Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i Guitarist

Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA Telephone 01225 442244 Email guitarist@futurenet.com Online www.guitarist.co.uk Back in the 1950s and 1960s, guitar makers took their lead from the car industry in offering annual model upgrades, which were all about presenting progressive new features to the consumer. While cars might have boasted of new, more powerful engines or smoother suspension, companies such as Gretsch offered new features that they thought might help open up creative horizons. Some, such as complicated muting systems and stereo outputs, proved evolutionary dead ends, but they were still aimed at giving players new tones and capabilities to make music with. As the guitar industry became more preoccupied with its own past, following the resurgence of Fender in the 1980s (which was achieved partly through…

It’s never been easy to pigeonhole Godin, the long-running Canadian maker, which turns its expansive hands to everything from affordable steel- and nylon-string acoustics to £5k-plus signature electric models. If there is a theme, it’s practicality: good, solid craft that’s always very fit for purpose. This Radium is case in point. It was actually introduced at the start of 2020, in Carbon Black and Winchester Brown, just before Covid caused its havoc, while the Matte Green version you see here was announced in 2021. A change in distribution meant reviews were on hold, and while we managed to get our hands on the higher-end Radium-X with its LR Baggs X-Bridge back in issue 495, this base model slipped through the net. “Presenting a new breed of single-cut guitars, which combines…

FIRST PLAY MXR M307 LAYERS MXR’s Layers pedal can freeze and sustain a note or chord, creating a sustained ‘layer’ that can be used to enhance and bolster notes or act as a pad that you can play over. Pressing the footswitch takes a sample of your playing at that point, which will sustain until you release the footswitch. Alternatively, there’s auto-triggering via playing dynamics, with the Trig knob setting a threshold above which a layer can be triggered. A Mix knob sets the level of the layer in relation to your dry sound, and you also get knobs to set the Attack (fade-in time) of the layer, and the Decay, which can be turned up full for infinite sustain. The pedal supports three simultaneous layers that overlap with each…

Artist: Julian Taylor Album: Pathways (Howling Turtle, Inc) Toronto based singer-songwriter and guitarist Julian Taylor has been making high-quality music for many years, his sound bringing in R&B, folk, country and soul influences. But it’s only really been since 2020’s The Ridge, an album that also focused on pan-Canadian roots music in part, that his momentum has gathered. Since then we’ve had Beyond The Reservoir in 2022 and now Pathways, another excellently crafted set of songs. This attention seems overdue. “My first official record came out in 2000,” he tells us. “And before that there was an EP in ’97, but I was a kid back then.” Making The Move Julian has been playing music since the age of four and comes from a family of storytellers, so it feels…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE You know the type: large, loud and Claretcheeked, with brightly coloured corduroy trousers, cream shirt (with green-and-red stripes), khaki check-tweed waistcoat and big brown brogues. (Apologies to anyone wearing that exact get-up while reading this…) Well, many years ago Jason Sidwell of this parish, our good friend Damo and I used to run ‘Guitar Breaks’ teaching weekends. We’d book a nice hotel somewhere in the English countryside, arrange lunches, evening meals and so on, and would get 20 or so paying guests who’d come to up their playing game a bit. Jason was the ‘professor’, Damo did the organising, and I was the guy in the middle who helped Jase, added my ha’porth here and there, and played rhythm guitar or bass for the class. “Dave rushed in, breathless…

SUBSTITUTE AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra Terms such as ‘altered’ and ‘extended’ chords are relatively simple to explain. Extended chords add other notes from the scale to the existing Root-3rd-5th triad (for example, C-E-G), so if we add a 7th, we’d call this a major 7th chord (C-E-G-B). We can extend up to a 13th in this way by progressively adding in the non-chord tones of a scale – in theory, at least. In practice, Root-3rd-5th-7th-9th-11th-13th played simultaneously makes for a dense, almost dissonant voicing. On guitar we’d struggle because we only have six strings, plus a limited reach and number of fingers! So we tend to omit nonessential notes. The 5th is often the first to go, then the 11th gets the chop in 13th chords for clarity. Altered chords contain non-diatonic…

Fender Vintera II ’50s Jazzmaster Once upon a time, the Fender offset was a much-derided guitar, but you don’t need us to tell you it’s had quite a resurgence in popularity in recent years – and that’s an understatement! Refreshed at the end of 2023, the Mexican-made Vintera II line focuses on vintage specs, so expect a small-radius ’board and small-gauge fretwire. But with its vintage-style 50s single-coil Jazzmaster pickups, not to mention the original-style dual control circuits, this is a blast from the past that looks, plays and sounds the part without vintage issues or price. We said: “There’s a reason why this guitar has eventually become quite a classic.” And, for many, that vibrato is still the best! Price: £1,099 Website: www.fender.com Manson Verona Junior The Manson brand…

JWJ ‘The Hog’ Shropshire-based luthier Rich Jones, aka JWJ Guitars, sent us into a bit of a spin when we set eyes upon his OM and Parlour guitars back in issue 499. And so expectations were high when we opened The Hog’s case a few months later. We weren’t disappointed, either, as the workmanship and sheer musicality that greeted us were enough to win a Guitarist Gold award. The Hog is an all-mahogany stunner that Rich has designated as being his entry-level model, but at this price and grade of quality it offers so much more. Hand-built instruments with this type of craft don’t come along every day and so it’s no wonder that The Hog has become something of a JWJ best-seller. Price: £1,295 Website: www.jwjguitars.co.uk McNally S-32 Ciaran…

Boss IR-2 Amp & Cabinet A whole rig in a Boss Compact chassis, the IR-2 can supply the signature sound of 11 different amp types, each of which has an associated cab IR from Celestion Digital. You can also load alternative IRs into the pedal, add ambience with a choice of reverbs and use a send and return loop to bring other pedals into the signal path after the amp emulation. With its battery power, the IR-2 is a versatile go-anywhere problem solver for many scenarios: you can use it for headphone practice, USB recording or live work where the two channels (a different amp or the same amp with altered settings) toggled between with the footswitch confer a useful flexibility. Price: £179 Website: www.boss.info Line 6 HX One A…

Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient The brand’s Fundamental series comprises affordable pedals that each covers a specific effects type and is designed for ease of use with a control surface of three centre-detented sliders. Here, there’s a choice of three atmospheric reverb algorithms – Deep, Lush and Haze – with control over Reverb Mix and Decay, plus a Tone knob that shifts the overall tonality of the reverb in a way specific to each algorithm. Through these you can quickly conjure up a wide range of expansive soundscapes and lingering background pads with long decay times. Walrus’s great track record with these sorts of pedals is absolutely in evidence here – but with hands-on simplicity at a bargain price. Price: £125 Website: www.walrusaudio.com MXR M309 Joshua Ambient Echo MXR has packed…

HISTORIC HARDWARE Guild Guitars co-founder Alfred (real name Avram) Dronge was born in Poland in 1911 and emigrated to the US, via a two-year stay in Paris, in 1916, settling in New York City. As an accomplished musician, he was first a guitar teacher and club player, before opening a music store in the mid-1930s in Manhattan’s Park Row. After some persuasion by friend and ex-Epiphone executive George Mann, Dronge and Mann founded Guild Guitars Inc in October 1952. It would be neither the first nor the last time a retailer or repairer saw opportunity in manufacture. The workforce assembled in a 1,500-sq ft factory at 536 Pearl Street, comprising craftspeople displaced by leading archtop maker Epiphone, which had moved some operations to Philadelphia in the wake of union disputes.…

BOSS SDE-3 DUAL DIGITAL DELAY £169 CONTACT Roland UK WEB www.boss.info What You Need To Know 1 Another Boss delay pedal… There have been a few of them in the past couple of years, but each of them absolutely fills its own niche. 2 What makes this one special? The main thing is that it puts Roland’s digital delay sounds from the 1980s into a compact pedal. The sought-after sound of the classic SDE-3000 rackmount unit was channelled into two recent triple-footswitch SDE-3000 pedals, but now you can get it in this smaller and less expensive pedal. 3 Why is it called a dual delay? Because that’s its most notable feature: it can give you two delays in parallel, the second one offset from the first by an amount that…

In our recent Nitty Gritty feature on tremolo (issue 515), we described how a valve can be configured to create a low-frequency oscillator (LFO) that can modulate amplitude. You can’t actually hear the oscillator itself, merely the effect it has, and that effect isn’t restricted to tremolo. In addition to amplitude, an LFO can be used to modulate pitch, frequency response, phase and delay – and that leads us onto vibrato, chorus, flangers and phasers. Doppler Vibes Many of us will have experienced the acoustic phenomenon of the pitch of a police car siren appearing to increase in pitch as it approaches and decrease as it moves away. It’s called the Doppler effect, and if the volume and pitch remain constant you’re probably in trouble. Engineers have developed clever ways…

Rhythm & Swing Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Lewis Pequeno Bastardo & Vox AC15 C1 Difficulty | 10 mins per example WHETHER YOU’RE A PRO musician or play with bands in your spare time, chances are you’ll spend the majority of your time fulfilling rhythm guitar duties. You’re certainly not alone in this – many great soloists are also fantastic rhythm players, covering both rhythm and lead parts and frequently blurring the lines between the two. Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan are great examples of this blending of styles, with the solo/examples here (broadly speaking) inspired by the latter. We’re working in a ‘trio’ format, with just bass and drums for support, so we need to cover harmonic, melodic and rhythmic areas far more comprehensively than we would…

Phil Manzanera One of the most affable men in rock, Phil Manzanera is also the most mercurial of hit-makers. We meet him and his guitars on p86 Orianthi Sparky, hard-hitting and continuously at the sharp edge of rock, the Aussie guitarist talks tone, inspiration and more p54 Studio Upgrades The Les Paul Studio is one of the most popular and attainable Les Pauls of all time. We review the latest updated version on p98…

It’s amazing to think that a guitar that was born in an era of great financial hardship and social distress could be so revered by players almost 100 years later. But such is the case with the so-called ‘Depression-era’ acoustics: essentially stripped-down, no-frills instruments that were aimed at the musicians of the day, themselves enduring the full clout of the famous financial bottoming in the USA during the 1930s. Recently, we’ve seen Martin answer the call with its Streetmaster acoustics, which were reliced to reflect the rough and tumble of the years, looking like they’d done their time in the juke joints and barrel houses of the Deep South. And, of course, Martin’s all-mahogany models have been more and more visible in its catalogue in recent years, too. It seems…

WISHLIST Gibson BB King ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ 1974 ES-355 Gibson BB King ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ 1974 ES-355 £8,999 Gibson PHONE 00800 44427661 WEB www.gibson.com Think of the late, great BB King and a picture of his famous ‘Lucille’-model Gibson with its ES Artist-type sealed body will likely come to mind, although these didn’t actually appear in Standard and Custom versions until 1980. Before then, BB had long plied his high-profile trade, invariably with a standard ES model and typically the 355. Currently, Gibson Custom has a Lucille Legacy and ‘Live at the Regal’ ES-335 in the catalogue, and now this latest historic homage from 1974 has joined the ranks. The ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ pulls in another couple of heavyweights, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, unquestionably rockstars…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER When I was considering a career as a guitar maker, one of the appealing aspects was the longevity of it. I could imagine a long life ahead of me still carving wood and building instruments well into my ‘retirement’. If one manages to get by in an occupation that has already been rendered obsolete by technology, in my mind it’s less likely anything new is going to come along to get in your way. Of course, the challenge is to make that living in the first place. Why would anyone be interested in a product that took longer to make, if there is a cheaper alternative? Fortunately, guitars benefit from being made by hand in a carefully considered fashion. More sonic potential in the wood can…

JUNIOR HIGH Thank you for your absolutely outstanding feature celebrating 70 years of the Gibson Les Paul Junior. I have to confess that I have ashamedly dismissed this guitar throughout my 35 years of playing, largely due to the fact that I had always felt that this particular style of Les Paul simply didn’t look very nice. However, your article encouraged me to look beyond the aesthetics and to really appreciate what this fine instrument has to offer. Additionally, what this instrument has done to inspire the next generation to learn the guitar – supported, of course, by high-profile artists such as Billy Joe Armstrong and Joan Jett proudly taking them to the stage – is in itself a wondrous thing. Perhaps most importantly, Barrie Cadogan’s video demo of Rory…

Epiphone Inspired By Gibson Custom 1963 Firebird V It’s the sort of collaboration that warms the cockles of our (not exactly loaded) hearts. A pukka Gibson Custom 1963 Firebird V will cost you close to £6k, but this Epiphone version – which comes in either Ember Red or Frost Blue – sails close to that wind with its very well-detailed build, including that classic nine-ply mahogany/walnut through neck, banjo-style tuners, Maestro Vibrola and Gibson USA Firebird mini-humbuckers. Forget those cheapo Epis of old; we concluded this is “a fabulous beast”. Our only dilemma is whether we should go with the single-pickup Firebird I or this twin-pickup beaut. Price: £1,699 Website: www.epiphone.com Fender 70th Anniversary American Professional II Stratocaster Fair play to Fender. 70 years after the party started, the brand…

It’s often been said that guitarists are resistant to change in guitar design. I think perhaps that’s overstated, as our 40th Anniversary Reader Survey found that, on the whole, Guitarist readers were fairly open to new advances in gear, with 38 per cent of respondents identifying most with the statement “I love innovation in guitars, amps and effects,” while the largest group – 51 per cent – agreed with the statement “Now and again an innovation grabs my imagination.” Only 11 per cent of respondents said they had little or no interest in innovation in guitar gear. So much for the infamous conservatism of guitarists. The nearest it gets to being true is when it comes to styling. We may like to have all the performance advantages of modern guitar…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “With my own money? I think it was a Gibson LS-6, which, by the way, you can’t find these days. But it had a head shaped like a Les Paul; it was a single-cut and made out of one piece of cheap wood. And it had a rotary six-position knob that looked like it came off a Vox AC30. That was my first Gibson, which was all I cared about.” What was the last guitar you bought and why? “I haven’t bought a guitar in decades, really! Well, not really. I have a signature Les Paul and there are perks that come with that. But I do use Gretsch guitars a lot and they’ve been very kind to…

When Cream T owner, Tim Lobley, told us he was working on a ‘modern’ T-style guitar earlier in 2024, we can’t say we were overexcited. Plenty of makers have done that and we shudder to think how many mucked-about-with ‘Telecasters’ there are out there across the price points. In truth, Tim was thinking along the same lines: what could Cream T bring to the ‘posh’ T-style table? It turns out that “quite a lot” would be the answer. As you can see, the Astra certainly looks the part and its outline isn’t just a redraw around a Fender, with a shorter treble horn and slightly wider cutaway. We get a forearm curve and deep ribcage contour, too, and in terms of specification it follows the posh S-style Polaris that Cream…

FIRST PLAYORIGIN EFFECTS HALCYON BLUE OVERDRIVE Origin Effects has completed a trilogy of what are arguably the three most cloned and modified drive pedals. First, we saw the Halcyon Green Overdrive based on a Tube Screamer, then came the Klon-based Halcyon Gold Overdrive, and now here’s the Halcyon Blue Overdrive, inspired by the early 90s Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal. However, these aren’t mere clones. In fact, Origin has expanded the tonal options with a toggle-switched choice of an authentic original voicing or a modified one, plus a user-variable amount of dry sound as a component of the signal, and the company’s Adaptive Circuitry with its neat trick of automatically adjusting voicing in response to pick attack and volume changes. Setting the pedal to its BB voicing and utilising the Level, Drive…

New releases From £279 CONTACT Various WEB See below Somehow we find ourselves reaching the end of the year already. While that can only mean two things for gearheads – it’s Gear Of The Year time and the NAMM Show is just around the corner – we’re already seeing a lot of brands already giving us a taste of new releases for winter. From acoustic innovations to birthday celebrations, the tail end of 2024 also delivers a couple of surprise signature models. And we’re still over a month away from the Anaheim gear-fest! So we’ll be back next issue with more wallet-relieving new products. BLACKSTAR SERIES ONE MK II £1,999 It’s hard to believe Blackstar’s Series One is now in its adolescence, but to celebrate the Brit brand has given…

Artist: Steve Hill Album: Hanging On A String (No Label Records) Watching Steve Hill play live really is a wonder to behold. Through a contrivance of simple tech, including a drumstick attached to his headstock to clout the cymbals of his drum kit, Steve can play drums, bass and guitar simultaneously – the 21st century’s answer to the traditional one-man band. His latest album, Hanging On A String, has just hit the streets, but the journey to its release was far from straightforward, as he explains. You had a rough ride between this album and your last, didn’t you? “Dear Illusion came out in November 2022, and a week after the album was released, I was driving home from a gig and I fell asleep at the wheel five minutes…

RAISING THE TONE Opinion This month former Guitarist editor Neville Marten and I ventured down to World Guitars in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. A haven of high-end lutherie, the store is one of the most welcoming places to try top-drawer PRS, Gibson, Fender and Tom Anderson electrics, to name but a few premium brands it stocks. Intriguingly, the store also has quite a few Nik Huber electrics in at any one time, including – at the time of writing – three quite different examples of Nik’s stunning Orca ’59 model, which takes its inspiration, quelle surprise, from Gibson’s celebrated 1959-spec Les Paul Standard. Nik Huber is no slavish copyist, however, but an extremely skilful and distinctive luthier, so the Orca ’59 has various refinements and finessed details that the original never…

WORTH £432 IN TOTAL! If you’ve ever paid a visit to the Gibson Garage London, at 61 to 62 Eastcastle St, W1W 8NQ (and if you haven’t, you really should add it to your to-do list), you’ll have noticed that not only does it have walls full of excruciatingly lovely guitars, there is also a fine range of guitarist-friendly accessories, too. And this issue we’ve got a selection to give away to one lucky winner, who will receive the following: ● Gibson Vintage Original Instrument Cable (20ft)● Handcrafted Wooden Stand● The Montana strap● Coated Phosphor Bronze Acoustic strings ● Vintage Reissue Electric guitar strings● Guitar Care Kit● Mobile Tech Tool Kit All you have to do in order to be in the running for the big prize is head to…

Vintage REVO Series Trio While most brands seem to be introducing individual models and small collections, Vintage started the year with a whopping 15 new REVO Series designs. Among the diverse range, all designed by industry veteran Alan Entwistle (also behind the Rapier brand), is one of the more original T-inspired builds we’ve seen. We get a lightweight okoume body and, as the name suggests, three Entwistle J90A single coils with a pair of three-way lever pickup-selector switches – oh, and an offset vibrato! We said: “As a Jazzmaster in Tele dress, it’s light in weight, has very evocative sounds and a super-smooth vibrato.” Boutique in concept, bargain in price. Price: £449 Website: www.vintageguitarsrus.com Chapman Law Maker Legacy 2024 saw a complete rejig of Chapman’s expansive range and a move…

PJD Carey Elite Having rejigged its model line-up with the high-quality but very affordable Standard range, PJD Guitars opened the doors to its Custom Shop earlier in the year. Here, as founder Leigh Dovey put it, “we can have some fun”. We guarantee you will, too, because this up-spec version of the Carey Standard model adds a little posh in the form of the strongly figured roasted maple neck and body cap while retaining the vibey light weight of the company’s original models with a chambered ‘old growth’ mahogany body. The York-based brand is now also winding its pickups in-house, which give this Carey a real journeyman, classic and versatile voice. Don’t miss these! Price: £3,199 Website: www.pjdguitars.com Patrick James Eggle Rob Harris Signature A big name in the elite…

Blackstar HT Club 40 MKIII Blackstar’s Club Series amps have really shown off the company’s talent for developing an extremely effective, attainably priced amp line and improving it year after year until it punches not just above its weight but shines in any company. The 40-watt HT Club 40 MKIII’s two channels give four characterful voicings: crisp contemporary tone and a warmer, Fender-like glassiness on the clean channel, while the dirty channel offers vintage crunch as one voicing and crucible-hot gain as the second. Consequently, this combo has an extraordinary range of nuanced, girthy tones, especially with Blackstar’s unique ISF tone-sculpting control letting you set the US/UK tonal character. Price: £899 Website: www.blackstaramps.com Bad Cat Jet Black Head In his final article for Guitarist, our late, much-missed amp reviewer Nick…

Crazy Tube Circuits Hi Power Christos Ntaifotis, CTC’s founder, hit on something when he started a range of pedals that pair historic amp sound with a classic drive pedal. The Hi Power offers sounds from Hiwatt amps with a recreation of the Colorsound Power Boost pedal – a combo strongly associated with David Gilmour around the time of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. The two components are independently footswitchable and you can choose from two different versions of the Boost, plus emulations of 50- and 100-watt Hiwatts with Normal and Brilliant channels, or both together. With tones from clean to raucously fuzzy, it delivers two classic tonal flavours for your rig that are rare in pedal form. Price: £235 Website: www.crazytubecircuits.com ThorpyFX Electric Lightning This Chris Buck signature pedal…

There can be few guitarists who have roamed so widely through the landscape of pop music as Phil Manzanera. Born in England but raised in, variously, Cuba, Venezuela and Hawaii, his playing has always possessed a deep spirit of musical adventure. From era-defining avant-garde rock with Roxy Music to Latin-infused prog and dalliances with experimental synth in his early solo career, his vagabond muse has never settled down. His gift for playing just exactly the right phrase at the right time, combined with a leftfield sensibility that always results in work that’s full of surprises, means that over the past five decades, his music has never lost its vitality. As he releases a heavyweight 11-disc retrospective of his solo albums, we join the ever-affable guitarist in his London studio, where…

You’d hope that when you buy your shiny new axe, it would be perfectly ready to go, especially since guitars aren’t getting any cheaper as we’ve all no doubt noticed. Over the past year, however, it’s fair to say rather too many new instruments aren’t quite finished when they turn up at Guitarist HQ. Is that acceptable today? Do guitar companies think we should either spend our own time finishing off their guitars or pay a professional? Is the QC of new guitars going down the pan? It’s impossible to generalise, but a personal bugbear for me is tuning. Can I get the guitar in tune in the first place, and will it stay and play in tune? Now, I’m not expecting to do a quick tune to pitch and…

“The Gretsch 6130 Round-Up premiered in 1953, but customers didn’t start seeing it until 1954. The Western motif inlay at the 1st fret didn’t appear until 1955, which is the year this one was made. The knotty pine top wasn’t something that could be ordered and some of the guitars just came that way while others didn’t, with no explanation from Gretsch. The pine was usually very thin, and if these guitars aren’t packed well and there’s an accident, the control knobs can push right through the top. “They had every bell and whistle that Gretsch could offer you besides the bejewelled knobs, which were reserved for the Falcon and Penguin. But it has the Western motif inlays, gold hardware and the belt buckle tailpiece with the lasso scene. “They…