With a strong focus on the Australian music scene, Australian Guitar is a rich source of information on playing techniques, styles, the wide range of instruments available and all the technology that guitarists have to consider in the 21st Century.
FENDER + MOFI = THE PRETTIEST TURNTABLE OF ALL TIME? Fender has partnered with audio tech company Mobile Fidelity Electronics (MoFi) for its first-ever turntable, the PrecisionDeck. Limited to only 1,000 units worldwide, the new turntable has a shape designed by Fender Master Builder Yuriy Shishkov, is built using the same swamp ash wood as found on Fender’s Precision Bass guitars and finished in Fender’s three-color sunburst. Internally, the components are designed and built by MoFi, with the same technology found in the company’s award-winning UltraDeck turntable system. Fender describes the system as “ready to play straight out of the box” thanks to its pre-mounted MoFi MasterTracker pickup, which utilises two low-mass magnets aligned in a V formation parallel to the record’s grooves to “accurately extract music from LPs”. Other…
AARON SHANAHAN HAILS FROM BRISBANE, QLD PLAYS IN DREAM DALI SOUNDS LIKEHEADY, LABYRINTHINE STONER-POP LATEST DROP “LET HER BE” (SINGLE OUT NOW VIA SUNNY ISLAND) What’s your current go-to guitar? I’ve had a few brands and types of guitars in the past – and I would love to try more different types with Dream Dali – but my go-to is the Fender Stratocaster. It’s a very malleable and affordable guitar to get different sounds with. How did you initially fall in love with the instrument? I am still yet to fall in love with a guitar, but I’ve always had a steady relationship with the Fender Strat. I once owned a custom-made Ernie Ball guitar that was great looking and had a tone that you could manipulate easily. Ernie Ball…
THE BUOYS Unsolicited Advice For Your DIY Disaster SPUNK Lacquering their youthful, sunkissed power-pop jams with lyrical barbs that shoot straight for the heart, The Buoys’ sophomore EP would feel just as much at home roaring from the PAs at next year’s Splendour In The Grass as it would through a pair of AirPods during a casual quarter-life crisis. Zoe Catterall and Hilary Geddes’ yin-and-yang fretwork sears with a frisky, jangly grunt, contrasted wonderfully by Courtney Cunningham’s rounded and propulsive basslines. Teeming with energy even at their lowest point, the band often veer scarily close to the edge of overkill – you know what they say: if you ain’t redlining, you ain’t headlining – but they always know just when to reel it back in. Case in point: the dizzying…
SNAIL MAIL Valentine MATADOR / REMOTE CONTROL Equally as glittery as it was melancholic, Lush – the aptly titled debut from Maryland indie stalwart Snail Mail (aka Lindsey Jordan) – had a notable ‘lightning in a bottle’-esque quality. It wowed with meticulous production and conscientious songwriting, but it also shone for its blithesome looseness and brazen confidence, Jordan committing herself wholly both as a classically trained musician with an ear for technicality and a dorky queer teen living in the peak of meme culture. Three years on, Jordan doesn’t try to recreate that magic. It would seem she isn’t so keen, either, to reinvent herself – she knows she has a niche, and she’s happy to lean into it – but there’s a clear determination to evolve and experiment. Where…
Dave Murray is laughing at our question, and, honestly, we can’t really blame him. We’ve connected with the Iron Maiden guitarist to discuss his iconic metal band’s new record, Senjutsu. It’s an epic double album bursting with complex, head-spinning guitar action – and we’ve just asked him to pick out its single most challenging six-string moment. “Anything that sounds difficult,” he says, “Was difficult to play!” Murray’s good-natured jibe aside, Senjutsu is a truly formidable work of art. The British trailblazers’ 17th album is a ten-song, 80-plus-minute collection of classic Maiden grandeur and inimitable triple-guitar assault, courtesy of Murray and his compatriots Adrian Smith and Janick Gers. It’s stacked with Iron Maiden’s signature calling cards: dual-guitar harmonies, soaring solos, galloping rhythms, loud-soft dynamics and more merge with enthralling lyrical tales…
The new album from New Orleans blues-rocker Samantha Fish, Faster, doesn’t sound like it was created during a dark time in history. With a slinky, devious opening riff and a flirtatious vow to “make your heart beat faster,” Fish lets us know from note one that life in COVID lockdown hasn’t taken the mischievous glint out of her eyes. “This album… I feel like it’s a big moment for me,” the singer and guitarist offers. “I feel like we all went through something collectively last year. I think it’s transformative for us as a group of people, but also individually, and so for me, this is about shaking off everything.” Though her first love is the blues, Fish has taken many musical styles to the fitting room over the years…
