Innehållsförteckning för March 2021 från Guitar Player

LAST YEAR WAS notable for a lot of what we didn’t have. There was no 2020 Olympics, no Boston or New York City marathons. Wimbledon was canceled, as was the Masters Tournament. Even the Scripps National Spelling Bee was called off, marking the first time the event hasn’t been held since 1945. But not even the Covid pandemic could stop Guitar Player’s and Guitar World’s search for 2020’s Guitarist of the Year. Nor did it deter heaps of talented guitarists from responding to the call. In fact, we noticed a dramatic increase in the number of entries we received, and they came from all parts of the world: Japan, Australia, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, France, the U.S. and the U.K. If we can draw any conclusions from the response, it’s this:…

IT WAS A record born from surprise — not the good kind — and struggle. In fact, the whole concept of Two Guitars (Blue Hen Records) wasn’t inspired by the great guitar-duo collaborations of the past, such as Chester & Lester. It was instigated by necessity. When wicked weather forced their drummer and bassist to go MIA from a gig at New York City’s 55 Bar, guitarists Jim Campilongo and Luca Benedetti decided to press on without a rhythm section. “We said, ‘Let’s just play,’” remembers Campilongo, “and we stumbled along, trying to recreate a full band sound with just the two of us. Eventually, we relaxed and didn’t worry about filling everything in — you know, playing ching, ching, ching, ching in a Django Reinhardt style — or keeping…

YOU SAY YOU want to be a successful guitarist in the modern music economy? It’s simple, but not easy. First be a virtuoso, then tour relentlessly, and along the way master social media in all its forms. In other words, be like Daniel Donato. Donato’s six-string mastery was forged through years of playing four nights a week, four hours a night, in the crucible of Nashville’s Broadway, beginning at age 17. The guitarist then toured America and Europe developing a brand of music he calls “Cosmic Country,” until he was selling out shows in both places. Along the way, he garnered tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. All of this has led to a rapid rise for his latest record, the Robben Ford–produced A Young Man’s…

I’M LUCKY TO have a group of inspired friends who retain a youthful exuberance for musical discovery. Recently, my friend Richard Julian texted me about an album he was excited about: Moonlight in Vermont by the Johnny Smith Quintet, featuring Stan Getz. His text reminded me how much I’ve studied and loved both this LP and Johnny Smith, who is one of my all-time favorite guitarists. Released in 1956 on the Roost label, Moonlight in Vermont compiles two previously released 10-inch records: Johnny Smith Quintet Jazz at NBC and Johnny Smith Quintet Featuring Stan Getz Jazz at NBC. Along with Johnny’s guitar work, Getz’s tenor sax adds an equally outstanding voice on an album that sounds cohesive despite its origin as two separate records. Born in 1922, Johnny Smith was…

IN A CAREER that spans more than 50 years, Lee Ritenour has played on tracks recorded by some of music’s biggest names. Aretha Franklin, Joe Henderson, Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, David “Fathead” Newman, George Benson, Pink Floyd — those are just some of the artists Ritenour has worked with. Along the way, he launched his own solo career in 1976 with the album First Course, performed as a member of Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra, and recorded three chart-topping albums with the smooth-jazz group Fourplay. He’s also become known for playing a red dot-neck Gibson ES-335 that he’s used throughout his career. “EVERYTHING WAS THERE: ABOUT 40 TO 50 AMPS, MAYBE A HUNDRED GUITARS, MUSIC FROM SINCE I WAS 12 YEARS OLD” Growing up in L.A. in the…

DID YOU KNOW that every major and natural minor scale contains within its structure six different pentatonic scales — three major and three minor? Once understood and utilized, this multipentatonic awareness can open up the fretboard in many convenient and inventive ways. For starters, it can help you break out of the uninspiring solitary-position-playing rut, sending your fingers to places on the fretboard you never thought they could go. It can also help you create unusual-sounding, “off the beaten path” phrases and easily craft melodic and rhythmic motifs. It can even open the floodgates for “inside/outside” passages. In this two-part lesson, I’ll explain and demonstrate how this can be done in appealing ways that will hopefully inspire you to take the musical ball and run with it in new and…

BELOVED FOR ITS dynamic touch sensitivity, clarity, openness, juicy harmonic richness, and an addictive blend of biting attack and forgiving compression, the original Gibson PAF — Patent Applied For — humbucker of the late 1950s has long been the Holy Grail of vintage pickups, and a challenge to reproduce. Several admirable re-creations have emerged in recent years, however, many of which are getting closer to cracking the code. We’ve rounded up several of these in the pages of Guitar Player in the past, usually logging a batch at a time every couple of years, and this issue brings us the latest such investigation. Most makers today agree on the essential components and construction of the original PAFs, though some differ in the formulations of some of these parts. After all…

BREEDLOVE HAS TEAMED with actor/musician Jeff Bridges to create three ecology-conscious signature models. They include the American-made flagship Oregon Concerto Bourbon CE ($2,699) and two additions to the Organic Collection that is developed stateside and crafted overseas: the Concert Copper E ($699) and the Amazon Concert Sunburst CE on review here. All three are made of solid tonewoods from sustainably harvested forests (not clear cut) and feature the motto All in this Together inlayed on the fretboard. Being unfamiliar with the granadillo wood used for the guitar’s back and sides, and always interested in attainably priced and ecologically sound instruments, I was very curious to give the Amazon Concert Sunburst CE a look and a play. This is a stunningly attractive guitar. A unique tobacco sunburst radiates through a thin…

Lockdown Loaded I’ve spent the past eight months playing more guitar than I have in the past eight years combined. I hate to say it’s “thanks” to Covid-19, but it’s definitely because of it. When I saw Steve Vai announcing “How I Survived 2020” [January 2021], I knew the answer right away — he survived by playing guitar, just like me and probably most of your readers. When I hear that the gear manufacturers have had a banner year because of the pandemic, I’m not surprised. I’ve already bought two new guitars worth about $4,300 combined, in addition to five effects pedals, a practice combo and a ton of plug-ins for my recording DAW. And I’m not done yet. —GEORG ESIPPLE I’ve been blown away by the recent covers —…

IF WE’RE SEEKING a definition for the term cool that bookends the title of this monthly feature, we could do far worse than hold up a pair of detail-precise re-creations of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars. Unveiled by the Gibson Custom Shop at the tail end of 2020, the Jimi Hendrix 1967 SG Custom and 1969 Flying V will be produced in just 150 examples of each model, including 25 left-handed Vs. Together, they deliver a heady trip some 50-odd years back in time. The SG Custom got national TV coverage when Hendrix played it on The Dick Cavett Show on September 9, 1969, and it made plenty of other live dates with the guitarist as well. The Flying V was custom-ordered direct from Gibson in a left-handed configuration, to replace a…

ALTHOUGH THE CLA SSIFICATION seems odd for an artist who was born and raised in Wales, has a PhD in astrophysics and holds down a day job as a video-game coder, Gwenifer Raymond begrudgingly embraces the “American primitive” label with which her hypnotic and often unsettling brand of acoustic fingerstyle guitar has been stamped. “A label is the easiest way to describe a thing, and I think ‘American primitive’ is probably the easiest way to describe what I do,” she says from her home in Brighton, U.K. The term, which acoustic guitarist John Fahey coined in the late ’50s to describe his own music, was always intended to somehow convey an ineffable and ever-evolving amalgam of influences. “Fahey himself invented the term because he couldn’t think of what it was…

EVERY SO OFTEN — and, actually, more often than not — Larry Carlton will be out and about and he’ll hear… Larry Carlton. “I’ll be at the supermarket with my daughter, or maybe we’ll be at a shopping mall, and I’ll hear a song and go, ‘Oh, yeah. I played on that.’ It’s always a funny kind of feeling, but it’s nice, too, especially when the song sounds fresh.” During the 1970s and into the ’80s, Carlton distinguished himself as one of the undisputed kings of the West Coast studio session scene. “I was the newcomer in town just as a lot of the Wrecking Crew players were moving on to other things,” he recalls. “I worked with a lot of them at the start of my career, but I…

ERIC CLAPTON’S WORK on the 1966 John Mayall album Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton inspired an entire generation of would-be blues guitarists as he defined the tone and expression that a great guitarist can achieve. And this particular great player found a great instrument to make his music: an original Gibson Les Paul with a sunburst finish. The cover of the record showed Clapton reading the Beano comic, so it became known as the Beano album, and the instrument he used became known as the Beano guitar. Many guitarists love Clapton’s playing on the Beano album. One such musician is Billy Gibbons, who was, at the time of its release, a budding young guitar player in Texas. “The sound was just so fierce and so attractive,” he says, “and the…

THE TASTEFUL APPLICATION of open-string licks is a cornerstone and hallmark of polished country lead-guitar playing, right up there with chicken pickin’ and bending the strings of a Fender Telecaster. Every great country picker, from Chet Atkins to Brad Paisley, has a cache of open-string licks that they can employ at the drop of a hat in various guitar-friendly keys (namely the ones without “sharp” or “flat” in their name). Owing a considerable debt to the rolling banjos and cascading fiddles of bluegrass masters like Earl Scruggs and Kenny Baker, country guitar legends like James Burton and Albert Lee seamlessly wove open strings into the fabric of their technique, crafting blistering openposition runs and complexly layered melodies filled with chiming open notes. These cool-sounding techniques have influenced many other modern…

I THINK WE can all agree Leo Fender is a god of the electric guitar world. Unfortunately, he’s also something of a devil, having done more to sow confusion about vibrato and tremolo than any other human being. To understand how, you need to know that tremolo is a fluctuation in volume, like rocking a volume pedal rapidly up and down, while vibrato is the fluctuation in pitch we recognize in singers, or Clapton’s wiggling finger. Yet we often mix them up, largely because Leo regularly called the tremolo effect in his amps vibrato, and because the pitch-shifting, vibrato bar of a Fender Strat is still marketed as a tremolo system. Vibrato was heard in the 1960s in the Magnatone 260 amps used by Lonnie Mack and Robert Ward. Boss…

WHEN MICHAEL SOLDANO put the Super Lead Overdrive 100 into production in 1987, he could hardly have known it would become a benchmark of the amplifier industry that would remain in production more than 30 years later. What he did intuit correctly, however, was that guitarists seeking to dial in the high-gain lead sounds that were popular at the time were being woefully underserved by the larger amplifier manufacturers of the era, whose stock offerings required expensive (and often noisy) aftermarket modifications to attain desired levels of sustain and drive. Soldano’s SLO, on the other hand, offered gobs of gain right out of the box, and could do so at a sensible volume, since the amp’s overdrive sound was generated entirely in the preamp section and therefore did not require…

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IN LATE 2020, Gibson announced the relaunch of the Kramer brand with the Original and Modern Collections that re-create the specs of the legendary models from the ’80s. The Original Collection consists of the Baretta, Focus, Icon, Pacer and SM-1 guitars, while the Modern Collection includes the Assault, Striker, Nite-V bass and three new signature models: the Charlie Parra Vanguard, Tracii Guns Gunstar Voyager and the Snake-Baretta, named for Dave “Snake” Sabo. Promising more to come in 2021, Kramer says the collections will feature everything from “entry-level and intermediate guitars to professional offerings across our entire line, including the USA-assembled Custom Graphic Collection, hand-painted by legendary Kramer graphic artists.” Kramer was founded in the late ’70s by Dennis Berardi and Gary Kramer, a friend and associate of Travis Bean. The…

SAYING SIERRA HULL is only a mandolin player is selling the 29-year-old singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist short. But it probably wouldn’t hurt her feelings. After all, mandolin is the instrument that brought her to the Grand Ole Opry stage at the age of 10 and Carnegie Hall two years later, and helped her land a record deal before she could drive a car. However, mandolin is only part of the story. Guitar, especially, has been in the mix on songs like the multi-instrument workout “Hullarious” on her Rounder Records debut, Secrets, released in 2008 when she was 16. But as Hull evolved from straight bluegrass with her Grammy-nominated Bela Fleck–produced 2016 release, Weighted Mind, she adopted a more experimental approach that showcased her mandolin playing and songwriting with little additional…

THERE’S NO NAME in the guitar-amp world that will command more hushed reverence, or a larger price tag, than Dumble. So rare and exalted are these creations that even the better efforts among a host of copies thereof have become highly acclaimed, while an encounter with the real thing is likely to make even the most stoic guitarist go weak in the knees. So what exactly is a Dumble, and why all the fuss? Let’s take a look. Alexander Dumble started repairing and modifying amplifiers in California in the 1960s, and built the first of his best-known model, the Overdrive Special, in 1972. The term model is something of a stretch, however, given that every one was custom made and slightly different from the ones before and after it. Each…

AT THE AGE of 18, Tash Sultana was given a high school assignment to list lifetime goals. As it turned out, the young Australian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist had it all mapped out. “‘I want to get a record deal, and I want to headline music festivals around the world,’” Sultana recalls writing. “And all of that happened by the time I turned 21.” Before that, though, Sultana busked on the streets of Melbourne and played open-mic nights long past teenage curfews. But this was no solo folkie affair. Sultana — who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns they and them — complemented their dramatically expressive voice with a penchant for gnashing, big-time electric guitar solos, and perfected a dazzlingly fresh approach to rock and R&B by using looping pedals…

JIMMY BUFFETT HAS amassed an impressive bounty of instruments over 50 years, and the lengendary troubadour and buccaneer dug into his trove to render his latest acoustic endeavor, Songs You Don’t Know by Heart (Mailboat). The title is a play on his ubiquitous greatest-hits collection, Songs You Know by Heart, an apt title for most listeners whether they’re a Buffett denier or a true-blue Parrothead aware of his every tune. The guitarist’s diehard fans voted for the nuggets on this latest album, which reimagines deep catalog cuts. Songs You Don’t Know by Heart is the perfect album for every banana-bar minstrel who has sung “Margaritaville” or “Cheeseburger in Paradise” wishing they could turn the audience on to hipper choices from Buffett’s catalog. It’s also ideal for anyone who has dug…

AS THE LINES between acoustic and electric guitars continue to blur, it’s easy to get confused about pickup systems. Most players know that an acoustic with onboard electronics plugged into an electric guitar rig sounds bad, but relatively few players consider why. The following is a basic overview of the two main kinds of pickups relevant to acoustic players in need of amplification. MAGNETIC SOUNDHOLE PRO/CON The electromagnetic pickups commonly found on electric guitars can be used in the soundhole of an acoustic guitar, and they will sound pretty good through an electric-guitar amp because of the high impedance, low output and tight midrange focus. Use a direct box to convert a magnetic pickup to an appropriate level before sending it to a P.A. Active, battery-powered soundhole pickups can deliver…

THE AMERICAN PROFESSIONAL I I series are the latest evolution of guitars that have been updated to suit the needs of today’s players. The series comprises two Stratocasters (standard and HSS), the Telecaster and Telecaster Deluxe, the vibrato-equipped Jazzmaster and five basses. For this review, we’re focusing on the Strat and Tele Deluxe models, which were tested with a reissue Fender Deluxe Reverb (with hardwired circuitry by George Alessandro), a Mesa/Boogie Mark Five: 25 1x10 combo, and a selection of boost and distortion pedals from Xotic, Fulltone and Hermida. AMERICAN PROFESSIONAL II STRATOCASTER Resplendent in its Sienna Sunburst finish and off-white pickguard with matching knobs and pickup covers, this nicely made guitar sports a maple neck that’s carved with what Fender calls a Deep C profile. It’s more rounded on…

“SOME SONGS TAKE forever to write. You labor over them for so long, and you start to wonder if there’s a point to continuing,” Eric Johnson explains. “Then there are those other songs that just come to you like magic. When that happens, it’s like you’ve just been sent a sort of gift from the universe.” The Texas virtuoso puts “Cliffs of Dover” in the latter category. As guitar instrumentals go, it’s hard to beat — four minutes of cascading melodies that flood the senses and impart a sensation of total joy. It became Johnson’s signature song after propelling his second solo album, 1990’s Ah Via Musicom, to multi-Platinum status and a Grammy win for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. But “Cliffs of Dover” almost didn’t see the light of day.…