Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2026 i Guitarist

Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UATelephone 01225 442244 Email guitarist@futurenet.com Online www.guitarist.co.uk It’s not often you can say, with absolute certainty, where you were and what you were doing when you heard a band for the very first time. But if you can, you know it must have been something of a turning point in your own musical development, both as a listener and, in my case, as a guitarist-in-waiting. This was certainly true for me with Cream. Hindsight hereabouts is absolute. But first, permit me to fire up my virtual time machine to remind ourselves how we gentlefolk of a certain vintage consumed music back in the late 1960s. With the internet and all its dark arts still decades away, the way we would come…

Long-time Guitarist readers will no doubt be familiar with the Cogmeister, a previous release from the Dinosaural brand and brainchild of designer Dan Coggins. The triple-footswitch pedal, which featured in the Drive category in our Gear Of The Year list back in 2023, basically put three drive/boost pedals in one chassis. Now, not all players needed three components of the pedal in one place and some folks asked for them to be made individually. Luckily, Dan was happy to oblige. First, we saw the Cogmeister’s final boost section singled out as the Dan Solo pedal, and now it’s the turn of the central drive section – the beating heart of the Cogmeister – to be set apart with the release of the Hypoid Drive. That section of the Cogmeister was…

Artist: Pavey Ark Album: More Time, More Speed (self-release) With their 2020 debut, Hull-based folk collective Pavey Ark established themselves as a firm addition to the UK’s thriving indie-folk scene, mixing the vintage warmth of their old-school heroes with the cinematic ambience of the modern age. Their second album, More Time, More Speed, takes the sound further with singer/guitarist Neil Thomas’s gentle fingerpicked guitars and emotive vocals supported with strings, trumpets and horns. Easy Influences New tracks such as Out Of Here, Stop These Games and Yesterday Is Done have many influences due to Neil’s use of streaming service Spotify as a mood board. “I’m more into albums than the artists who made them,” he says. “Fully Qualified Survivor by Michael Chapman is a perfect record. I like compositions that…

If you read last month’s column, you’ll recall how I found myself getting a guided tour of Peach Guitars in Colchester, a massive emporium of droolsome delights. The shop stocks pretty much every top brand from the affordable basics, right up to Custom Shop Gibsons, Martins and Masterbuilt Fenders for wallet-scaring sums. Other boutique brands are available, too, from the likes of Collings, PRS, Knaggs and Duesenberg. “I like the cut and thrust of a bricks-and-mortar guitar store. I love talking to the guys, getting their opinion, delving into their knowledge” Anyway, I’d spied a Murphy Lab ’59 Les Paul that looked like the guitar of my dreams but whose price tag was more on the nightmare side. So I went away to ruminate on it. Should I trade in…

AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra In the world of extended chords, this is as far as we can go. As discussed previously, chords at this end of the spectrum frequently deviate from their strict theoretical definitions in the real world. To recap; an extended chord goes beyond the major (or minor) triad, on to the 7th (or flat/dominant 7th) then 9th, 11th and 13th. In theory, all of these would be present in ascending scale order, but in practice this can lead to some dense, even dissonant, chords. There’s also the issue of playing a seven-note chord on an instrument with six strings... In the examples below, I attempt to demystify some of the theoretical terms and demonstrate strategies enabling us to play beautiful-sounding 13th chords. When choosing which notes to omit, the…

We know the guitars Eric Clapton played in Cream. All of them Gibson: the ‘Beano’ Les Paul, the ‘Fool’ SG, the cherry red ES-335 and the sunburst Firebird I. While that list is, of course, correct, dig a little deeper and a few oddities and anomalies poke their heads above the parapet. But as with anything musically historical, evidence is often vague or contradictory, so what follows here is as close as we can get with the sources available. The ‘Beano’ Les Paul was used at the band’s initial get-together at Ginger Baker’s flat in Neasden, Northwest London, July 1966 With Clapton only just having left John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the ‘Beano’ Les Paul was predictably his instrument of choice in early Cream rehearsals. It was used at the band’s initial…

BOSS XS-100 & XS-1 £349 & £195 CONTACT Roland UK WEB www.boss.info What You Need To Know 1 These are very blue… Well, Boss wasn’t going to make them red – that’d be too much like DigiTech’s Whammy, for a long time the only game in town for treadle-equipped pitch-shifting pedals. 2 What’s the USP here, then? In last issue’s Blueprint feature, Boss’s Matt Knight told us “the idea was to create a polyphonic algorithm where users didn’t need to change their playing to get what they wanted out of [the pedals]”. 3 What sets the two XS pedals apart? The XS-100 has all the bells and whistles but may be a bit large for some pedalboards, so the XS-1 offers much of what it can do in standard Boss…

Chris Imlay bought this 1961 Silvertone 1446 ‘Chris Isaak’ from a music shop in Arcata, California, for $225 in 1989. At the time he was playing in a Star Trek-themed instrumental surf-rock band called Thee Shatners and, according to Chris, “We always used gimmicks to obfuscate our lack of talent, and in this case it meant wearing Star Trek crew outfits with plastic bubble space-helmets over our heads – walking from the cold outside into the warm sweaty music venue always caused the helmets to fog up…” One night a partially blinded Chris fell and he and his guitar became wedged between the stage and a wall. After his bandmates helped free him, he discovered the instrument’s cable and socket had been knocked inside the body and a hasty road…

Vintage Glory With 40 watts of classic twang and, let’s agree, looks to die for, does Fender’s reissue of the ’62 Super still have that magic mojo? p14 Still Got The Blues? The current generation of blues players recount how they constatly look back to the idiom’s glory years for insight and inspiration p42 Leo Lyons Ten Years After’s bass player recounts the story of the band’s early years and their path to glory at the Woodstock festival in ’69 p50…

The fundamental design of acoustic guitars has remained fairly static for many years. Take the dreadnought, for instance; that particular design came about more than 100 years ago and is still in use, pretty much unchanged, today. But recently we’ve noticed a distinct shift. Maybe it’s the leap forward in amp, PA and particularly acoustic pickup technology that has allowed artists to use smaller-bodied guitars to achieve the effect they want, or perhaps it’s the current generation of luthiers putting their own twist on tradition – it’s hard to tell. We suspect it’s a combination of both. One such twist is before us today, in the shape of a new design from Rich Jones at JWJ Guitars. Sure, it may look like a dread with a Gibson J-45 somewhere in…

Newman Torn and Frayed Edition £3,299 CONTACT Aurora Music Works Phone 01695 338900 WEB www.auroramusicworks.com Although unavailable for many years, the late Ted Newman’s unique solidbody – originally conceived for Keith Richards back in the 70s – has made quite a return since the introduction of the 5 String in 2024, the first of an ongoing series of limited-edition models made in the UK under the stewardship of the Cream T Custom Shop. Along with that guitar, there’s been the single-pickup Honeycomb Junior GT-40, the dual-pickup Honeycomb Senior (both with either Guitar-X swappable or fixed-pickup options), and towards the end of 2025 this Torn and Frayed addition, “a limited edition run of guitars designed to celebrate the history of Newman Guitars and Cream T Pickups”. It’s offered in artfully and…

A good guitar setup is often looked upon as somewhat of a dark art. Much like taking your car to a trustworthy mechanic, it sometimes feels like only an experienced luthier should be allowed under the bonnet to probe around looking for something to fix. However, as I often teach my students, guitar setups are easy if you know how. Besides acquiring a few simple tools and clearing the kitchen table, there is nothing to stop the casual guitarist from getting into basic guitar maintenance, and the benefits can be game-changing. I’m not suggesting you fire up your espresso machine’s milk frother to steam off a Martin neck, nor am I advocating ripping out frets from your custom shop Tele. But I do think that with a little knowledge and…

STAR LETTER TELE TALE I enjoy reading Guitarist every month and am particularly interested to see Huw Price’s articles, as his expertise and knowledge inspires me to have a go myself, albeit on some less valuable guitars than the ones he deals with. Recently, I bought a Squier Affinity Telecaster at a local auction. It had been given a heavy relic finish and, although I like a played-in look, I’m not keen on the heavy wear and damage elements of some of the guitars you see. I’ve included before and after pictures of the results of my efforts. After stripping the body, I found a burr poplar veneer and a thick plastic binding to the top. I liked the plain back, but the veneer didn’t suit the Telecaster so I…

1966 was a significant year for music. Thanks to Jim Marshall, amplifiers were getting more powerful and the marriage between the JTM45/100-watt head and 4x12 speaker cabinet unleashed never-before-heard levels of volume and, with the wick suitably trimmed, the right amount of crunchy sustain to fuel the early onset of guitar heroics. What’s more, the generation of teenagers and 20-somethings of the day were looking for something more engaging than the pop music they were surrounded by. Enter Cream. Rising from the ashes of The Graham Bond Organisation, Manfred Mann and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the combined talents of Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton merged to form rock’s first supergroup – and the world was never quite the same again. In the following pages we track the emergence of…

Anew book called Cream Chronicled, authored by Ginger Baker’s daughter Nettie, sets out to document every gig and recording session, and various major events that happened to the band between 1966 and 1968. It also covers the times Ginger, Jack and Eric got back together at the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall Of Fame inauguration in 1993 and the reunion gigs in 2005. Needless to say, painstaking research, combined with an obvious love of the subject matter, has resulted in an amazingly authoritative book. We speak with Nettie about what it was like to spend so much time in Cream’s glorious past. One thing that struck us when we read the book was how hard Cream were worked throughout their lifetime as a band. “When I started researching, that’s when I…

When Fender announced the return of the ’62 Super Amp as part of its American Vintage series, tone-chasers took notice. Often overshadowed by its tweed and black-panel siblings, the original brown-panel Super, produced briefly between 1960 and 1963, bridged the gap between the raw sag of the late-50s tweeds and the glassy, high-headroom clarity of the later black-panel amplifiers. Because production numbers were relatively low, authentic brown-panel Supers are rare and their tone has become almost mythical among collectors. For decades, these Supers have been prized for their unique warm, woody, harmonically rich tone, commanding serious prices on the vintage market. In fact, the early 60s brown-panel Supers remain some of the most sought-after amps ever made. With a 40-watt 6L6 power section, a pair of 10-inch speakers and a…

While so many small guitar-makers can’t seem to shake off the obvious classics when it comes to style, West Valley’s Josh Stopford has a different vision. The Indiana is far from an inspired-by design: this is a lightly offset outline that can play host to various hardware and pickup setups. Along with offering the start-up, single-pickup Junior model and the semi-solid Slim, our top-line model shows off the full potential of his vision. Based around the longer Fender scale length with a mahogany neck attached with bolts (not screws) to a thin maple-topped obeche back, the Indiana is hard to pigeonhole. It’s offered with an offset-style vibrato, but our sample’s tune-o-matic and stud tailpiece nod to Gibson style, which is reflected in the Sunbear humbucker at the bridge and soapbar-sized…

UK guitar-maker Manson Guitar Works has had a long history with Matt Bellamy of Muse, who is now the majority shareholder in the company. Business matters aside, Matt and the Manson team have worked together over several years to come up with the company’s first pedal, the Supermassive Black Fuzz. Solidly constructed by fellow UK brand ThorpyFX, it certainly has a distinctive look, featuring aluminium knobs that are intricately engraved with custom artwork. While the lack of a defined line makes it difficult to see at a glance where the controls are set, there’s no mistaking where to put them if you hit a chord and use your ears. The Magnitude and Gravity knobs set the output level and gain respectively (as you’d find on most dirt pedals), but the…

Gretsch Abbey Road RS201 Studiomatic £1,249 CONTACT Fender GBI PHONE 01342 331700 WEB www.gretschguitars.com JARGON CRUNCHING High-Pass Filter The Gretsch RS201 uses high-pass filtering in the Rumble Filter circuit, but that’s a term (along with low-pass filtering) that often causes confusion. It’s simple, though: the high-pass filter removes low-end, allowing high frequencies above the designated cut-off point to ‘pass’ through the filter. The opposite is true for low-pass, which removes everything above your designated frequency. Wow, Gretsch has been busy this year! Hasn’t it, just? Since the clocks changed we’ve seen the new CVT models, the new Electromatic and Streamliner Jet series, and the return of the Synchromatic line, bringing with it affordable Falcon and Nashville models. Now, for the brand’s latest release, Gretsch is teaming up with the world-renowned…

Artist: Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram Album: Hard Road (Red Zero Records) He may only be approaching his late-20s, but at this stage of his career, blues singer-guitarist Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram can no longer say he’s the new kid on the block. He’s a Grammy-winning artist who has earned the respect of his elders and peers, with his own Kingfish Telecaster Deluxe signature through a Fender Twin, along with invites to open for artists such as The Rolling Stones, Slash and Joe Bonamassa. Last year saw the release of his third studio album, Hard Road, which features more musical nuances than ever before. It’s still a blues-rock record all in all, although Ingram has broadened his horizons by moving away from heavier tones in favour of cleaner and more soulful musings. There’s…

Like a lot of aspiring players, I grew up chasing my guitar heroes. I listened to everyone, but the ones who really stayed with me were the players who played fiery blues licks with melodic phrasing that made every note feel alive. When I finally dug into who influenced them, everything pointed back to the same source: the British blues explosion of the late 60s and early 70s. Clapton, Page, Beck, Green, Kossoff and Hendrix (despite being American, Hendrix was so tied into the London scene that you can’t separate him from it). The guitarists from that era were influential because they reshaped what the electric guitar could be. British blues took the soul of American blues and turned it into something heavier, grittier and unhinged. Suddenly, the guitar wasn’t…

Interview a few star guitarists and you’ll soon hear the old lie: “I just play for the song (man)”. But Steve Cropper really did. Immune to egomania and content to exist at the edge of the spotlight, the Missouri-born rhythm man – who has died at the age of 84 – always weighed and measured his guitar parts to serve that day’s material, his metronomic yet soulful right hand often cited among the best in the game. As the cornerstone of Stax Records’ house band, Booker T & The MG’s – not to mention a producer, engineer and co-writer of standards such as Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, Wilson Pickett’s In The Midnight Hour and Eddie Floyd’s Knock On Wood – Cropper was the engine room…

By the mid-60s, as jazz bands slowly faded from the front pages of the music press, they were gradually replaced with rhythm and blues bands. One such band featured Graham Bond, a complicated figure and musical innovator who would go on to inadvertently pave the way for many bands over the next few decades. We go back to the beginning – including the bust-ups and band-member swaps – to detail the rise of one of Britain’s most revered supergroups. THE NAME’S BOND Bond started his career in jazz, playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. He left the outfit in 1962 and formed the Graham Bond Quartet with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, both from Alexis’s band, along with guitarist John McLaughlin. By the mid-60s Bond decided to move toward the…

PRS SE SANTANA £799 Before Paul Reed Smith came up with his classic outline in the early 80s, his pre-production custom instruments invariably used this Special/Junior DC outline, typically with a mahogany or figured maple carved top. Of course, it added a vibrato that was designed to make Carlos Santana happy, and originally featured a roller nut and locking tuners. Today’s SE, which comes with a gigbag, features Santana ‘S’ humbuckers, while the scale length has recently quietly changed from 622mm (24.5 inches) to 625mm (24.594 inches). www.prsguitars.com EPIPHONE IGC 1960 LES PAUL SPECIAL DOUBLE CUT REISSUE £999 While you can snag a new Epiphone single-cut Junior or Special for £375 and £391 respectively, this Inspired By Gibson Custom Special DC (there is no Junior version) is a beauty with…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “I was lucky enough that I’d started playing when I was really young, so my mum got me a couple of really great guitars, namely a Squier Strat. It was a Japanese Squier Strat, which I still play to this day. It’s just an awesome piece of gear. After that, I was gifted a guitar by Fender. But the first guitar that I made a point of purchasing was a Fender Jazzmaster – because in 2008 or thereabouts, it was just not possible to get a left-handed Jazzmaster in this country. Even though I had contacts at Fender, they told me, ‘No, man, you might as well be ringing Ibanez, we just don’t make left-handed Jazzmasters.’ So I…

PJD’s Carey Apprentice first took flight towards the end of summer 2022 as a small run of just 12 pieces with a cracked gloss nitro-finished slab body and headstock face (which introduced a new gold decal logo) in either 3 Tone Tear Drop Burst [pic 1] or Butterscotch, six in each colour. Unlike the typically chambered light ash or mahogany of the then-Standard models, the Apprentice introduced solid obeche for the body wood, while the neck was quarter-sawn roasted 3A figured maple with a satin nitro back, PJD’s standard at the time. The original pickup was a Cream T Apprentice 59 P-90 soapbar single coil – a slighter hotter version of Cream T’s The Duke soapbar, we were told – with a measured DCR of 7.78kohms along with a volume…

“The earlier example isn’t technically a Switchmaster for the very obvious reason that it doesn’t have a switch, but these are both three-pickup Gibson ES-5 models. Gibson introduced the three-pickup ES-5 in 1949 and described it as ‘the supreme electronic version of the famed Gibson L-5’. It’s widely accepted that the ES-5 was the first production guitar with three pickups. Gibson only made 22 examples that year and one of them was to become the instrument that T-Bone Walker used throughout the 1950s and 1960s. “I don’t think that the natural finish became an option until 1951, which is when the first of these guitars was built. I have the original bill of sale and Gibson shipped it out to Germany to a guy whose surname was actually Gibson. He…

Modern Blues Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Gibson Les Paul & Marshall JTM45 MkII reissue Difficulty 10 mins per example THE IDEA BEHIND this month’s example solo is to try to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by wilfully ignoring the rich tradition of blues/pentatonic soloing – which has evolved over decades – and imagine folk, jazz, blues and Celtic music combining as if for the first time in a parallel universe... In theory, this could give a brand-new perspective on vocabulary, tone and so on. In practice, it reminded us a lot of Mike Oldfield! Mike is best known to many as the composer and performer of Tubular Bells. Though renowned as a multi-instrumentalist, Mike has said that he regards himself primarily as a guitarist, having initially been influenced by acoustic…