Innholdsfortegnelse for July 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 This month’s cover feature on Thin Lizzy, as well as being a highly welcome reminder of the dazzling array of guitar talent the band has boasted over the years, begs some interesting questions about the nature of a band –and the role guitarists play in its musical identity. Thin Lizzy aren’t the only band that have had a revolving door policy regarding guitarists: the first that comes to mind is John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, which played host to some of the greatest British blues guitarists in history, notably Eric Clapton and Peter Green. But the line-up continued to feature stellar players such as Buddy Whittington long after those two greats had departed. We could…

Marshall Amplification, originally under the careful stewardship of Jim Marshall (aka the Father of Loud), has arguably done more to define the sound of rock guitar than any other amp brand. We have all surely fallen at some point for the majestic tones coaxed from these amps by guitar legends since the early 60s, with each generation’s guitar hero finding new and innovative ways to expand the Marshall sound while the designs themselves remained largely unchanged since their inception. Towards the late 70s a hotter, more fluid guitar sound began to emerge from the US. Tinkering technicians such as Jose Arredondo and Lee Jackson had begun developing hot-rodding techniques to achieve a variety of goals – increased gain being chief among them. These jacked-up tones would dominate the airwaves for…

Fender PHONE 01342 331700 WEB www.fender.com Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition ’59 Journeyman Stratocaster £4,400 We don’t often feature the fruits of Fender’s renowned Custom Shop in these pages for the simple reason that nearly all the guitars it produces go straight to dealers. But we managed to snag this rather beautiful ’59 limited-edition Strat by chance and decided to display its dashing good looks. What we have here is a Journeyman Strat in faded Sonic Blue, with many characteristics that are shared by Stratocasters of the period. Journeyman guitars have the lightest amount of relicing available, and here it’s limited to slight crazing in the nitrocellulose finish, as if the guitar has been used but certainly not abused during its fictitious lifetime. On some of these instruments Fender has…

Back in March I invited myself along to the excellently named String Break guitar show – an exhibition showcasing 15 of the UK’s top up-and-coming guitar builders. Focusing primarily on acoustic instruments (with a small corner showcasing a trio of electric guitars), String Break aimed to highlight the finest work found upon the top shelf of this country’s handcrafted guitar offerings. Hosted at Rooster’s Brewery Taproom in Harrogate, Yorkshire, the exhibition was a stone’s throw from the workshop of Tom Sands, known to acoustic guitar aficionados as a prolific YouTuber and ex-apprentice to Ervin Somogyi, the godfather of the golden age of modern American lutherie. Tom was the galvanising force bringing the exhibition together and exhibited his own work, which included a stunning Brazilian rosewood parlour guitar. O’Gorman Guitars, however,…

AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra One of the most powerful tools in a songwriter’s box is the use of... suspense. Setting up tension with a dissonant or suspended chord – or perhaps a note over that chord – that then resolves to a more harmonious one has been popular for as long as people have been composing music. This can be approached in a variety of ways, so we’ll work methodically and start with ‘sus’ chords. Replacing the major or minor 3rd with the 2nd or 4th of the parent scale gives a suspension – sus2 or sus4, to be precise. These can resolve to a regular major or minor chord (think of Bach’s compositions or Pinball Wizard by The Who), or they can be left hanging if you want to leave your…

As a young man in New York City, Larry DiMarzio was a guitar repairman with a big vision. “What I was after was really making a better rock ’n’ roll pickup,” DiMarzio tells Guitarist. While that may sound simple in theory, it wasn’t in reality. From DiMarzio’s perspective – which was gleaned through years of repairing used guitars, which he found to be of increasingly poor quality – major brands that he grew up loving had lost the “process for building the pyramids”. Essentially, by DiMarzio’s estimation, the halcyon years of the 1950s and early 60s, which produced some of the most prized Les Pauls, Stratocasters and Telecasters ever produced, were a distant memory. In their place were quality control and tonal issues. The concerns with the build quality were…

Based in Queensland on the eastern seaboard of Australia, Fenech Guitars has been around for nearly 10 years, but it’s a name that is only just beginning to be known on our shores. And, as you will have read in the previous pages, we became very quickly impressed by not only the build quality but also the feel and tone of both the samples we looked at. Aaron Fenech has a background in carpentry and science, having gained a BSc that “looked at engineering principles but really focused around ocean environments and a lot of mathematics, a lot of physics”, he tells us. Factor in a fascination for the acoustic guitar and the idea for a business took off… What inspired you to launch Fenech Guitars in the first place?…

When Victory Amps launched the MK Clean and MK Overdrive at NAMM 2024 – the culmination of a four-year project helmed by chief designer Martin Kidd, with the guiding ethos “no restrictions, no limits, no compromise” – expectations were understandably high. Since his start in the industry in the early 90s, Kidd has earned serious kudos. Having served as the brain and soldering iron behind Cornford’s most famous designs (while advising giants including Ampeg and PRS), he’s guided Victory from UK start-up to global contender in a little over a decade, attracting endorsers as eclectic as Guthrie Govan and Graham Coxon to the cause. Victory has already chalked up several modern classics (as a metal player, you haven’t lived until you’ve unleashed the Kraken). But Kidd’s audacious design brief for…

LA LOM This melodically rich guitar band have diverse musical roots yet also recall the shimmering sounds of 60s instrumental rock p44 Solid Gold? It’s a well-spec’d Goldtop with the ‘right’ headstock and authentic looks – but is this Epi a better bet than a low-tier Gibson LP? p8 Photo Fenech Here’s something a little different in the acoustic world: Aussie-made guitars with non-mainstream woods and a keen ear for tone p84…

A clam has released a third in its series of pedals aimed at recreating The Beatles’ sounds. While guitar sonics on the Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s albums were the aim with its Dr Robert and Mocker pedals, the company has now moved further on in the discography to the tones of Magical Mystery Tour and ‘The White Album’ with Go Rocky Go, a pedal replica of the Vox Conqueror amp’s preamp. The Vox Conqueror, one of a solid-state range of amps that also included the Supreme and Defiant, was used by The Beatles for recording around 1967 and ’68, and can be seen in the Hello, Goodbye video. Aclam had an original amp and measured all its components and recreated it in the pedal, albeit with a couple of additional…

Epiphone Inspired By Gibson Custom Collection From £999 CONTACT Epiphone PHONE 00800 44427661 WEB www.epiphone.com Are these based on Epiphone models? No, what you’re looking at are the latest additions to Epiphone’s Inspired By Gibson Custom line-up. If you’ve been reading these pages over the past few years, you’ll know this range has gone from strength to strength in terms of spec, build quality and features. They’re designed in collaboration with Gibson’s luthiers from the Nashville Custom Shop, and Gibson/Epiphone has opted to call them reissues. Aljon Go, Epiphone product manager, Nashville, says of the range: “These guitars are part of our ongoing mission to make the exceptional craftsmanship and elevated appointments of the Custom Shop more accessible to players and fans everywhere.” What’s in the series? There are eight…

Artist: Envy Of None Album: Stygian Wavz (Kscope) For a band that has never done a gig together, Envy Of None has gained an increasingly high profile since the release of their eponymous debut album in 2022. After that record’s success, the band were eager to keep the momentum up and so Stygian Wavz was released earlier this year. The tracks have gathered plenty of critical acclaim with their crafted blend of prog and pop and some superbly ethereal vocals from Maiah Wynne. Guitar duties fell once again to Alex Lifeson, but first of all we were intrigued to find out how the band was born. How did Envy Of None first come about? “After Rush finished our last tour in 2015 I kept playing and doing a bit of…

As a self-proclaimed tone chaser, I’ll try almost anything in pursuit of better guitar tone. Years ago, intrigued by the hype around NOS valves and the promise that they could magically transform my amps into tonal bliss, I invested in a stash of pricey NOS 12AX7 preamp valves just to see what the fuss was about. So, what are NOS valves anyway? ‘New Old Stock’ (NOS) refers to valves made decades ago and were never used. This was mostly during the golden era of tube manufacturing in the 1950s to early 1970s, as they were produced in massive quantities for military, broadcast and industrial applications. The saying, ‘They don’t make ’em like they used to,’ might be true for these valves as they were built under strict quality control. NOS…

STAR LETTER BIG IN JAPAN Being retired, I’ve spent some of the last 10 years buying more than 200 old electric guitars locally on Facebook or Gumtree and bringing them back to life and getting them in as good a state as possible for others to use. I always assess their condition before considering the purchase to make sure that they’re not beyond saving. But the Atkin JH3001 would sadly fall into my ‘leave well alone’ category were I to see anything like it offered locally. Surely at the price quoted in issue 524, someone’s having a laugh? A few weeks ago, I went to the Bristol Guitar Show with my daughter and her partner (neither of whom is a guitar enthusiast), but they enjoyed looking. At one of the…

Bob Mould’s ferocious wall of sound has been cited as an influence by everyone from J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr and Joe Genaro of The Dead Milkmen, to Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters. It all started with Hüsker Dü, a punk-meets-college-rock assault that Mould recalls as being akin to “three fighter jets racing to get there first”. Though in all fairness, fans of classic records such as 1984’s Zen Arcade and 1986’s Candy Apple Grey might liken those records to more than speed-racer pyrotechnics. Of particular note is Mould’s adoption of Yamaha’s G100 solid-state amp with two Fender Concert heads up top. That, along with various distortion and chorus boxes hooked up with his beloved blue Strat, not only created Mould’s sound but one that would be mimicked by going…

Tell us how you first met Larry DiMarzio? “I was looking for a luthier and somebody pointed me toward Larry. That’s how I met him. We became friends, but he was already messing around with pickups on people’s guitars.” And when did you start working together? “My problem was that I kept getting fired from clubs because I played so loud. Back then, there were no master gain controls on amps, which I still don’t use, but in these clubs, a 100-watt Marshall was so loud. So Larry was overwinding my pickups to get more kick, which let me break up my amps at lower volume since I didn’t use pedals.” Did you find Gibson and Fender’s stock pickups to be inferior in quality? “Not really. The biggest difference was…

KNAGGS KENAI HOLLOWBODY GENIE £5,500 CONTACT Peach Guitars PHONE 01206 765777 WEB www.knaggsguitars.com Named after an Alaskan river, the Kenai is Knaggs’ ‘Les Paul’, a cornerstone of the range these past 15 years but far from a copy with a redrawn headstock. Yes, it’s a single-cut and uses the time-honoured ingredients – mahogany back, maple top, a glued-in mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard, not to mention its dual humbuckers, shoulder-placed toggle pickup selector and that classic four-control layout – but in outline there’s a definite taste of Telecaster, isn’t there? And while the top carve to the 52mm thick body is beautifully contoured, the back is heavily chamfered on the bass side and base, which not only reduces the bulk of the rim but comes across as rather more…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “I bought a 1978 Gibson SG with the harmonica bridge. It was a really horrible brown colour, but it didn’t have a narrow nut. It was a nice-sized neck, and it was sort of a thin profile – but it had a wide, normal nut width. So I guess that was a plus.” What was the last guitar you bought and why? “The last guitar that I bought was a 1956 Gibson Les Paul Junior. The reason why is just because I love them! I feel like I need to gather all of them unto me [laughs]. Every one I pick up is very much like snowflakes in that they’re all so different. But the one commonality they…

Soon after joining Guitarist, I was assigned to interview Joe Bonamassa and he began telling me about an amazing guitarist called Chris Buck. Rather than let Joe carry on, I felt obliged to tell him that Chris and I were so well acquainted, I was even friends with his dad, Dory, who had been talking about giving Chris a special guitar. Dory and I eventually settled on a plan to refinish and upgrade his Epiphone Flying V. If you ever feel the need for an armour-plated vehicle, just send your regular car to Epiphone for a respray… Epiphone guitars have a two-layer finish, with glossy colour coats sprayed over a transparent base coat. You can get them off, but different techniques are required to do so. The topcoats come off…

Buddy’s Blues Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Knaggs Choptank, Boss BD-2W Blues Driver & Fender Blues Deluxe Difficulty | 10 mins per example THE BUDDY REFERRED TO IN THE TITLE is, of course, Buddy Guy: the pioneer who influenced Hendrix, Clapton, Page and Beck among others. His fiery playing (and equally impassioned vocals) remain as exciting today as ever. Like Eric Clapton, he was told early in his career that his playing was too loud, too strident and outside the accepted norms of the day. This necessitated him largely pausing his solo career after 1967’s I Left My Blues In San Francisco to become a sideman for artists such as Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter, supplementing his income with club dates and working as a tow…

Whatever the evolution of the Les Paul design over the years, plenty of us still want it just how it was – at least in appearance. Few can afford prime examples of the real thing, and Gibson Custom’s vintage-aimed models are slipping into the ether, too, in terms of price. Even a rather good Gibson USA 50s or 60s Les Paul Standard will cost you £2.7k. And while these are available in a host of colours, they’re very shiny, new and far from vintage in the looks department. Gibson’s in-house answer, then, is Epiphone and the premise of a number of recently launched ‘reissues’ in its top-tier ‘Inspired By Gibson Custom’ strand, including a 1960 Les Paul Standard in Washed Cherry Sunburst and Iced Tea Burst, and the 1957 Goldtop…

The BK Butler/Chandler Tube Driver seems to have been around forever and has been a staple in the rigs of several luminaries: David Gilmour, Eric Johnson, Billy Gibbons and the two Joes – Satriani and Bonamassa – have been seen to use it. That large mains-powered valve-based overdrive is now the inspiration for the Venus, which takes the idea and enhances it with some real pedalboard-friendly practicality, notably a relatively compact-sized enclosure and standard nine-volt operation. When you take into account both the pedal and rackmount versions, there have been lots of Tube Driver variations, but Crazy Tube Circuits tells us that it has concentrated all of the different voicings and features into one pedal. Original Tube Drivers featured an ECC83 valve that users sometimes changed for an ECC82, but…

Artist: Richard Dawson Album: End Of The Middle (Domino Records) Newcastle-born Richard Dawson, who has been described as “Britain’s best, most humane songwriter” by The Guardian, released his eighth album, End Of The Middle, this year, and the storytelling here homes in on the family unit: “I wanted this record to be small-scale and very domestic,” he says of the concept. Songwriting itself was something he worked on from a young age: “I wasn’t good at it, but it was a natural thing to want to do and I perhaps took the creative impulse for granted because I always had it. When I was 11, my sister had Iron Maiden’s first album and I fell in love with it. Then I got my first guitar and I never looked back,…

The first person I interviewed for Guitarist was indeed The Shadows’ legendary lead guitarist. It was before I joined the mag and was working for Fender in London. Hank had come down to try out some Strats, and the year was 1985. The Shads were rehearsing at Nomis Studios, the brilliant but ultimately doomed brainchild of Simon Napier-Bell. It was a luxurious rehearsal complex around the corner from Olympia, and all the big bands rehearsed there. I recall interviewing John Page of Fender’s Custom Shop there some years later, and we could hear Queen hits blasting out from an adjoining room. When the music stopped, bassist Pino Palladino emerged. Pino said he was standing in for John Deacon while the band rehearsed for the Freddie Mercury tribute concert on 20…

Born Raymond Ronald Jones in Thornton Heath in 1939, Wizz Jones was given his nickname – Wizzy The Wuz – by his mother, due to his fondness for magic tricks. He was influenced early by musicians such as Big Bill Broonzy and Woody Guthrie, and was also affected by Jack Kerouac and his seminal book On The Road, leading him to embrace the beatnik era and grow his hair long, a look that would accompany him throughout his life. Says Keith Richards in his autobiography, Life: “Wizz Jones used to drop in [to art college] with a Jesus haircut and a beard. Great folk picker, great guitar picker.” “Your influence on my music means that some of your musical DNA is always with me and the countless others who have…

You’d like Scott Gorham. As countless rock writers have discovered since the mid-70s, an afternoon with the Thin Lizzy guitarist passes in a happy haze of dirty jokes, political potshots, flumes of e-cigarette smoke and drawled war stories (some more libellous than others). If we weren’t talking on Zoom, you suspect the conspiratorial Gorham would suggest ditching the interview and hitting the pub – although had you accepted that invitation back in his hellraising days, you might never have never made it home. That industrial-strength likeability isn’t just a gift for journalists; it’s also helped Gorham keep the wheels on a band whose combustible chemistry meant a line-up shift was never far away. By our calculations, the band’s 74-year-old custodian has partnered no fewer than 12 other guitarists in Lizzy,…

If Leo Fender really did get everything right the first time, then why did flagship models such as the Stratocaster continually evolve? By the close of the pre-CBS era, the late-1964 Stratocaster differed significantly from the Strat ‘prototypes’ that began appearing in the first half of 1954. Steve Hove of ATB Guitars in Cheltenham has brought along five pre-CBS Stratocasters to guide us through the changes that occurred between 1957 and 1964 and tell us about recent market trends. 1957 “Ash is an open-pore wood that needed to be grain-filled. After the very earliest Strats, which just had a natural finish with the dark perimeter, Fender sprayed the centre section yellow. In 1955, they began applying a sealer called Homoclad over the grain filler before spraying the yellow. “Alder bodies…

WALRUS AUDIO QI ETHEREALIZER £449 CONTACT FACE bvba PHONE +32 3 844 67 97 WEB www.walrusaudio.com With ‘Soundscape Generator’ pedals such as the Lore and Fable, Walrus Audio has form when it comes to creating ambient sounds. So what better company for Yvette Young to turn to when looking for a signature pedal? The result of the collaboration is the Qi Etherealizer. The Qi part, alternately spelt as chi and pronounced ‘chee’, relates to vital life energy and is reflected in the pedal artwork, which depicts a body with energy flowing around it. This is essentially a multi-effects unit with four effects – chorus, delay, grain sampler and reverb – that interact in either a serial or parallel configuration. It’s a true stereo pedal, though it can be run in…

Many moons ago I remember asking Paul Reed Smith why he didn’t use pickups made by the likes of Seymour Duncan. My thinking was that while Paul had studied and learned the guitar-making craft of the greats, hadn’t Seymour Duncan done the same, focusing on the pickups they used? The question came out all wrong. “Don’t you like my pickups, David?” No, that wasn’t what I meant. Today, though, we all have easy access to the parts needed to make a pickup: the bobbins, the magnets, the wire and even mainstream luthier suppliers such as StewMac will sell you a pretty good pickup winding machine. You certainly don’t have to start like Seymour Duncan did with a record player’s turntable. Follow some basic and well-documented rules and you, too, can…

“ I recently acquired a 1960 Gibson ES-335 and discovered something interesting that I’ve never seen before. Even after all these years collecting and selling vintage guitars, I learned it’s always possible to teach an old dog new tricks. “When I got the guitar everything appeared completely original besides one of the control knobs, which had a late-60s-style deep reflector rather than the shallow style that is correct for the year. I wasn’t concerned because I knew I had some genuine vintage knobs, but when I pulled the knob off to replace it, I discovered the potentiometer shaft was nylon, rather than metal. “As soon as I saw it my heart jumped into my throat because I’d bought it from a trusted guy and I couldn’t imagine that he would…