Indholdsfortegnelse for August 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 Our cover feature celebrating 130 years of Gibson guitars made me realise how profoundly the landscape of music-making is shaped by fashions that, a few years later, are all but forgotten. In the case of Gibson, the quest for projection and volume in the pre-amplifier era of the 1920s in part bequeathed us the punchy archtop acoustic. The banjo bands and raucous string ensembles of the Roaring Twenties may have faded into history like musical ghosts, but we’re still appreciating and enjoying the contoured semi-hollow guitars that lineage of guitar-making gave us. Likewise, when we spoke to Fred Gretsch about the company’s guitar-making efforts in the 1950s, he pointed out that, at the…

FIRST PLAYPRS SE NF3 Has PRS gone a little bolt-on mad? Well, certainly in the Indonesianmade SE line, it’s bolt-ons that have been the recent trend in terms of new releases. Only a little while back we saw the SE CE 24 and Swamp Ash Special, both based on historic PRS designs, then earlier this year the superb stripped-down (both in style and price) SE CE 24 Standard Satin, which added to the bolt-on choice behind the more established SE Silver Sky. Typically for PRS, those new bolt-ons are all twin-humbucking guitars (although the Swamp Ash Special does add a mid-placed single coil), but this new NF3 introduces a trio of hum-cancelling Narrowfield DD ‘S’ pickups, Indonesian-made interpretations of those units used on the more T-style NF 53 that launched in…

FIRST PLAY BEETRONICS WANNABEE BEELATERAL BUZZ We have become so used to seeing Beetronics come up with a series of original fuzz pedals that its latest stompbox is something of a surprise: the aptly named Wannabee is a double-drive pedal with drive circuits that, while no doubt having Beetronics’ own slant on things, are based on the familiar and perennially popular Klon and Bluesbreaker pedals. The Bluesbreaker inspiration is to the left and is called circuit #0, while the Klon-style is to the right and is called circuit #1. Both sides of the pedal are independently footswitchable so can be used individually or combined: a three-way toggle switch determines which will come first in a serial order or, alternatively, the two being used together in parallel, opening up a whole…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER ... I’ve spent the majority of my evenings last month lit up like a ghost, the pale glare of a laptop screen the only source of light as I ponder my next project. Unfortunately, guitar making can tend to stay on the brain; while others are fast asleep, my best bet for a good night’s sleep is to solve the complicated neck join that’s been in the back of my mind all day. And so I’ve prescribed myself a couple of hours of CAD drawing before bed to put my mind at ease. The guitar in question is a solidbody electric, yet its many demands require the mindset of an acoustic guitar builder. With a softwood body, hardwood neck, adjustable D-tube neck reinforcement and body contouring,…

STAR LETTER PEDAL POWER I must admit to being amazed at the number of effects pedals reviewed in the magazine these days, and also at the price of some of the pedals for a single effect. The vast majority are digital, and the preamp type pedals, which are very expensive, tend to use digital modelling as a basis. Original classic analogue pedals that cost a fortune have also been reviewed and compared, including the recent Boss anniversary supplement. So where am I going with this? Back in 1988 I purchased, and still have, what was probably the first multi-effects pedal, the Boss ME-5. At the time this was considered a massive breakthrough as now you could have your popular effects all in one box and you could programme them for…

The original Pacifica design was first released in 1990 and was conceived as a high-end ‘improved’ Strat-style guitar by the small team at the just-opened Hollywood R&D centre. It’s named after a city above San Francisco and was joined by a more Les Paul-inspired guitar, the Weddington, named after the street in which the facility was located. Ironically, the guitar’s success, in terms of numbers, came a couple of years later with the huge-selling, lowly priced Pacifica 112. The new Pacifica models, which have been sometime in development, retain the essence of that original design, and Yusuke Ota provides some insight to the process. Yusuke, can you introduce yourself to our readers? “I hold the position of electric guitar product owner at Yamaha. In this position, I played a central…

REVIEW LINE 6 HX ONE LINE 6 HX ONE £299 CONTACT Yamaha PHONE 01908 366700 WEB uk.line6.com What You Need To Know 1 That’s small for a Line 6 HX pedal. This latest in the HX line is designed to be an easy fit for any pedalboard. 2 Does it just do effects? Yes, there’s no amp and speaker simulation onboard this one, but there’s a comprehensive collection of Helix-quality effects covering all the genres you can think of – over 250 algorithms in all! 3 Can you chain effects together? No, this is strictly one effect at a time – it’s that ‘extra’ pedal on the ’board that’ll give you any effect you want at any time, complementing the rest of your pedals. Besides its units with amp/speaker and effects…

Junior Marvin What an accolade it is to be sought after by not one but two legends – Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder. Junior Marvin tells us all about it on p50 A Rebel’s Farewell Duane Eddy was a true godfather to rock ’n’ roll guitar and a player of huge distinction yet remained humble to the end p44 Eric’s Martin Clapton may be best known for toting a Strat, but it was his ’74 Martin 000-28 that became his closest companion through the 1970s. We check it out on p80…

FIRST PLAYPJD GUITARS ST JOHN APPRENTICE Whatever the reasons, we could suggest there’s a bit of a trend emerging: the stripped-down, high-quality guitar that’s far from hard on your income. It was the theme of our last cover story and, working on that, we got wind of a new entry, PJD’s new Apprentice. We say ‘new’ because the brand released some small runs of single-soapbar-pickup models back in 2022, with lightly reliced gloss nitro finishes, which were the first to introduce the gold decal logos now standard for all its models. Those guitars were very special, but nudging £2k, they were hardly impulse buys. This new version very nearly is. We’re not saying £899 is pocket change, but for a UK-made, quality-led, satin-finished, obeche-bodied single-pickup guitar with a hand-wound humbucker……

Artist: Joanne Shaw Taylor Album: Heavy Soul (Journeyman Records) It was busyness as usual when we Zoomcalled Joanne Shaw Taylor. With her faithful hound, Hank (a miniature Dachshund, aka ‘The Psychosausage’), by her side she was already in the middle of a writing session for the follow-up album to Heavy Soul. “Well, I’m trying to write, if Hank will let me,” she says. “He keeps barking at everything and he has a rabies vaccination this afternoon. It’s all very rock ’n’ roll and unglamorous over here!” A period of intense touring had preceded today’s interview and, with the new album poised for release into the world, she was eager to detail her recording experience, which included working once again with legendary producer Kevin Shirley. Did you take your regular touring…

RAISING THE TONE ... Opinion Regular readers will recall that, last issue, I decided to beef up the neck-pickup sound of my ’52 Tele reissue by fitting another 50s design to it – an Alnico V ‘staple’ pickup, albeit a latter-day version made by Sunbear Pickups. While I don’t dislike traditional Tele neck pickups as some do, I absolutely fell in love with the huge, rounded clean tone of the staple pickups I’d tried in the past. Fully committed, I ordered a humbucker-size Sunbear SB-Staple V pickup and, not long later, received the finished item in a beautifully presented box. Opening it, I found the pickup nestling in a bed of dark-blue paper straw, and was soon admiring the subtle ageing Sunbear founder Stuart Robson had applied to the…

April 1938 – April 2024 Second only to writing the perfect song, it is perhaps the ultimate goal of any guitarist to forge a sound that is theirs alone. Duane Eddy, who died of cancer in April at the age of 86, certainly accomplished that. And while the tag given to his methodology – ‘twang’ – had lightweight and frivolous connotations, the sound itself was anything but. “It’s a silly name,” the guitarist once said, “for a non-silly thing.” The low-slung, mysterious, otherworldly tone – played on the bass strings of his giant Gretsch archtop, clad in reverb and given a shiver by his Bigsby vibrato bar – made the US guitarist’s ocean-crossing instrumentals of the late-50s so evocative that even life in suburban Britain felt like a classic American…

130 Years Of Gibson130TH Gibson ANNIVERSARY 1902: Birth of the Gibson company Around 1880, Orville Gibson moved from his native New York State to Kalamazoo, Michigan. He developed an unconventional mix of ideas and methods to make his mandolin-family instruments and guitars, starting in the mid-1890s – with the company today marking 1894 as the year of its inception. He did not use internal bracing. Instead, he would carve his tops and backs, and rather than the usual heated-and-bent sides he’d saw the sides from solid wood. In 1902, Orville sold out to a group of five businessmen who formed the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company. Orville left soon afterwards, receiving a regular royalty for five years and then a monthly cheque for $41.66 until his death in 1918. 1922:…

This guitar is emblematic of more than just a hugely important song. It became a constant companion in the early phase of Clapton’s solo career Behind many platinum-selling songs lies a simple acoustic guitar, one that is always close to the artist, at home or on the tour bus. One such guitar is Eric Clapton’s 1974 000-28, the instrument upon which he wrote Wonderful Tonight – a love song inspired by his then-girlfriend Pattie Boyd that would become his best-selling single. The guitar has been largely out of the public eye since it was sold at auction to a private collector in 1999 for $173,000, with the proceeds going to Clapton’s Crossroads Centre for rehabilitation from drug and alcohol addiction. That all changed earlier this year, however, when Bonham’s auction…

MCNALLY S-32 £3,999 CONTACT McNally Guitars PHONE +44 (0) 2838349811 WEB http://mcnallyguitars.com What You Need To Know 1 Ciaran McNally? The name sounds familiar… Ciaran’s been featured in these pages often in the past. For example, we reviewed his Shane Hennessy signature model back in issue 472. But if not then, you may well have come across his name from further back when he worked for both Lowden and Atkin Guitars. 2 What’s the Foundation Series? Basically, these are McNally’s entry-level models that offer five different body shapes and a selected choice of body woods that all retail at £3,999. Despite the fact that Ciaran points out these are unfussy builds, as you can see from the S-32 we have here, these are serious instruments. 3 Does McNally take custom…

Vintage ProShop V72 Custom Build With Dave Burrluck With the custom-ordered ProShop guitar having already proved itself in rehearsal, our reviews editor introduces it to an audience… Another weekend, another gig in a pub on a cramped ‘stage’. All the gear has to go up (and down) stairs: where the heck are the road crew when you need them? My stage space is just enough to fit me and my diminutive pedalboard, which is obscured from the audience by the lone PA speaker. Still, environment and temperamental pedalboard aside, I’m looking forward to giving the custom-ordered Vintage ProShop V72 a bit of a workout. To be honest, I’d say the guitar itself is a bit more prepared than its player. I’d restrung it with a set of 10 to 46…

Q I’m after some advice on modding a 90s PRS. I bought the guitar (a ’94 Custom) way back, used it a lot and then, well, I didn’t, even though I loved the guitar – and still do! I never wanted to sell it, but reading about and trying out newer PRS guitars, I realise things have changed a lot since the 90s… I was wondering if I could (or should) bring the old model up to more modern specification: pickups, wiring and perhaps replace those old cam-locking tuners? Stephen, via email A It’s quite a dilemma, isn’t it? You’re right about all the changes over the years: a ’94 PRS is very different from a current 2024 Core model in terms of its finish, hardware and, most obviously, its…

“I believe the Nick Lucas guitar was the first artist-endorsed model Gibson made. It was introduced in 1927 and they had a photograph of his face on the inside label. These days, the Nick Lucas model is more closely associated with Bob Dylan, who played a refinished one with a Guild bridge between 1963 and 1966. “Over the course of the production run Gibson never quite settled on the specs. The first body shape is different and resembles the L-1 and L-3. The body shape changed in 1929, by which time the Nick Lucas had also acquired an inlaid headstock logo and a newly designed bridge. “Although they started out with mahogany back and sides, Gibson went on to use rosewood and occasionally koa before settling on maple in 1934.…

When it comes to impressive-looking guitars, it’s hard to imagine anything more sensational looking (save perhaps for Gretsch’s White Falcon) than a three-pickup, white Gibson SG Custom with Vibrola, and a Cherry Red ES-355. When released, both instruments sat at the top of their respective family trees and boasted pretty much every flashy element that Gibson had at its disposal. Thus it was ebony rather than rosewood fingerboards, gold instead of nickel plating, and real mother-of-pearl over the swirly celluloid found on SG Standard and ES-335 models. In the SG’s case, it also added a third pickup and when finished in white and with a big gold vibrato (did they pinch the idea from Gretsch?) looked spectacular. In line with its recent collaborations with the Gibson Custom Shop, Epiphone has…

FIRST PLAY THORPYFX ELECTRIC LIGHTNING Anyone who watches Chris Buck’s always entertaining Friday Fretworks videos on his YouTube channel will have already heard this ThorpyFX pedal as it’s been on his ’board for quite some time now, albeit in disguised form, making it the subject of much speculation. Now revealed as the Electric Lightning, it is, in fact, the Cardinal Black guitarist’s signature pedal. The brief for the pedal was to create an overdrive with an independent clean boost so that Chris had a one-box solution to deliver his own sound, no matter what backline he had access to. To achieve this, Thorpy has come up with a valve-based overdrive circuit with a three-knob EQ similar to a Marshall tone-stack, and combined that with a high-headroom clean boost. Both are…

Artist: Conchúr White Album: Swirling Violets (Bella Union) Conchúr White, a singer-songwriter hailing from County Armagh in Northern Ireland, released his debut album in January. The appropriately titled Swirling Violets contains the signature woozy Bella Union sound but with plenty of Conchúr’s own character running through it. “It feels totally new because it’s my first album,” he says. “I’ve been in bands before, without going through that album process, so every facet of this is novel and exciting. It’s great to have the experience.” Solo Vs Band As Conchúr mentions, before striking out as a solo artist, he was more involved in bands, so this relatively new guise is one he found himself in almost unwittingly. “I never really thought about being a solo musician and using my name, to…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE ... I first encountered Colin Pincott – Jim Diamond and Mammoth’s guitarist – in the Fender Soundhouse in Tottenham Court Road around 1974. Living up the road in Essex, it was an easy jaunt on the train and tube to nip down and ogle guitars, and this musical superstore was a revelation. With two floors plus an upper mezzanine that housed a coffee bar, and with free drum and guitar lessons each Saturday, Ivor Arbiter’s brainchild was lightyears ahead in terms of retail sophistication. “I was mesmerised by a giant of a man with a Gibson L-5 perched on his mighty chest, pulling out jaw‑dropping jazz chords, runs and licks” Anyway, on this particular visit I spied a giant of a man with a Gibson L-5 perched on…

SUBSTITUTE AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a good ‘straight up’ major or minor chord, particularly on acoustic guitar, but with a few little adjustments such as lifting a finger off or moving a note up or down a semitone, you’ll find that there are lots of other sounds available to you. It’s true to say that a good song will often stand up on solo acoustic guitar (though I have yet to attempt any Squarepusher…), but that’s no reason for us to rest on our laurels. Players such as David Bowie, Pete Townshend, Joni Mitchell and Andy Summers have all created ideas that could be played with simple chords – but some depth and interest would be lost. The five examples below are played in regular tuning and…

There are guitar companies as old as Gibson but few who have made such a breadth of classic instruments – from mandolins and archtops to iconic solidbody electrics, debonair jazz guitars and sweet-strumming acoustics. So if you’ve ever struggled to get a handle on exactly how key events unfolded in over a century of guitar making by the company, you’re not alone. Indeed, the guitar-playing public would never have been privy to many of the factors that shaped the company’s evolution. But decisions that got made in the boardrooms of the 50s and 60s and on the factory floor at Kalamazoo, and the personalities who shaped the company’s fortunes, gave us the iconic guitars we know and love today just as much as famous musicians did. That’s why we invited…

Having been totally won over by the McNally S-32 with its top-shelf timbers and supreme workmanship, we were intrigued by the idea of a lone builder offering a base series of instruments – something we hadn’t necessarily come across in the past. On the face of it, the idea of giving customers a range of body shapes and choice of woods at a single base price is a splendid way of entering the handmade acoustic guitar market and we were eager to hear how the idea came about. “The price is within reach if people were going [to a dealer] to buy something like a high-end Martin” What was the thinking behind the Foundation Series? “The idea was to have some set models that would be a little bit more…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “The first guitar I bought was a Gretsch 6120. It was one of the first batch of the reissue guitars in the late 80s that was brought into the country. I sold my 1957 Ford Consul, which was my pride and joy at the time, and that enabled me to buy the guitar because it was a huge sum of money in 1989. I was 19 years old and it was the guitar of my dreams. It was delivered to where my mum worked at the time and she called me and they’d put it in the conference room on this really big long table. I walked over and I was just knocked out by the beauty of…

The earliest guitar‑like instruments probably had flat fretboards, but these days pretty much every guitar has a curved ’board. We’re not talking about an up‑bow or back‑bow, but rather the curve that joins both edges of the fretboard with its highest point all along the centre line of the neck. If you’re wondering why a fretboard radius is generally preferred, try forming an imaginary barre chord with your fretting hand and you’ll probably see that your index finger is slightly curved. Now grab your guitar and try barring across all six strings using your index finger alone and you may notice that the D and G strings are the ones least likely to play cleanly. Going back to our ‘air’ barre chord, place your thumb where the back of the…

VIDEO & AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra CAGED: A Practical Guide Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Fender ’62 Reissue Stratocaster, Boss SD-1 (modded) & Vox AC15 C1 | Difficulty | 10 mins per example THE CAGED CHORD SHAPES can be a great way of learning the geography of the fretboard. The shapes, both major and minor, occur in every position and key just like the pentatonic boxes. In fact, they form part of these very same patterns but in a far less linear ‘two-notes-per-string’ way. It’s easy to fall into the trap of regarding the CAGED shapes purely as chords. After all, where would we be without our E- and A-shape barre chords? But just as some pentatonic shapes fall more easily under the fingers, some chord shapes are easier to shift around than…