Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i Guitarist

Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UATelephone 01225 442244 Email guitarist@futurenet.com Online www.guitarist.co.uk This month’s cover feature on T-Bone Walker and the birth of electric blues couldn’t help but remind us what a foundational role T-Bone had on shaping the modern language of guitar. Most of what we call blues guitar today contains high-energy echoes of his licks, along with plenty of drama, angst and bombast, which is a newer addition. Blues, for T-Bone, was as smooth as cat’s fur and he never overplayed his hand: his blues was languid, classy and able to laugh at itself a little but still deeply anchored in profound emotion and raw experience. His signature tune, Stormy Monday, is a masterpiece in understated, somnolent melancholy. If it were covered today, I…

Hard to believe, perhaps, but Bad Cat has already enjoyed a quarter of a century as one of the world’s foremost boutique guitar amp companies. Its much-loved product line, comprising a lower-priced Player Series II and the premium Hand Wired series, is now augmented by both Lunchbox range and the Mod Shop series we’re looking at here – Bad Cat’s creative creche where designers and players tweak existing Bad Cat circuits into inspiring variations for small production runs. To celebrate the opening of the Mod Shop comes the Black Cat 30 Mod Shop Edition fresh from the Costa Mesa, California, HQ. Before his death earlier this year, amp-design legend Mark Sampson, who’s long been associated with the Bad Cat brand, took a Black Cat 20 from the Player Series II…

Whether you’re running just a few pedals or have a mega ’board in action, a decent mains-powered pedal power supply with multiple outputs is essential – just plug it into the wall socket and you’re good to go. However, there may be occasions when you can’t easily plug it into the wall socket and, that’s where Walrus Audio’s latest widget, the Canvas Power USB, comes into play. This compact converter box enables certain standard pedal power supplies to run from USB power delivery, which could be supplied by a laptop charger, high-powered phone chargers or, for truly portable operation, by a USB PD (Power Delivery) battery pack. The Power USB is part of the Canvas ecosystem and so it’s designed to be used with power supplies in the range, including…

Artist: Andrea Rinciari Album: Soho Sessions (Andrea Rinciari Records) On his latest release, Soho Sessions, Italian jazz guitarist Andrea Rinciari is paying tribute to the music that’s been performed with his quartet on a weekly basis over the past few years. Included within the eights tracks are his versions of Bean And The Boys, covered by one-time mentor Barry Harris, as well as other standards like Tea For Two, I Can’t Get Started and Carvin’ The Rock. The performances across the board are stellar, though it’s chemistry between Andrea and tenor saxophonist Alex Garnett that shines through most, with the pair serving up melodies together or taking turns to finish each other’s musical sentences. Round Midnight This album, says Andrea, is the product of having learned a comprehensive amount of…

Around 40 years ago I used to go and watch a fantastic jazz-rock band in Essex called C Level. This set of amazing musicians included Alan Clarke on drums (who I later played alongside in country singer Diane Solomon’s band), Alan Forman grooving on bass, Gary Plumley wailing on tenor sax, the devastating keyboardist Pete Jacobsen who’s sadly no longer with us, and good friend Tony Sandeman playing insane guitar. These guys were young, eager, excited about the music, pushing technical boundaries, full of youthful exuberance and relished showing off to dazzled audiences across the county. I tell you this as just this week I visited Southend-On-Sea to watch C Level 2. Their latest incarnation still features Alan and Tony, but on sax was the stunning Zak Barrett (who also…

AUDIO ▶ http://bit.ly/guitaristextra When naming complex extended chords, there are various conventions and abbreviations. These are helpful when reading or writing a chord chart, but can seem like mysterious jargon to the uninitiated. The aim of this article is to demystify some of these terms and give you tools to name the weird and wonderful chords you may encounter on the fretboard. The maj9 chord is a helpful example because it demonstrates how a complex extended chord can be described in concise terms. Let’s reverse-engineer a maj9 chord to start with: Root-3rd-5th-7th-9th. The ‘maj’ in maj9 refers to the 7th, though this is indeed a major chord. A minor chord with a maj7 is possible (see Example 5 for Amin/maj9), but maj9 is shorthand for a maj7 chord with a…

April 1939 – September 2025 First, a disclaimer: any attempt to exhaustively chronicle the life and times of the late Danny Thompson is a fool’s errand. The talismanic British upright bassist – who died last month at the age of 86 – filled his years with music and misadventure on the grandest scale, lending the fluid thrub of his instrument (a great brown barge nicknamed ‘Victoria’) to a head-spinning thicket of projects and collaborators. It speaks to Thompson’s versatility that fans have long debated not only the main event of his six-decade career, but even the genre he operated within. Should the headline be his provocative late-60s work with prog-folk iconoclasts Pentangle? The seminal Five Leaves Left (1969) and Solid Air (1973) albums recorded respectively with the ethereal Nick Drake…

Renowned for her stinging Albert Collins-inspired lead lines and powerful vocal style, Joanne Shaw Taylor flew into town in September for a few live dates in the UK and Europe. Now living in Nashville, Tennessee, but formerly from The Black Country, Joanne recently released her 10th studio album, Black & Gold, to great critical acclaim. She joined us in the Guitarist studios, bringing her touring rig along for an exclusive shoot and video walkthrough. Ordinarily, Joanne’s miniature Dachshund, Hank, would come along for the ride, too. In fact, he’s no stranger to the limelight himself, with an online presence that rivals her own; he even has his own Instagram account, where he’s been known to troll Joanne’s close friend and sparring partner, Joe Bonamassa. Sadly, her four-footed friend had to…

Noel Gallagher’s love of the Les Paul spans all the way back to a pre-fame Oasis, where – as is the case for many aspiring rock stars – he toted an Epiphone Les Paul Standard as his main guitar. With a record deal under his belt, you might expect that to have changed in an instant, but check out the video for Oasis’s first single, 1994’s Supersonic, and you’ll see the Cherry sunburst Epiphone taking pride of place. However, Noel, who had struck up a friendship with former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, was ‘gifted’ not one but two Les Pauls from Marr himself. The first is a Standard, which began life as a Goltop and had the honour of being owned and smashed by Pete Townshend before Marr acquired it,…

It’s 71 years since the Stratocaster was unveiled to a less than rapt audience. Over those past decades, however, it’s become the best-selling guitar of all time. Well, we suspect that’s true. Many have lauded it as the ‘perfect’ design – ‘Leo got it right first time!’ – and countless non-Fender craftspeople have made their own-version ‘Stratocasters’ with just minor changes, or not. Yet, certainly from the early 70s, a whole slew of designers thought they could improve this perfect design, and today there are probably more aftermarket parts – hardware and pickups – to ‘upgrade’ the Stratocaster than any other electric guitar. So what exactly was, and is, ‘wrong’ with the Stratocaster? There’s not one single part, from string tree to strap button, that hasn’t been ‘improved’ by someone.…

Keeping It Simple Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Knaggs SSC & Vox AC15 Difficulty 10 mins per example A COMMON PIECE of advice given to guitarists is play less. Albert King once advised Gary Moore to “play every other note”, for example. To be clear, this is not to say having great technique (and flaunting it) is a bad thing – there are few experiences more thrilling than hearing Gary Moore tearing around the fretboard at full speed – but even then it’s true to say the way he plays things is at least as important as what he plays. Obviously, a lot depends on the kind of music. It would feel strange hearing Yngwie Malmsteen play a minimal emotive blues over a neo-classical backing track, just as we…

Oasis Of Tone Love the band or loathe ’em, there’s no denying that the three new Oasis guitars from Gibson and Epiphone are supersonic p90 Joanne Shaw Taylor The Birmingham-born, Nashville-based guitarist and songwriter talks about her love for Esquires and Fender Bassmans p58 Southern Comfort Huw Price’s triumphant restoration of a classic 60s Gibson acoustic reaches a transformative climax with a very careful refinish on p122…

The Touchstone acoustic series is an alliance that’s oceans apart between Eastman’s facility in Beijing, China, and the workshop of Dana Bourgeois in Lewiston, Maine, USA. And if anyone is unfamiliar with his name, Dana is one of the world’s foremost luthiers and his guitars sell at a premium price. The Touchstone Series came about when the Eastman guitar company – no slouches at turning out very high-quality acoustics under its own name – came aboard and a whole new streamlined production process was put into place. It works like this: Dana and his team source, brace and voice the guitars’ tops in Maine and ship batches of them over to Eastman’s workshops in China. There, the backs, necks and so on are put together in accordance with a strict…

Lowden F-50C £10,895 CONTACT Lowden Guitars WEB www.lowdenguitars.com Earlier this year we caught up with a new and relatively affordable Lowden guitar, the bolt-on F-12, which, along with the F-10, kicks off the acoustic range at £3,400. From the 12 models you move up in numbers and specification until you land here: the 50 Series, which tops the Lowden line (with the exception of the ultra-limited Master Series). George Lowden places the guitar in context: “Our F model, which is our mid-size guitar, was actually the second guitar I designed, way back around 1980, then I adjusted the shape at the end of the 80s. The ‘F’ was originally used because I designed it specifically for flat-picking; I was hoping to get a little bit more punch. I wanted the…

They say you reap what you sow. A few months ago one of my videos of a repaired headstock break started doing the rounds online, and I guess it was no surprise to see a glut of guitars shipped to me from various parts of the country over the following weeks – all were in need of some kind of headstock fix. Interestingly, no two breaks were exactly the same and I realised that my approach on each one would have to be different. I was taught that in order to aspire to a perfect repair job, one has to understand the source of the problem. In the case of headstock breaks, the commonest cause can be anything from a friend’s misplaced derrière to a reckless baggage handler. It’s pressure…

CONTACT Audio Distribution Group WEB www.sourceaudio.net What You Need To Know 1 That looks a lot like the Collider… Yes, it’s another Source Audio pedal packing delay and reverb in the same form factor, but this time it’s aiming for the more ethereal world of atmospheric soundscapes. 2 Are there just six knobs for parameter adjustment? It’s clever in that you can switch the six knobs between the delay and reverb sides, so that’s effectively 12 on the surface, but you also get the Neuro 3 software editor, which can go really deep into adjusting the sounds. 3 You’ll need presets, then, to save all of that? That’s right – you have instant access to eight from the front panel and 128 if you’re a MIDI user. The Encounter is…

Regular readers will know that we seldom feature cheapo copycat guitars in these pages. While it’s true that top boutique makers whose instruments we do cover commonly base their own ranges on these same designs, they almost always bring some new aspect to the table. This can be build quality that larger lower-end manufacturers just can’t match, bespoke or custom pickups and hardware, or sometimes the facility for the buyer to spec the instrument directly with the builder. So why are we looking at this pair of Jets? Who even is Jet Guitars? And what have these models got that’s made us change our minds? Well, we last caught up with Jet back in issue 485 when we evaluated the JS-800. To recap, the brand was born in 2020 and…

First seen in the POG2, the Attack slider is a feature that has particularly hit the spot with players, adjusting the note envelope for swelled or bowed sounds whether or not you’re using the pitch aspects of the pedal. Now, that specific effect has been made more accessible to all in a dedicated pedal in Electro-Harmonix’s diminutive Pico range. The Swello is designed to slow the volume envelope of your playing to create swells, something it does polyphonically, so chords as well as single notes get the full treatment. It also has an optional low-pass filter that can be used for polyphonic envelope filter effects. An Attack knob increases the attack time as you turn it clockwise, while a Volume knob sets the output volume – and those two are…

Artist: John Smith Album: Gatherings (Commoner Records) The reasoning behind John Smith’s new album is really quite straightforward. After 20 years in the business, he decided it was time to celebrate by looking back to his early albums and selecting some songs that he feels have taken off in new directions after playing them for so long on the road. To embellish things still further, he enlisted the help of some of the top folk artists on the circuit today, including The Staves, Siobhan Miller, John McCusker and Lisa Hannigan. The result is a wonderful revisiting of some of John’s early repertoire. “When you hear songs that don’t stand up to the standard you hold 20 years later, it can be a little painful – but mostly it was very…

It’s not often we get to play with one genuine vintage Les Paul Standard built between 1958 and 1960. However, when Guitarist partnered up with Gibson Garage London in October for an evening event celebrating the ’Burst, we were surprised – and even slightly terrified – that, with the help of friendly owners, we were able to assemble not one but seven of the things for the evening event attended by a packed room of guitar lovers. On hand to show off how these landmark instruments sounded was stellar bluesman Aynsley Lister, who – like the true gent he is – had just come back off an exhausting European tour at two in the morning the night before, but still turned up to thrill the audience with his playing. And,…

April 1951–October 2025 Paul Daniel Frehley was born on 27 April 1951 in the Bronx, New York. He had a tough childhood, leading to him joining a street gang in his early teens. If not for his love for British Invasion players such as Page, Beck and Clapton, life might have been very different for Frehley. Frehley picked up the nickname ‘Ace’ during adolescence, reportedly because he was a bit of a ladies’ man. What he also picked up was the rock ’n’ roll scene, leading him to drop out of school and pursue the possibility of music full-time. By his early 20s, Frehley was a New York City cabbie. It was around this time that he saw a now iconic ad in The Village Voice, which read: “Lead guitarist…

Born in Surbiton, Surrey, on 11 November 1945, Christopher Walenty Dreja was the son of Polish airman Alojzy Dreja and Englishwoman Joyce Guillan. While at Kingston School Of Art, Chris met fellow guitarist Anthony ‘Top’ Topham. The two jumped on the bandwagon of electric rhythm and blues on which The Rolling Stones were riding high. Dreja and Topham formed The Metropolis Blues Quartet, adding drummer Jim McCarty, singer/harmonica player Keith Relf and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, and changed the group’s name to The Yardbirds. Still only 15, Topham quit when the others ‘turned pro’. Although overshadowed by three legendary lead guitarists – Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page – Dreja was an essential core member who co-wrote many of the band’s songs. He was a stabilising influence, hailed for his…

As is often the way, my latest book began with a guitar. It’s a gorgeous ’49 Gibson ES-5N, the one that T-Bone Walker played longer than any other guitar in his career. It’s not hard to see why he loved it so much – and not hard to understand why he was so distraught when it went missing during a tour of France in the late 60s. As the years dragged on, T-Bone’s Gibson was thought lost forever. A few years ago, however, it surfaced at an auction in France. Its new owner, Patrick Racz, asked me if I’d be interested in writing a book about the guitar and about T-Bone. I didn’t take long to answer. And so began a long and happy journey into the world of T-Bone…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “I remember my first guitar was a Slammer by Hamer, which came in a beginner pack that essentially included a Fender 15-watt amp, a few picks, a strap and a whole lot of motivation to practise. I didn’t have a clue about what pickups did or how necks feel; I honestly just wanted to play Metallica and heavy riffs since I had been learning on an acoustic guitar. “Since the internet wasn’t so handy as it is today, I really got my inspiration for gear from guitar magazines and frequent visits to Guitar Center. That’s where I discovered this stunning Ibanez S series. I still remember the model number S40DXQM because I remember repeating it in my head…

With most restoration projects there comes a point where the guitar looks worse rather than better. Although the look and feel of the back and sides was much improved, stripping the top had revealed two significant cracks and plugged pickup screw holes on each side of the soundhole. A couple more screw holes on the lower bout may be evidence of a pickup control module having once been attached, and there was a deep dent adjacent to the tailblock. Thankfully, the sunburst finish should conceal most of the damage. Having been subjected to bleaching, dampening and several sanding cycles, the spruce top was ready for spraying. With sunbursts, the edge binding and soundhole rings have to be masked off. Conventional masking tape doesn’t conform to curves, so I used 6mm…