album: No Use Praying EP (Frictionless Music) Guitarist and music producer Ross O’Reilly is based in London and divides his time between production projects and his new alternative country influenced duo, Cash & Carter, where he works with vocalist and lyricist Shaun Smith, who often operates under the moniker Stealth. This mainly acoustic-based duo is a departure for both musicians. “I’ve known Shaun for about 10 years now and we’ve worked together since,” Ross begins. “If you gave us a pop quiz on the background of Americana and country music then we might be in the bottom half, but we just love the sound of it. And Shaun is a big Johnny Cash fan.” What’s In A Name Cash & Carter feels like a bold name…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE John Lennon’s aunt Mimi told him, “The guitar’s all right as a hobby, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.” After The Beatles made it he put the phrase onto a plaque and sent it to his aunt at the house he’d bought her with his musicianly earnings. John knew exactly what he wanted to do, and boy did he do it. But when I left school I had no idea of my life’s direction. We lived in a tiny village in the far north-east where none of the available job options (including ‘going down the pit’) appealed. And the thought of university didn’t even cross my mind. “Clapton tells how he was about to quit music when John Mayall spotted his potential and rescued him.…

SUBSTITUTE Sometimes, when music theory ties us in knots, it’s good to remember that so much of what we’re dealing with is just names for sounds. And sometimes those names struggle to keep up with the complexities of music as much as we do! One term that can throw people at first is the 6/9 chord, so this feature will attempt to dispel any mystery about them and their possible variants. As you might suspect, the 6/9 chord contains both the 6th and the 9th of the ‘parent’ scale, the scale the chord is taken from. In practice, the name 6/9 is actually an abbreviation of 6add9 because 9th chords would technically contain the 7th. They have a very particular sound due to the stacking of 4ths. Check out the…

During the years when Rory’s Strat saw use in hundreds of gigs, Donal was Rory’s de facto manager – travelling the world with him and handling everything from air freight to negotiating record deals. He was the only person Rory trusted to handle business while he rocked the world’s great stages. He also helped Rory track down an eclectic but hard-working collection of mostly classic American guitars but with a fair smattering of vintage Japanese oddities and rarities, folk instruments and, of course, amps and effects. The motivating force behind Rory’s collection was typically either pragmatic need – say, for a workhorse stage or studio instrument – or the desire to emulate his own heroes, who were drawn from the golden age of pre-war blues and jazz. “Buying the baritone…

Fans of Rory’s famous Irish Tour ’74 album – one of the great live rock and blues recordings of our time – will know the National as the guitar used on the track As The Crow Flies, with its metallic yet soulful voice evoking so many of the old blues and roots recordings that inspired Rory growing up. “I remember Rory picked it up in Denver, and he was particularly after a resonator like the one Scrapper Blackwell played,” Donal Gallagher recalls. Rory himself added more detail about the purchase in a 1977 interview with International Musician, stating that:“I got it from a guy in the States. You get these travelling guitar salesmen going round. I got it for a very reasonable price – about £100. “Despite its powerfully projecting…

This 1960 Melody Maker was nudged in a more Les Paul-like direction, with the addition of a humbucker at the bridge, when Rory acquired it in 1985 originally for slide work. However, when a certain member of Guns N’ Roses turned up at a Los Angeles gig to pay homage to Rory, it came in handy for another purpose, as Donal Gallagher explains. “In March of 1991, we’d arrived back in LA after a long flight from Sydney. Oddly enough, we’d left Australia on 2 March, which was Rory’s birthday. I’d kind of planned the flights so that Rory would get two birthdays [after crossing the International Date Line]. The first gig in LA was at the Roxy down on the Strip. Anyway, thanks to this sort of Lost In…

EPIPHONE LES PAUL JUNIOR £469 To kick off the Junior style, this Epiphone-branded single-cut in its dark Tobacco Burst-only gloss looks suitably moody. It uses a ‘Lightning Bar’ compensated wrapover bridge with an Epiphone P-90 Pro dog-ear and mahogany with laurel fingerboard construction. Elsewhere, the dual-pickup Les Paul Special in TV Yellow costs £489, while Junior champion Billy Joe Armstrong has his own Classic White signature Junior at £529, with the same Lightning Bar bridge and P-90 Pro. www.epiphone.com EPIPHONE CORONET £439 A cost-effective way to experience the single-pickup Coronet style, this model uses the perhaps more classic and larger ‘butterfly’ pickguard, here a three-ply, plus the output jack socket is face-mounted, not side-mounted. It comes in Cherry or Ebony finishes and again uses all-mahogany construction with a laurel fingerboard,…

As regular readers may know, I’ve pretty much devoted myself completely to fingerstyle acoustic guitar recently, at least as far as gigging and recording goes. Solo fingerstyle performance can be a bit nerve-racking as the stream of notes produced is very much a chain that must either flow without mishap from the guitar or hit a mistake and grind to a sudden halt. Unlike playing a riff on electric with a nice loud band behind you, you can’t fudge things and drop back in at the next bar if you slip up. Every note is nakedly on display – and every mistake, too. That can pose a bit of a psychological challenge when it comes to gigging fingerstyle acoustic pieces. Ironically, the more tense you are, the clumsier your fingers…

A little over 45 years ago, a then pretty unknown English band released a self-financed album called Outlandos d’Amour. It had been recorded out of hours at a small studio in Leatherhead, Surrey, between January and September of 1978, on secondhand tape found in the band’s manager’s garage. The first two lead-off singles were banned by the BBC, although on its reissue in 1979, one track in particular changed the struggling band’s fortunes: Roxanne became an international hit and the calling card of this plucky ‘fake punk’ trio called The Police. For his early career with the soon-to-be-huge trio, guitarist Andy Summers relied – virtually exclusively – on a mongrel Telecaster, which he’d famously bought from a student while teaching guitar in California in 1972 before he returned to London…

“The neck date reads December 1957. This Strat has been loved and played, but it’s very straight and correct, with the yellowed plastic knobs and pickup covers, and the alder body, which were all standard by then. The body has slim body contours like a ’56 or ’57, and it’s quite unlike the chunkier contours that started appearing in mid-to-late 1958. “The neck starts off with a beautiful V that is on the harder side and that’s fairly typical for late 1957. By about the 5th fret the V shape softens out into a larger and wider profile, and by the 9th fret it has a very substantial heft. The frets are original and they show some wear, mostly in the cowboy chord position, but the playability is fantastic. “I…