Innehållsförteckning för June 2023 från Guitar Player

I LOOK FORWARD to every story and article we print each month, often for different reasons. The reason I so enjoy Jim Campilongo’s monthly “Vinyl Treasures” column is for his personal insights into the classic albums he explores. Discovering how another person experiences and interprets music — or anything, really — is an opportunity to shape or reshape our own perceptions, and in doing so broaden our minds and gain new insights that possibly give us a fresh spin on art, politics, life… pretty much anything you can think of. In this month’s column, Jim puts the subject of re-interpretation front and center with his discussion of José Feliciano’s 1968 debut album, Feliciano!, on which the guitarist served up his own Latino jazz–influenced takes on the day’s pop standards, including…

VIVIAN CAMPBELL WAS barely 21 years old when he joined the initial lineup of Dio, and he was an integral part of the group’s first three studio albums. Quite a lot has happened since then. The Irish-born axeman was actually seasoned by the time Ronnie James Dio beckoned. A player since he was 12, Campbell was a teenager when he joined Sweet Savage, an Emerald Isle metal band whose “Killing Time” was covered by Metallica. He brought an abundance of chops into Dio and co-wrote tracks like “Rainbow in the Dark,” “Gypsy,” “Caught in the Middle,” “The Last in Line” and “Just Another Day.” But after touring to support their album Sacred Heart in 1986, Campbell acrimoniously parted ways with Dio, a rift that would not be repaired before the frontman’s…

Buddy Guy’s reached that point in life, and in career, where he could wear the proverbial Grumpy Old Man tag with pride and purpose. But the truth is he’s anything but. With nearly 70 years of a playing career behind him, the Chicago-based legend prefers to be a wise and wizened gentleman, a gracious and enthusiastic representative of the Old School, with a sworn mission not to let his chosen music, the blues, fade away, even as he hits the road this year with his own Damn Right Farewell Tour. Guy, at 86, is certainly well-suited to the task. Hell, his story even sounds like a classic blues song. Guy was born to sharecroppers in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and did his own time in the fields, getting $2.50 for every 100…

I’M ASHAMED OF my stand game, and from what I’ve seen over the years, most of us should be. We’ll spend all our dough on a guitar and then set it on whatever janky stand is around, or no stand at all. I’ve seen it everywhere: at nice clubs, studios, the GP offices and even in the Beatles documentary Get Back. There are so many awesome options, from multi-guitar stands and racks, to replacing stands with hangers that clear up precious floor space. I recently had to move into a new place with less room suitable for guitars in cases. I wound up re-evaluating everything. Here’s what I learned: ASSESS OPTIONS The first step is to take inventory. What kinds of guitars do you have, what’s the primary purpose of each…

IT’S BEEN FOUR years since Czech manufacturer Furch opened its Nashville distribution center. Since then, the company has gained stateside recognition, including an Editors’ Pick Award in GP’s September 2020 issue for the Green Master’s Choice. Furch uses seven color designations to differentiate its production ranges, all of which now feature solid woods, with the Blue range the second-most affordable. The latest edition Blue Deluxe Gc-CM is a grand auditorium cutaway with mahogany back and sides and a cedar top. It’s highlighted by dual beveled edges on the front and back, and like all Furch models it features the company’s proprietary CNR System, in which the mahogany neck is reinforced with modern materials and has dual-action adjustment [see “Meet Your Maker,” page 26]. The black shading on the beveling matches…

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IF YOU WERE seeking power in your fuzz-wah tones in the mid-to-late 1970s, nothing delivered in a more high-voltage fashion than the Morley PWF. The name was short for Power Wah Fuzz, and the pedal was long on aggressive, hard-charging tone. Shining through a crowded field of stompboxes, Morley pedals were big and built to last. Swathed in shiny chrome, they were presented as the best of the best in the effects revolution’s boomingest decade. Morley products were often referred to as “the Cadillac of effects pedals,” although the company frequently advertised them with a Rolls-Royce grille subtly hovering in the background, a notion purportedly inspired by the fact that Ike Turner used to drive his own Rolls to the Morley factory outside L.A. to purchase pedals directly from the…

THE LINES BETWEEN acoustic and electric become more blurred every day, and one cat that’s had a hybrid vision for a cool quarter century now is ALO’s Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz. He essentially turns a grand auditorium cutaway into a hollow-body electric by using a sound-hole pickup through a tube amp, and he can make it sound like Trey Anastasio meets Wes Montgomery. Lebowitz is a regular call for Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and other festival scene luminaries, including Jack Johnson. He’ll be an artist-at-large again this year at the High Sierra Music Festival, where he’s liable to play a dozen or so sets with numerous acts. You’d be hard-pressed to name another guitarist on the NorCal scene over this past quarter century that’s played a more unifying, Jerry Garcia–like role…

SHOULD WE CONSIDER it ironic when the mighty Fender finds inspiration in C-list catalog guitars of the 1960s? Whatever the answer, Fender’s creative reimagining of its classic designs has been firing on all cylinders in recent years, and the new Gold Foil Collection further exemplifies that sense of adventure. Although these Jazzmaster and Telecaster models are named for the pickups mounted into them, it’s obvious at first glance that Fender has used the electronics as a springboard to create new renditions of these classic shapes, and the immediate visual appeal of each is impossible to deny. Those fun, funky pickups used on myriad Harmony and Silvertone guitars of the late ’50s and ’60s have been enjoying major popularity for quite some time now. And while this isn’t the first time…

IN THE LATE 1980s, Paul Reed Smith called on Ted McCarty — ex-president of Gibson and the visionary behind the ES-335, SG, Firebird, Flying V and Explorer — to consult with him on guitar design and production techniques. McCarty became a mentor and friend to Smith, and in 1994 PRS issued its first McCarty model, leading to a series that now comprises four U.S.-made Core models, three S-2 series guitars (also made in Stevensville, Maryland) and three SE McCartys made by Cor-Tek in Indonesia. The latter includes this latest 594 Singlecut, featuring all-mahogany construction, a maple-veneer top, 58/15 LT S pickups and the zinc bridge and stop tailpiece found on the costlier Core and Private Stock guitars. The SE McCarty 594 (the number refers to the 24.594-inch scale length) is…

ARIELLE HAS NEVER made a secret of her love for all things retro. Since being discovered in 2010 by Nuno Bettencourt, she’s found herself opening for — and fitting in well with — some of rock’s most classic acts, including Heart, Joan Jett, Graham Nash, Country Joe McDonald and members of Deep Purple. Her talents didn’t go unnoticed — Brian May handpicked her for a key role in his London-based musical, We Will Rock You. He then went on to help her develop the retro-futuristic Arielle model for his Brian May Guitars, making it the first original guitar design May has contributed to since creating his own iconic Red Special. With the title of her 2021 album, Analog Girl in a Digital World, Arielle acknowledged her decidedly anachronistic bent. Her…

MOST OF US know that vintage acoustic guitars can be a little inconsistent in quality. We accept that some are diamonds, while others don’t shine quite so brightly. After all, isn’t that part of the mystique of things built the old-fashioned way? The trouble with that theory is that, while everyone loves a nice, resonant old guitar, no one wants to own one of the bad ones. And that really summarizes what modern luthiers are trying to do through the union of handcraft and technology today: make better guitars, more consistently. Few companies embody this approach as completely as Furch. In fact, the company, which is based in the Czech Republic, has revolution in its blood. Founder František Furch built his first guitar in 1981 because so few good acoustics…

IF YOU’RE LIKE me, you might not think about José Feliciano very much. I knew his 1968 hit cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Every time I heard it while I was out and about, I would stop dead in my tracks and listen as it slipped into the Muzak of my errands. That was the extent of my knowledge of him, until I bought his 1968 debut album, Feliciano! Released on RCA when the guitarist was a mere 23 years old, Feliciano! includes both “Light My Fire” and his other early hit, a cover of “California Dreamin’.” The album spent 59 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart and received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. José himself won the Grammy for Best New Artist at…

U2’S THIRD ALBUM, WAR, is generally regarded as the band’s first truly great record. Although not officially a concept album per se — it doesn’t follow a dedicated storyline — the record has a prevailing theme centered around worldwide strife and the ravages of armed conflict, whether it was close to the band’s home base of Dublin or halfway across the globe. An impassioned and confrontational work, War was a critical and commercial triumph, and its rapid succession of smash singles — “New Year’s Day,” Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Two Hearts Beat as One” — pushed it to Gold and Platinum status on both side of the Atlantic. But in the months before U2 — singer-guitarist Bono, guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. — began recording…