Innehållsförteckning för Vol. 150 från Australian Guitar

In a hot second from now (early October, to be exact), The Kooks will touch down for their first shows on Aussie ground in almost four years. The trip comes as part of their belated celebrations for the 15th anniversary of Inside In / Inside Out, the Brighton pop-rockers’ seminal 2006 debut. But the shows – pencilled in for Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney – won’t just be a trip down memory lane: the trio too have a whole stack of new songs to premiere Down Under, having just unleashed unto the world their sixth studio album, 10 Tracks To Echo In The Dark. Deceptively titled, the album sports some of The Kooks’ brightest material yet: something frontman Luke Pritchard credits to the recent milestones he’d reached in his personal life…

Maturity has never been one of Dune Rats’ multitude of strengths – this is, after all, the band whose most iconic music video (for the self-titled album highlight ‘Red Light, Green Light’) was a one-take run of frontman Danny Beus and drummer BC Michaels ripping bongs. But alas, the Brisbane surf-punk trio – rounded out with bassist Brett Jansch – aren’t in their late teens and early twenties anymore, and although they haven’t shed a gram of their loveable looseness and penchant for partying, they’ve realised there’s (at least a bit) more to life than getting f***ed up and wreaking havoc. Cue the Dunies’ game-changing fourth album, Real Rare Whale (say that five times in a row), which BC declared upon its announcement to be “a bit more of a…

If you’ve ever perused the web seeking guitar material, chances are you’ve run across a mysterious fretboard mapping theory called the CAGED System. Maybe you thought, What is this, a wire box that holds a bounty of chord voicings, or maybe a way of playing in solitary confinement? Well, it’s no big mystery once you unlock the first key of the cage. Once understood, the CAGED System can be used to connect the fretboard in a network of interlocking and overlapping chord voicings, arpeggios and scales. In this lesson, we’ll examine the fundamentals of the CAGED System, how it applies to chords and lining them up along the fretboard, as well as systems for combining shapes for common chord progressions. BASIC CAGED-SYSTEM CHORD VOICINGS The CAGED System is founded upon…

SET UP YOUR GUITAR Typically from $120 Unlike electric guitars where the sound is mangled and processed through your entire signal chain, the most common objective when amplifying an acoustic guitar is for it to sound like an organic instrument – just louder. This means there’s no hiding the annoying buzzes, rattles or any other noises that could ruin an otherwise great performance. You can breathe a lease of life into your guitar by getting it set up by a professional luthier or tech, leaving you with a comfortable action, perfect intonation and problem-free playing. CHECK YOUR ELECTRONICS REGULARLY From $10 You know what can kill the intimate storytelling of a delicate acoustic performance? That intermittent burst of ear-splitting noise from the jack socket you “keep meaning to do something…

David Bowie’s the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, to give it its full title, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It’s the record that cemented Bowie’s status as an international superstar, selling more than 7 million copies, and it is second only to Let’s Dance [1983] in terms of Bowie’s most successful records. Key to Bowie’s rise to prominence was the work of guitarist Mick Ronson, the perfect visual and sonic foil for Bowie’s unique vision. At the helm for Ziggy was producer Ken Scott, who’d engineered a couple of Bowie’s albums when Tony Visconti was producing. Scott’s own story reads as the unlikeliest of tall tales. Applying for an apprenticeship in recording and engineering, his first job after leaving school was working as…

Regular readers will have spotted the Cort name cropping up quite frequently with its well-received electric models. But as you also may already know, the huge manufacturing machine behind the brand, Cor-Tek, also builds guitars for some of the world’s leading brands, not least PRS’s electrics (in Indonesia) and its acoustics and hollowbodies in China, as well as Manson’s start-up models and many, many more. Our two new models are representative of Cort’s own extensive acoustic range – we counted 14 different series on the company’s website, many of which have a number of different instruments on offer, adding up to a considerable list. Aside from being new 2022, all-solid wood models, there’s no theme linking the duo before us; both these guitars are standalone models and so we will…

ADAM NEWLING HE IS A second-gen Greek-Australian with the spirit of a weathered Nashville country-rocker, fusing his love for steely twang and sizzling melancholy with his proven penchant for indie-rock (when he’s not jamming up a storm on his own accord, Newling plays in Ruby Fields’ band). KINDA LIKE Andy Golledge, Buck Meek and Molly Burch. CHECK OUT Newling’s stirring second EP, Half Cut And Dangerous (which at eight tracks spanning 32 minutes, feels much more like an album), on which he embodies a vivid rawness with his battered and emotive singing, and a rich soundscape that seeks – and never fails to find – the beauty in minimalism. COLOURBLIND THEY ARE A quartet of nostalgic alt-rockers on Kaurna land (Adelaide) turning their lingering teen angst into cathartic emo anthems…

Of all the timeless sayings in the Australian language, one is distinct for a multitude of reasons: “Get f***ed.” It can be utilised to reflect excitement (“50 percent off Shapes at Woolies!? Get f***ed!”), bewilderment (“Get f***ed, that kangaroo just crushed an entire keg of VB with its biceps”), disappointment (“Get f***ed, as if I’m paying $2.10 a litre for E-10”), anger (“Look at this dickhead doing 60 in an 80 zone, get f***ed”) and even love (“You bought me this? Get f***ed, that’s so sweet”). But perhaps its most apt utility is in expressing astonishment – every once in a blue moon, for example, you’ll hear an album so inconceivably wild, so off-chops and intense that the only words your mind can conjure in reaction are, of course, “Get…

Hell hath no fury like Julia Jacklin’s determination to make you feel things. The Blue Mountains-born, Sydney-raised and Melbourne-based indie stalwart cut her teeth on songs like ‘Pool Party’ and ‘Motherland’, which in addition to being stellar tracks from her stellar debut, 2016’s Don’t Let The Kids Win, share the commonality of being gut-wrenching punches of raw, unrestrained emotion. Jacklin went even more intense on 2019’s Crushing, an album baring her soul with such ardent poignancy that one front-to-back listen would straightup kill one of the seven dwarves. In the years since she gave us Crushing, Jacklin has done a fair bit of living: she’s seen new places, met new people and, perhaps most importantly, felt new emotions. Her third full-length effort, Pre Pleasure, is reflective of that: it’s a…

T-REX SOULMATE ACOUSTIC $699 The T-Rex Soulmate Acoustic is bursting with features for acoustic players including a compressor, chorus, delay and some pristine digital reverb algorithms. On the utility side there’s a 3-band EQ, automatic feedback suppression, and a tuner. They’ve even bundled in a looper to boot. LR BAGGS VENUE DI PEDAL $559 Essentially giving you a more detailed set of features as a well-stocked on-board preamp, the Venue DI from electro-acoustic know-it-alls LR Baggs features a five-band EQ with a feedback-busting, tuneable notch filter, phase switch and stage-ready tuner. Ideal if your acoustic features a passive pickup or if you just want the controls where you can see them. FISHMAN AURA SPECTURM DI Around $550 The Aura Spectrum DI makes use of Fishman’s fantastic Aura acoustic imaging technology,…

Fender introduced its Paramount Series for discriminating acoustic players at Winter NAMM 2016, and the company has been busy updating and augmenting it in 2022. Fender started off the year with three new steel-strings, and then — just in time for warm-weather back-porch pickin’ — offered up the three instruments that make up the Paramount Bluegrass Collection: the PB-180E banjo, along with the PR-180E Resonator and PM-180E Mandolin on review here. The whole Paramount concept is about modern takes on vintage designs, and the Bluegrass Series takes it a step further, applying elements such as onboard electronics and modern neck profiles to old-time Americana instruments. The PR-180E is an all-mahogany acoustic-electric round-neck resonator that comes in a nice hardshell case. It has a pair of small f-holes located in the…

Headphones really have to earn their crust these days. Not only is great audio quality expected but wireless connectivity with your devices is pretty much standard today. Vox’s VH-Q1 headphones are all of the above but also feature noise-cancelling technology that suppresses intrusive sounds from outside, such as engine noise on a long haul flight. Pairing the VH-Q1s with a device is pretty simple; you just hold down the power button for five seconds, after which they should be discoverable on Bluetooth-enabled phones or tablets. Once paired, the sound quality is impressive, balancing warmth and detail very pleasantly via the highgrade film diaphragms. The pillowy earpads are very comfortable and, at a little over 300g, the headphones are light enough to wear for long periods without discomfort, despite their robust…

Coming to us live from his home studio – or as he’d rather call it, his “little underground doomsday bunker” – Parkway Drive’s Jeff Ling says with a forced chuckle, trying (and immediately failing) to shelter his anxiety: “Honestly, I’m scared of this room. I spent a lot of time in here over the last few years, so now I only come here when I need to escape the noises of my kids and everyone else upstairs. I call it the ‘trainwreck studio’ because I’ve got two young children, and life has just been so busy that it hasn’t been vacuumed in like five years, so there’s stuff stuck to the walls and all over the floor… It looks really sad in here – but it gets the job done!”…

Having been largely unable to tour their second album, 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers, The Beths were determined to make up for lost time with its follow-up. Expert In A Dying Field was written in the mind-numbing throes of the pandemic’s peak – when the Kiwi power-pop outfit were truly pining for their return to the stage – and as a result, almost every second of the record feels tailored to be belted out in front of an audience. You can hear it in the tasteful crunch of the riffs on ‘Head In The Clouds’, and in the warbly, almost jittery lead passage on ‘Best Left’. It’s there on the pseudopsychedelic wailing that steals the stow on the back end of ‘2am’, and in the luminous pop-punk vibe the band explore…

In announcing Emotional Creature, the second full-length effort from Chicago power-pop outfit Beach Bunny, frontwoman Lili Trifilio – who started the band in 2015 as her solo bedroom “pop project” – explained that, over the course of the pandemic, she’d grown alongside her songs. “Some of [the tracks on Emotional Creature] were written in various stages of life,” she said, “and I think as we go through different experiences and hardships, you come out stronger.” By proxy of its gestation across such a formative time in Trifilio’s life – the cerebral rollercoaster that is the transition from one’s early twenties, which is effectively just “being a teenager, but also being able to get sloshed”, into the soul-warping dredges of adulthood – Emotional Creature is much more introspective, contemplative and –…

Since bursting onto London’s live music scene in 2014, The Big Moon have passed through several phases. First came Love In The 4th Dimension – the band’s irreverently Libertines-esque indie-rock debut that earned them a Mercury Prize nomination. Then, in 2020, the four-piece showed a softer side with the more spacious pop sensibilities of their “coming of age” record, Walking Like We Do. Now, they return with Here Is Everything – a collection of 11 songs that were conceived amid the pandemic years, and during the pregnancy of frontwoman Juliette Jackson. With its themes of birth, motherhood, excitement and fear, the life changing circumstances that inspired the album make it a decidedly more grown-up off ering than anything The Big Moon has yet released. Still, it features all the astute lyricism…

1 There’s more than one route to creating a textured, ambient guitar bed. Jacking in our real guitar, and using Logic’s built-in amp and pedal designer, we start to create each element of a lush underbed in turn, beginning with a repeating chordal sequence. 2 Our simple four-chord loop is a bit dry (though we’ve upped the reverb in our virtual amp) but an application of Heavenly Chorus and extra reverb via the virtual pedalboard have helped change the guitar’s tone into something more characterful. We reduce our tempo too, as our original BPM now sounds too strident. 3 We’ve got a foundational chordal loop, which we can use as the linchpin of our ethereal guitar part. We want to add some swelling chords too, to create a sense of…

When we first heard that Fender was bringing out JV reissues commemorating the release of the original Japanese-made series, we mistakenly believed we would be getting accurate remakes of those game-changing guitars that recreated Strats, Teles, Precision and Jazz basses from the company’s golden pre-CBS era. The earliest ones had Fender in large script and a small ‘Squier’ on the bulbous headstock end, and these instruments staggered everyone who saw them with their brilliant build, stunning attention to detail, and authentic looks and feel. However, after the slight disappointment of discovering this was not to be the case, it turns out that what we have here are two interesting and versatile instruments that deserve their place in the middle ranks of Fender’s all-encompassing range. The guitars have much in common,…

Following last year’s pedal debuts, Universal Audio’s UAFX range continues to grow with these new Amp Emulators, which the company says emulate the best vintage guitar amps of all time. Each pedal represents one particular amp type: Woodrow ‘55 Instrument Amplifier is based on Fender tweed amps from the 50s; Dream ‘65 Reverb Amplifier represents the later black-panel Fenders with an emulation of the Deluxe Reverb; and Ruby ‘63 Top Boost Amplifier channels our homegrown Vox AC30. Providing various stereo and mono options, each pedal offers the actual amp emulation plus a choice of six speaker cabinet emulations – you get three as shipped, but registering the pedal entitles you to another three. Each pedal also has three toggle-switched variations on the sound that only become active on turning the…

“I can knock certain songs of mine for one reason or another, but not this one,” Marshall Crenshaw says of “Someday, Someway,” the irresistibly catchy 1982 pop-rock gem that launched the Detroit-born musician’s career and is now considered his signature song by fans and critics alike. “It sounded good when I released it, and it still sounds good today. People want me to play it at every show, which is fine, because I happen to love it and I’m really proud of it.” Phony Beatlemania In February 1980, Crenshaw was in Boston for a four-week run of Beatlemania, the musical revue in which he’d portrayed John Lennon for three long years. “One night, the stage manager gave me a warning: ‘You’ve got to try harder. Look like you’re enjoying it,…