Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Guitarist

Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA Telephone 01225 442244 Email guitarist@futurenet.com Online www.guitarist.co.uk It’s so enjoyable to just noodle about on the guitar that it’s easy to forget that the origins of the guitar’s 20th century boom in popularity lie in songs, not soloing. You can find evidence of this in the tiny frets of Les Paul Customs back in the 50s, built to make moving between jazz chords up and down the neck easy. Likewise, the beautiful Byrds-era Rickenbacker electrics of the early 60s could be seen really as a kind of amplified acoustic guitar, in terms of the intent behind their design, rather than soloists’ instruments. I’d argue that even the most famous solos in modern rock, such as Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, only…

FIRST PLAYEPIPHONE INSPIRED BY GIBSON 1963 FIREBIRD I & V Well does this reviewer recall hearing Cream’s live version of the blues classic Sitting On Top Of The World on the band’s Goodbye album. Clapton spits out reams of notes with a huge distorted tone that it turns out was his 1964 sunburst Gibson Firebird I. Just as memorable was first catching the infectious swagger of Johnny Winter’s Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo, most likely played on Johnny’s own 1964 Firebird, this time a white model V. While Winter made a Firebird the main staple of his career, Clapton only stayed with his for the final Cream tour and on a few Blind Faith shows the following year. EC’s use of the Firebird inspired Gary Moore and Joe Bonamassa to…

PRS ‘Dead Spec’ Silver Sky PRS ‘Dead Spec’ Silver Sky £3,495 It might have ‘broken the internet’ on its release late in 2017, but PRS’s Silver Sky now seems very much a part of the high-end Stratocaster-inspired market and is now also offered in the more affordable Indonesian-made SE range. It’s PRS, so there have been some minor tweaks over the past few years, of course, not least the addition of a maple fretboard option and a couple of satin nitro finishes for this year. But the ‘Dead Spec’ version, released at the end of 2023, is the biggest change to the ’Sky’s blueprint so far. It takes us back to the 70s, a time when many players would muck up perfectly good guitars with active circuits and brass parts.…

Artist: James Frankland Album: Fate’s Right Hand (self-released) James Frankland has made a name for himself as an instrumental guitar player who’s able to bring intricate layers into his music, as we see on his latest release, Fate’s Right Hand. However, he didn’t find an immediate connection to music. “I first started playing when I was seven, but I didn’t like it for about six years,” he says. “Then when I was about 13 there were YouTube and Ultimate Guitar tabs, so I could access Joe Satriani and Guns N’ Roses lessons. It was a good time for learning.” Challenging Players James explores a range of moods across Fate’s Right Hand, from the aggressively charged Stalemate to piano-accompanied slowy In The Depths. It displays an ability that has been honed…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE “The headstock on my new 12-string has dived towards the floor. Could it be that the headstock is carrying an extra half pound of metal?” They say that with 12-string guitars you spend half the time tuning and the other half playing out of tune. They should have added, “and lifting the neck up because it’s dropped due to the weight of 12 cast metal tuners!” As someone who’s ironed his own clothes since he was about 12, I can’t count the times I’ve cursed the iron’s creator: “Did the idiot that designed this ever actually try it?” The cables always foul up, and the one I currently use has a space where you’re supposed to coil the cord, but the space isn’t big enough unless you spend…

SUBSTITUTE Not all chord progressions stay strictly within the diatonic/chord scale convention – and that’s a good thing. Taking a little look at the theory involved here, the C major diatonic/chord scale is Cmaj-Dmin-Emin-Fmaj-Gmaj-Amin-B diminished (Bm7 b5 is also commonly used). These are often numbered sequentially using Roman numerals, so a II-V-I progression in C translates as Dm-Gmaj-Cmaj and so on. The ‘resolve’ from V to I in a chord progression is a very popular move. Let’s embellish it a bit and say the V is a V7, short for dominant 7 – namely a V chord with the b7 added. In C, G7 is the dominant (V7) that resolves to Cmaj (I). But what if we take this move and apply it to all the other chords in the…

This April will see the release of Mark Knopfler’s 10th solo album since he struck out on his own with Golden Heart in 1996. Dire Straits had disbanded the year before and you’d have been forgiven for thinking, at that moment in time, that his best years were perhaps behind him. But it says much of Knopfler’s musical integrity that both the depth and quality of his work have only improved in the 30 years that have passed since then. In fact, listening to his latest album, One Deep River, you get a sense of an artist who – strange as it might seem to say – has quietly revealed the real mettle of his songcraft in his post‑Straits solo work. Money For Nothing may have made him a household…

FENDER MUSTANG LT40S £205 The latest addition to Fender’s popular Mustang range, the LT40S fires 40 watts into a pair of specially designed four-inch full-range loudspeakers. There are 20 amp types and 23 effects that cover everything from vintage Fender to modern high-gain tones. A cool colour display and an equally cool editing app make the Mustang great fun to use. There’s no shortage of storage with 30 pre-loaded patches and another 30 user slots to store your favourite sounds in. The Mustang LT40S is value for money, too. www.fender.com POSITIVE GRID SPARK 40 £259 Positive Grid’s Spark arrived on the scene to universal acclaim in 2019, largely thanks to its revolutionary jam-along app experience. There are just four programmable presets available here, but you have a choice of 33…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “I had a couple of guitars when I was a teenager, but my dad helped me get me a bank loan for a white Ibanez Universe. I was 17 and I desperately wanted a multi‑coloured one when I was a kid. I was a huge fan of [Steve Vai’s] Passion And Warfare, a complete casualty of that album. I had that guitar for 10 years and loved it and I completely regret selling it, but I kind of moved on musically and felt that it was the wrong instrument. But it was a big mistake, getting rid of it.” What was the last guitar you bought and why? “The last guitar I bought was a Teisco SSL 4,…

Since I started writing these articles I haven’t talked much about the individual parts of a speaker and largely skipped over most of how a speaker (or driver) actually works. As we’re going to be looking at speaker cones in this article it may be smart to explain roughly how this part of the speaker functions. The cone (named after its conical shape, a tube wider at one end than the other) is attached to the speaker chassis at the larger end in a way that allows it to move when a force is applied at the thinner end. The idea of a speaker driver is largely that the cone can move freely when a force is applied before returning to its initial position, but done in a single motion,…

Snowy White & Peter Green Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Knaggs SSC & Vox AC15 Difficulty | 10 mins per example TERENCE ‘SNOWY’ WHITE and his Les Paul Goldtop travelled widely in the music business, from London-based sessions to stints with Pink Floyd and Thin Lizzy, plus his own solo hit single, Bird Of Paradise, in the early 1980s. However, the focus of this feature is Snowy’s collaboration with Peter Green, who had become a close friend as well as a major influence. In the late 1970s, Snowy played lead on several tracks for Peter’s In The Skies album, doing an incredible job of channeling his minimalist phrasing on tracks such as Slabo Day, which inspired my own backing track and example solo. The essence here is on delivering…

FIRST PLANPRS SE CE 24 STANDARD SATIN It’s hard to second-guess PRS these days. Having only just released a trio of new SEs for its 2024 line-up, including the Swamp Ash Special and CE 24 (featured in issue 506), the company has released yet another one: a Standard Satin version of the still-fresh SE CE 24. PRS fans will know that ‘Standard’ refers to an all-mahogany body, rather than the more commonly used mahogany back with a figured maple cap. This all-mahogany style dates right back to the first PRS guitars of 1985. Originally, there was just the maple-topped Custom and the less expensive all-mahogany ‘PRS Guitar’, which became the Standard around 1987. The genus of this new SE whizzes back to the following year when PRS’s first bolt-on was…

FIRST PLAYCRAZY TUBE CIRCUITS HI POWER Crazy Tube Circuits has a penchant for creating pedals that pair classic amp and drive pedal sounds. The latest is the Hi Power, which offers tones from Hiwatt amps with a recreation of the Colorsound Power Boost pedal, a combination that David Gilmour was known to use back in the day, notably on the Wish You Were Here album. The two sections of the pedal are independently footswitchable and the boost comes before the amp, but there is added flexibility with a send and return loop between the two. The Boost section has a toggle switch that lets you choose between the sound of the 18-volt Power Boost or the slightly later nine-volt Overdriver version. A Volume knob sets the gain and there’s a…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER I’ve mentioned before what a privilege it is to work with some of the rarest and most beautiful woods on the planet. Like many acoustic guitar makers, it fills me with gratitude to be able to set my hands working upon the smooth honey-coloured grain of cherry wood, or scrape ribbons of fine gossamer from the surface of a Macassar ebony guitar back. As woodworkers, we can quickly intuit the useful properties of different woods as we work them with hand tools. Rosewood is dense and oily (great for hard-wearing fingerboards and bridges) whereas Spanish cedar is feather-light but stiff (ideal for well-balanced necks). But we get even more intimate feedback from timber when we try to bend it into shape. As anyone who has built…

STAR LETTER AMERICAN DREAM? I bought a Mexican Strat for £329 as a teenager back in 2002. A Strat fan, I always had in mind that I’d upgrade to the ‘real thing’, a USA Strat, when I could afford it, but never got round to it. Playing more recently, I finally made it along to the local guitar shop and tried out a couple of Professional II models and an Ultra. They were great to play, but, on reflection, were not the step up I was expecting from my Mexican Strat. The Ultra’s neck was nice and the heel shape with better upper-fret access is a good feature, but back home my Mexican has a neck that actually feels more slimline and easier to play. The big difference was on…

Plenty of very famous guitar brands have had plenty of different owners – their guitars quite possibly made on completely different continents to where they started. But not Gordon Smith. This writer can’t quite remember when he first got his hands on one of these always affordable guitars, but it was some decades ago. In fact, the original brand founders made the guitars for the best part of four decades, and when husband-and-wife team, John and Linda Smith, deservedly took retirement, Gordon Smith was sold to only its second owner, the Auden Musical Instrument Company, a change that ushered in a new chapter under the direction of Doug Sparkes. “We moved production to Northamptonshire from Partington in Manchester in May 2015, so we’re coming into nine years now,” confirms Doug…

BOSS BP-1W BOOSTER/PREAMP & IR-2 AMP & CABINET £259 & £179 CONTACT Roland UK WEB www.boss.info What You Need To Know 1 We haven’t seen a new Boss compact here for a while… And then, like buses, two come at once! These were both released in late 2023. 2 One looks more complicated than the other. That’s right, the Waza Craft BP-1W is a pretty straightforward booster and preamp pedal, while the IR-2 is an amp and cabinet emulator that, by necessity, has plenty of knobs and eight sockets compared with the other pedal’s two! 3 Would they both go on my pedalboard, though? The BP-1, for sure, and the IR-2, possibly – it has many roles, but it could be the last link on your ’board if you want…

Yamaha first released the Pacifica in 1990, designed in the company’s then-new R&D centre (Yamaha Guitar Development) in Hollywood. Named after a city above San Francisco, the Pacifica and its sibling the Weddington – the less-successful, more Les Paul-inspired model that was named after the street address of the facility – were the fledgling team’s attempt to show Yamaha HQ what they could do in the USA. Ex-Ibanez designer Rich Lasner had joined Yamaha. “He was only with us for about two years,” said Ken Dapron, who managed the facility, back in 2003. “He was also the original designer of the Pacifica. I wouldn’t say [the model was] sole-designed; it was a group effort,” something that also included luthier Leo Knapp. “The Pacifica and Weddington were designed alongside each other…

BEETRONICS ABELHA TROPICAL FUZZ FIRST PLAY Beetronics’ latest offering is described as a ‘Tropical Fuzz’, tropical in this instance relating to tropicália – a type of music from Brazil that merges Brazilian and African rhythms with British and American psychedelic rock and pop, and features lots of fuzz guitar. Beetronics says that the Abelha, which incidentally is the Portuguese word for bee, reimagines the classic vibe of the music but infuses it with a forward-thinking twist. A large pedal, it’s a proper work of art with an intricately engraved top surface and a large red jewelled bypass LED, as well as a ring of six smaller multicoloured LEDs that light up in different colour combinations to signify various operating states. Let’s hope it sounds as good as it looks… A…

Suffolk’s biggest pop export has launched not one but two signature products. First up is the first ever handmade Sheeran By Lowden model, making it (for all intents and purposes) a full-blown Lowden. The Stadium Edition (£4,500) is limited to 150 pieces and is designed to be an exact replica of Ed’s stage guitar, featuring a WL (Wee Lowden) body made of solid rosewood back and sides with a spruce top, including Lowden’s Stadium Voicing to maximise clarity and resonance, while also fighting feedback. Meanwhile, Sheeran has also launched a pair of signature looper pedals. Designed by the guitarist and his production team, the Sheeran Looper + (£299) and the larger Sheeran Looper X (£1,199) put Sheeran’s looping capabilities at your feet, with multi-track looping (two on the + model,…

Artist: Steve Hackett Album: The Circus And The Nightwhale (InsideOut Music) Steve Hackett has been enjoying phenomenal success worldwide with his Genesis Revisited project, but live shows are always peppered with material from a solo repertoire that extends back into the 1970s. Recent years have seen his albums gain traction in the charts with his signature melodic guitar tone always to the forefront. As he’s continually searching for new themes to explore, the latest album is largely semi-autobiographical, featuring the life and times of a fictional character called Travla. Heavy riffs and lavish orchestrations are the order of the day hereabouts, and we couldn’t resist the opportunity to find out more about the album’s origins… Your albums have always had quite a strong narrative to them, but this one in…

RAISING THE TONE Opinion Regular readers may recall that around March of last year I began recording an album of acoustic fingerstyle pieces inspired by John Renbourn, John Martyn and 70s folk guitar at large. Chris Turpin, of the acclaimed roots-rock band Ida Mae, agreed to produce the record and, working around his busy touring schedule, we completed the sessions throughout the course of a year. Thanks to his excellent contacts, plus a few old friends of mine, we were able to get some amazing musicians onto the record, including bassist Nick Pini (Laura Marling, Tom Jones), vocalist Bethia Beadman (Courtney Love/ eponymous solo work), fiddle player Aaron Catlow (Sheelanagig/Kit Hawes) and Stephanie Jean Ward, Chris’s musical partner in crime in Ida Mae, on flute and piano. From all…

PIONEERS John Watson Jr was born in Houston, Texas, on 3 February 1935. As a child he learned piano from his father, John Sr. However, like so many young black kids coming of age in the mid-to-late 1940s, it was the mighty T-Bone Walker, best known for his iconic composition Stormy Monday, that grabbed his ears and made him want to be a guitarist. T-Bone Walker’s influence over the subsequent course that blues and rock ’n’ roll took cannot be overestimated. A slew of great recordings from the late 40s found their way into the hearts of everyone from BB King to Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix – and young Watson was no exception. Johnny acquired his first guitar courtesy of his grandfather, a preacher, who agreed to let Jr…

BLUEPRINT: Newman Guitars Not too many small, independent guitar-makers can list The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, not to mention James Honeyman-Scott and Joe Ely, as owners and players of their guitars. There are plenty more, too, and that includes a relatively recent convert in Billy F Gibbons. The brand in question is Newman Guitars whose roots take us back to the glory days and Ted Newman Jones III. From the off, the story of Ted Newman Jones III, or just plain ‘Newman’, is a little hard to definitively pin down. He was born in Dyersburg, Tennessee, in 1949, and caught the rock ’n’ roll bug in his teens, though he found that he was better at fixing up guitars and selling them on than he…

For guitar players, bassists and players of pretty much any stringed instrument, tuners are just a fact of life. Off the top of our heads, the only stringed instrument without tuners that we can think of is a tea-chest bass. Some players express strong tuner preferences based on functionality, weight and appearance. Among vintage guitar collectors, a changed set of tuners can be a dealbreaker, Schallers on a vintage Gibson being a particular bête noire for some. It’s pretty clear what tuners do. On instruments such as guitar and bass, the strings are stretched between two fixed points and the tuner sets the pitch of the open string by applying tension. Increasing this tension raises the pitch; decreasing it lowers the pitch. Friction pegs are still used throughout the violin…