Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2020 från Guitarist

We all love talking about gear, but there’s a dark side to that as well as a light. Go online and you’ll find plenty of blowhards denouncing this or that new guitar as ‘overrated’ or ‘terrible’, even if they haven’t tried it. Worse still are the ones who brag relentlessly about their amazing collection of guitars – then lord it over anyone whom they deem to own inferior gear. If you’ve ever felt downcast because of something that’s been said to you by trolls of that kind, I have a story to share that might help put things in perspective. One of the hands-down best guitarists we know plays a battered Aria Pro II copy of an ES-175. He gigs it all over the world at prestigious festivals and is…

PRICE: £809 ORIGIN: Korea TYPE: Single-cutaway hollowbody electric guitar BODY: Laminated maple with sound post NECK: Maple, set-in, with aged white binding SCALE LENGTH: 625mm (24.6”) NUT/WIDTH: Graph Tech NuBone/42.86mm FINGERBOARD: Rosewood, 305mm (12”) radius, pearloid ‘Neo-Classic Thumbnail’ inlays FRETS: 22, medium jumbo HARDWARE: Chrome Licensed Bigsby B60 True Vibrato, Adjusto-Matic anchored six-saddle bridge, vintage-style open back tuners STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 54mm ELECTRICS: 2x Black Top Filter’Tron humbuckers, master volume with treble bleed circuit, 2x volume, master tone, 3-way pickup selector toggle switch WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.3/7.3 OPTIONS: Gigbag £63; hard case £191 LEFT-HANDERS: No FINISHES: Matte Vintage White (as reviewed), Matte Phantom Metallic, Matte Black…

With their complex and hi-tech hollow construction, Relish’s Swiss-made guitars take a very fresh look at the electric instrument. They’re also made in small numbers and cost a pretty penny. Until now. In comparison with the Swiss-made instruments, Trinity by Relish is made in Indonesia and is a simplified, more conventional instrument that retains the pull-out/push-in pickup swapping system that we first encountered on the Eucalypt Mary back in issue 448 and that is now a part of all Relish designs. The body outline here apes the Swiss-made Jane and Mary models but is simply made from basswood in a choice of three gloss metallic finishes. It’s a 24-fret design, too, with a long Fender scale, a hardtail through-body strung Stratstyle bridge, and a simple master volume and tone setup…

The spookiest thing about the new Squier Paranormal guitars is the visitation from three ghosts of riffing past. The surf-soaked offset Squier Super-Sonic model first rose from Davy Jones’ locker in 1997. The Toronado and the Mustang-on-steroids that is the Cyclone began haunting the Fender catalogue in 1998 and 2002 respectively. Squier’s Paranormal Series is rounded out by a pair of too-cool-for-ghouls Cabronitas and a Telecaster that’s wrestling with an identity crisis. Priced at £399 a skull, you don’t need extra sensory perception to know these things demand further investigation. Here goes… [EM] PARANORMAL SERIES SUPER-SONIC £399 Originally issued as part of the Squier Vista Series in 1997, the Super-Sonic was briefly resurrected as a Fender Pawn Shop model around 2012. The new Paranormal edition features the same HH-format reverse…

Kurt Cobain’s record-breaking Martin wasn’t the only big draw at Julien’s Auctions’ Music Icons sales. One of the first four Cloud guitars Prince ever commissioned sold for $563,500 (around £502,000). The 1984 Blue Angel Cloud 2 was used by the late legend on his 1985 Purple Rain and 1992 Diamonds And Pearls tours, as well as Saturday Night Live’s 15th anniversary special. But it’s not the most valuable Cloud to sell at auction: Prince’s blue teal Cloud, built by luthier Andy Beech, fetched $700,000 in 2017. Brian May has been voted the best rock guitarist of all time in an online poll organised by our sister title Total Guitar via GuitarWorld.com. “I’m absolutely speechless,” said May in reaction to the news. “I’m blown away. I have to say it’s completely…

It’s really great that so many guitar stores are finally reopening their doors, albeit on an appointment-only basis. Even if circumstances mean a purchase isn’t yet on the cards, it still feels good to get in amongst it. I shall hopefully be visiting a store this weekend, when I go to stay with my ‘bubble’ in north Essex. I can’t wait to reconnect with my old friends who own the store to catch up on how things are going. Sadly, reconnecting in this way isn’t quite the same thing for the world of gigging. Even though pubs are – as I write this – cautiously reopening, the likelihood of us getting back to watching local live music is looking slim for the foreseeable future. Possibly even the whole of this…

My favourite substance for cleaning is naphtha, better known to us as cigarette lighter fluid. A few squirts on a piece of folded kitchen towel and a bit of elbow grease is all that’s needed to dislodge the worst grime. Naphtha is quick to evaporate and doesn’t interfere with any guitar finishes, so you can use it safe in the knowledge no harm will result. For the fingerboard, a lemon oil fretboard conditioner does a fine job, and also keeps the bare wood from drying out.…

Although this sounds like a type of esoteric philosophy, it’s actually a useful harmonic tool that allows us to create ascending or descending lines within a chord progression, graduating between different chords or creating a melody, depending on how you arrange them. As we’re moving just one single note within the chord, we could make that note the top line and imply a melody (as we did previously with the Summertime-style chords), or work within the chord as these examples do here. The example chords are all based in the context of E minor so are named in that context. For instance, as a separate entity, Example 4 (Emin6) could be seen as an A7/E but in this context it is the final variant on E minor, providing a nice…

Donald DJ Johnson is the rock-steady rhythm master behind Khruangbin’s sound. Here he explains what makes some guitarists more rewarding to work with than others… “I think for me it is all about approach. The thing that I really appreciate about both Mark and Laura is that they approach their instruments not like people would normally approach them. So Laura doesn’t approach playing bass like a typical bass player and Mark doesn’t approach playing guitar like a guitarist. Most of the time, he is trying to find ways to make his guitar not sound like a guitar or how to voice things not like a guitarist would voice them. Laura Lee, instead of focusing on,‘How can I make this sound cool and technical?’, she focuses on,‘How does it feel? What…

1 This isn’t a new model, is it? No. The Mike Stern signature originally surfaced in 1998 as the Pacifica 1511MS and was made in Japan. There was a lower-ticket version, the 311MS, which ran from 1999 to 2003 and was made in Yamaha’s Taiwanese factory. Whether this was actually a Mike Stern signature is a moot point as Yamaha maintains that the ‘M’ stands for maple (fingerboard) and the ‘S’ for single-cutaway. Of course! 2 So, what’s this 1611MS, then? Without a single parp of a trumpet the 1511MS became the 1611MS in, we believe, 2016. The specs remained pretty similar, although it was “refreshed” with Yamaha’s exclusive wood treatment – IRA (Initial Response Acceleration) technology – which “shakes off the stress often found in new guitars and makes…

Fender has plenty of classic-style Telecasters with humbuckers. For example, you could start with the Vintera ’70s Telecaster Custom or Deluxe (£879) then move up to the American Performer Telecaster Hum (£1,049). There’s some Japanese-style with the Made In Japan Troublemaker Telecaster (£1,129), while two of our favourites happen to be the American Professional Telecaster Deluxe ShawBucker (£1,569) and American Original 70s Telecaster Custom (£1,789). Fret-King remains an overlooked brand and its Country Squire Classic (£549) certainly ticks the ‘modernised T-style with neck humbucker’ box nicely, with plenty of cash spare for modding. Of course, if your budget extends a little further, Suhr and Friedman make cracking Ts starting at around £2,500.…

If you want to stick to the Tommy Emmanuel signature route, Maton has a whole range available; Tommy’s mainstay is his Maton EBG808TE, which you’ll find at around £2,169. Martin’s OMC-35E, found streeting at £3,199, adds a good few hundred to the price but comes stage-ready with a Fishman Aura VT Enhance pickup installed. Fellow US acoustic big hitter Taylor has the 512CE V-Class waiting in the wings at £2,499, while Gibson’s Montana Songwriter offers a bit of dreadnought kapow at £2,499.…

Dunes £179 Dunes is a cut-down version of EarthQuaker’s Palisades offering three of that pedal’s six clipping voices alongside two different bandwidth settings and gain, tone and level knobs. Odyssey Intergalactic Driver £219 Described in our review as having “a versatility that’s truly remarkable”, this Intergalactic Driver features three selectable clipping options or a simple clean boost with EQ. Bonsai £219 Another drive pedal with multiple options, the Bonsai has a rotary switch that offers nine different variations of Tube Screamer, covering the history of that iconic pedal’s circuitry.…

It’s mid-afternoon at our house and our little daughter is fast asleep having her nap. This is no obstacle to recording with the Kemper Stage, however. As we have discovered in previous tests you can get great cranked amp sounds out of this digital profiling amp and into your recording device completely silently. Today’s recording project is to make a couple of demos to form the basis of an upcoming jam with excellent blues-rock guitarist Innes Sibun. I’d mentioned a couple of Neil Young-esque pieces I’d written to Innes and he suggested sending them over before our jam so he could familiarise himself with them. This presented a more or less perfect first practical test for the Kemper as I wanted really organic, tweedy amp tones on these tracks. If…

Gibson Firebirds first appeared in 1963 in the form of four models: the single-pickup/dot-inlay I; dual-pickup/ dot-inlay III; dual-pickup/trapezoid-inlay V; and triple-pickup/block-inlay VII. With their angular geometry and custom colours, the original line-up of Explorer-like ‘reverse’ Firebirds was intended to tap into the zeitgeist of the forward-thinking, automobile-obsessed younger generation and compete directly with Fender in the popular solidbody market. Unfortunately, the Firebird did not rise like the proverbial phoenix as hoped. Despite its flashy looks, it failed to catch on, and shipping figures show the early reverse Firebirds had only a fraction of the SG range’s success during their brief existence from ’63 to ’65. To add insult to injury, the Firebird’s design was hotly contested by Fender as a mirror image of its patented offset Jazzmaster and Jaguar…

Late 1968 EHX founded; two-knob Foxey Lady and LPB-1 plug-in unit released Early 1969 Two-transistor Muff Fuzz released 1969 Four-transistor Big Muff Pi released; three-knob ‘triangle’ layout; black graphics; metallic casing 1973 ‘Ram’s head’ motif; knobs in a line; colour graphics; metallic casing 1976 Black & red graphics dominate metallic casing; power supply jack 1978 Op-amp circuit; some with tone bypass 1979 Alternative combinations of black/red/white/blue graphics 1984 Electro-Harmonix temporarily ceases production in US 1992 Russian-made Sovtek Big Muff Pi 2000 Production recommences in New York…

Difficulty 5 mins per example Tutor: Richard Barrett | Gear used: Knaggs SSC, Vox AC15 C1 Four-Note Blues THERE ARE MANY tutorials that advise on how to expand your vocabulary in terms of extra notes added to pentatonic patterns, referring to implied chord extensions or even superimposing one implied chord over another. While I’m a fan of these lessons, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to flip this approach on its head and go in completely the opposite direction. To that end, I’ve chosen just four notes from the B minor pentatonic scale (A, B, D and E) and not ventured outside of this self-imposed limitation at all – not even to play these notes in different positions. Doublestops, slides and string bends are all fine, so…

ALBERT KING Born Under A Bad Sign It’s good to know the resurgence of blues music in the late 60s benefitted the original artists, as well as the new young torchbearers. In 1967, Albert’s minimalist style cuts through in the title track, plusOh,PrettyWomanandLaundromat Blues, which showcases some of the super-wide string bends Albert was known for. There are a few more notes at play here than in our example solo, but the approach is similar. ALBERT COLLINS Alive & Cool Always cool, here we have ‘The Iceman’live in 1969. The recording is pretty lo-fi, but that doesn’t take away from the experience at all.Albert is in fine voice on both vocals and guitar on tracks such as How Blue Can You Get, Deep Freeze and Baby What You Want Me…

Khruangbin The Texas-three piece making some of the most soulful, exciting guitar music today – with a truly global sound p44 Tommy Emmanuel The acoustic maestro plays a Maton, doesn’t he? Not always. We talk to Tommy about recreating his Larrivée p92 Cars & Guitars Billy Gibbons has one of the best guitar (and custom car) collections in the world. Step inside his tone garage on p74…

Trinity by Relish is quite a departure from your Swiss-made guitars… “This is a start of a new chapter in my company’s history. Our intention has always been to inspire musicians and I’ve finally achieved a way of being able to approach more musicians. I struggled with how to make a compromise with the instruments we have built here in Switzerland in comparison with having a new partner that is capable of reducing my costs on the guitars we make.” How did you end up with Cor-Tek making the new guitar? “After approaching 16 different suppliers I went with the best one. I personally met the president of the company – I gave him some Swiss chocolate! – and explained my vision of inspiring musicians but not enough of them…

ORANGE AMPLIFICATION FS-1 FOOTSWITCH £24.99 Orange has unveiled the FS1 Mini, a new metal-cased single-button footswitch that stats at around 200g and 87x30x37mm and has a single orange LED indicator and quarter-inch jack to connect to your amplifier. The FS1 Mini can be used to switch channels on all Orange twin-channel valve amps including the Crush 20, Crush 20RT, Crush 35 and Crush Pro amps. It will engage/disengage the reverb on the Rockerverb and Crush Pro and the attenuator on the Rockerverb and Dual Dark series. The footswitch can be used as a master volume lift for the OR50 amp, an EQ lift with the Custom Shop 50 Plus Global and a gain boost on the OR100. Other uses include blend for the OB1 Series and compression on the 4…

Last month, we joined Cornwall-based luthier Seth Baccus to discuss how the material your nut is made out of contributes to tone. Seth had some fascinating insights to share on that topic, but then our conversation turned to how the nut is made. The material that your guitar nut is made from is only part of the equation, Seth advises. More important still is the way it has been shaped and cut, which has a critical influence on tuning stability and intonation as well as tone. “If you get the nut slot just right, it makes the guitar so much easier to play and tuning is a lot more accurate, especially in the lower register” “There are a few things to take into consideration,” Seth says of making nuts. “One…

Star Letter IT AIN’T WHAT YOU OWN I bought my first good guitar, a pink Stratocaster, in 1970 from Jack Brand at Sound City in Shaftesbury Avenue in London for £80 (the going rate for a 1964 Strat back then). He and I were in a band called The Factory and he later went on to join Meal Ticket. When I got the guitar, the first thing Jack said was,“Of course, we’ll strip the paint off to natural as it’s currently a very uncool Hank Marvin [Fiesta] red.” Fast-forward to 1983 and life in Cornwall as a semi-retired musician (I ended up doing eight gigs a week) and the car engine blows up. The only thing we have to sell to get some cash for the car is the guitar,…

Jack Gardiner Escapades Independent Release  8/10 Instrumental rock guitar is alive and kickin’ Our interest in Jack Gardiner’s debut album was piqued by a quote from none other than the formidable Guthrie Govan: “Jack is certainly a young guitarist with great technique. What sets him apart from so many of his contemporaries, however, is his innate musicality and also his abundance of experience as a live performer in the real world… a guitar player who can offer technical facility and musicality in equal measure.” One listen to 26-year-old Jack’s album substantiates the maestro’s analysis. From the outset, Escapades eases gently into an elite melodic instrumental rock category, complete with mind-boggling fretboard gymnastics aplenty. The solo on Cereal Killer acts as evidence of a rare talent. [DM] Standout track: Until Next…

“I wanted a guitar that I could do anything with,” says Adam of his 1611MS.“I toured with Beverley Knight last year and I used it on that gig and it was brilliant. I like doing gigs where I don’t have to put down and pick up another guitar. In the studio, which is my main gig, that’s different: I take loads of guitars. But live, I like to do the whole gig on one guitar. You get sweaty and you get into it – it becomes part of the gig.” Adam also took advantage of a bit of modding.“I had a coil-split added to the neck humbucker, so I could make it sound like a traditional Telecaster-style guitar,” he says. “Obviously, Beverley is a soul artist so I needed a…

LARRIVÉE C-03R-TE CUSTOM £2,699 CONTACT 440 PHONE 0113 2379658 WEB www.larrivee.com We’ve often pondered over the exact value of signature models during idle chit-chat here at Guitarist. After all, nobody is daft enough to believe buying a replica of so-and-so’s guitar will immediately bestow an additional helping of talent upon the new owner. So what exactly is the appeal? If you want to play like Clapton, surely dedicated and enduring practice will be a far better vehicle than shelling out for a lookalike instrument? And it has to be said that signature models usually have a premium price tag attached as part of the deal. We concluded that you’re probably talking ‘ballpark’ here. If you find yourself holding an instrument with all the onboard refinements and finery that an artist…

PRICE: £2,699 (inc case) ORIGIN: USA TYPE: 0000 12-fret cutaway TOP: Sitka spruce BACK/SIDES: Indian rosewood MAX RIM DEPTH: 121mm MAX BODY WIDTH: 406mm NECK: Mahogany SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”) TUNERS: Larrivée NUT/WIDTH: 44.45mm FINGERBOARD: Ebony FRETS: 17 BRIDGE/SPACING: Bone/57.1mm WEIGHT (kg/lb): 9.92/4.5 OPTIONS: None RANGE OPTIONS: Tommy’s tribute model is based around the Larrivée C-10 12-fret (£4,699) LEFT-HANDERS: Yes FINISH: Satin 9/10 PROS A wonderfully realised no-nonsense 12-fretter with a foot in many stylistic camps CONS All we can think of is that 14-fret-to-the-body devotees may run out of fretboard, but we’re being almost comically picky here…

ORIGIN: Germany TYPE: Delay and reverb pedal FEATURES: Selectable hard bypass or trails, 1.5s max delay time, tap tempo CONTROLS: Delay, Time, Repeats, Delay Sensitivity, Delay mode selector, Tap tempo division selector, Reverb, Decay, Damp, Reverb Sensitivity, Reverb mode selector, Reverb/Delay order switch, Expression mode selector, Tap footswitch, bypass footswitch, internal dip switches x2 CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output, FX loop, EXP POWER: 9V DC adaptor 220mA DIMENSIONS: 97 (w) x 120 (d) x 62mm (h) 8/10…

THE BACKGROUND ERIC REID, Via Email I love analogue effects pedals and I’m not really into Helix-style multis. Furthermore, I don’t like carting big pedalboards to gigs. What’s the most flexibility I can pack into a three-pedal ’board, do you think? I’ve read about pedals like Keeley’s DDR that seems to pack a lot of possibilities into one pedal. What else could I add to my three-pedal rig to provide the ultimate in tonal bang for my buck in terms of multiple drives, modulations and other classic effects? THE QUESTIONS 1 IS IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE A REALLY FLEXIBLE EFFECTS RIG FROM JUST THREE PEDALS? 2 WHAT PEDALS WOULD I NEED TO BE AS FLEXIBLE AS POSSIBLE? 3 WHAT ELSE SHOULD I ADD TO MAXIMISE THE SMALL RIG? THE…

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “It was a vintage Fender Telecaster and I can’t remember the exact year but I must have been 14 or 15 years old. I remember that it had a bridge pickup in it that was squealing like crazy and I didn’t know how to fix it, which is a typical problem on Teles. That was the first electric guitar that I fell in love with. I remember a friend of mine, when we were very young, his dad had an all-rosewood Telecaster – it was basically the George Harrison model – and he had it stashed away under his bed and we would take it out and look at it. I just loved the way Teles looked back…

“Jimi Hendrix used a Big Muff in 1969. Manny’s [of New York] was the first store I sold Big Muffs to and he bought one of the first ones from there. [Jimi] invited me to hang out at a recording session and there on the floor he had the Big Muff he bought at Manny’s! [Carlos] Santana bought a Big Muff from me using mail order with a Santana cheque and letterhead back in 1971! “This is my second go with Electro-Harmonix. I started it in ’68 and I was growing super-fast but went bankrupt in the early 80s. In the early 90s, I saw that a new market had developed – the vintage market – where all the pedals that I built in the 70s were selling for much…

If you spend enough time glued to the gogglebox, you’ll find you can’t move for American car-restoration shows. The plots are always a bit on the thin side. And there’s usually a stupid deadline… a deadline that can’t possibly be met. Yet something that looks as though it was pulled from the trash compactor on the Death Star is transformed into a sleek new conveyance with minutes to spare. Every. Single. Episode. Quite often these shows will produce something described as a “Rat Rod”. Beloved by rockabilly cats and kittens, these things are the antithesis of megabucks hot-rods with their expensive paint and polished chrome. Rat Rods generally boast visible wear and tear and flat primer-style paint. Luckily, the new Gretsch G5410T Electromatic “Rat Rod” that just rolled onto our…

PRICE: €1,614 (inc gigbag) ORIGIN: Indonesia TYPE: Single-cutaway solidbody electric BODY: Basswood NECK: Maple bolt-on, modern ‘C’ shape SCALE LENGTH: 650mm (25.59”) NUT/WIDTH: Graphite/41.8mm FINGERBOARD: Laurel, pearloid dot markers, 254mm (10”) radius FRETS: 24, medium jumbo stainless steel HARDWARE: Hard-tail six-saddle bridge w/ through-body stringing, enclosed tuners – chrome-plated STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 52mm ELECTRICS: 2x Relish XV humbuckers (as reviewed), 3-way lever pickup selector, master volume and tone. Additional pickup sets tested: Relish Single Coil, Seymour Duncan Alnico II HB Pro WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3.86/8.5 OPTIONS: Various pickup sets from Relish, Bare Knuckle and Seymour Duncan are available from €299. NB: “The pre-order Trinity comes with a standard set of swappable Relish XX pickups, a well-balanced and punchy humbucker duo,” says Relish.“Also included is a duo of Relish P-90 single-coil pickups…

The Beatles ABC Theatre Blackpool 1 August 1965 Here’s a real insight into how The Beatles sounded as a live unit without the overbearing screaming of their fanbase. The Beatles Blackpool Night Out was broadcast on TV to promote the Help! album, and the crowd enthusiasm was somehow mixed to a minimum so we can hear just how tight they’d become, a little over a year before they would retire from the stage. In under 20 minutes we get a six-song set of I Feel Fine, I’m Down, Act Naturally, Ticket To Ride, Help! and a McCartney solo with his mic’d Epiphone Texan for the TV debut of Yesterday. They sound incredible and incredibly human – fluffing the odd lyric, jiving along with the dancers during the credits and cracking…

This month, after deleting live dates from my diary because of Covid-19, I have instead been working on some country projects via the internet. One of the benefits of remote sessions is that you can do as many takes as you like – after all, the only person whose time you’re taking up is your own. It’s certainly been fun layering up guitars, using all the gear I’ve accumulated over the years. While the obvious choice for country music is the Telecaster (I used my refinished 1967 Sunburst), it’s also given me the chance to record with my newly assembled ‘Partscaster’ ’64 Strat. “Combined with the genuine ’64 neck and pickups, I’d defy most people to tell – purely from playing it – that it wasn’t a genuine ’64 example”…

The rack of unpolished guitars hanging up in my workshop this week probably signals something I have been putting off for a long time: it must be time to get the bottles out and start the arduous task of French polishing. I’m a big advocate of this centuries-old method for finishing wood, but the long hours needed to complete the process for just a single guitar mean I often find myself questioning whether I should go back to the drawing board and reconsider my methods. “I’m yet to find a process that surpasses the meditative joy of French polishing. As the finish builds, the wood bursts into life…” Simply put, French polishing is the process of rubbing minuscule amounts of finish (in this case shellac) onto the surface of the…

TRACK 1 My Broken Guitar Yogayo Reader Nick Peck, who records as My Broken Guitar, is beating the lockdown blues by setting down some personal songs with rich lines of acoustic and electric melody. We especially liked the sweetly misty acoustic instrumental Yogayo on his Soundcloud page. https://bit.ly/462feedbacklick1 TRACK 2 Paul Harmer The Last Song Reader Paul paid poignant tribute to the late, great John Prine with this steady rollin’ cover of Prine’s The Last Song, with a tasteful and poised solo crowning the track. https://bit.ly/462feedbacklick2 TRACK 3 Dead Man Bulge & Honey Dark Clouds Reader Scott Dedman sent in this atmospheric slice of alt-pop with echoes of Cat Power and Siouxsie and the Banshees – with a touch of Slash in the solo. https://bit.ly/462feedbacklick3 TRACK 4…

PICKUPS Pickups are by Roswell (previously WSC) who makes for many brands. The LAFs are Alnico V PAF-alikes LOCKING TUNERS WSC locking tuners with staggered height posts are a high-end touch designed to bring high tuning stability and optimal string break-angle over the nut NUT The nut is made from GraphTech Tusq XL NECK The neck is a 22-fret design with stainless steel frets – quite a selling point for some – that’s made of roasted Canadian maple. Again, roasted necks are usually only seen on higher-end guitars. Aside from their darker colour, roasted maple necks are thought to boast greater stability and, some argue, a slightly darker tonal influence than standard maple designs VIBRATO The Wilkinson WVS502K two-point vibrato is a high-quality Korean-made version of the unit that’s proved…

PRICE: £1,713 ORIGIN: Japan TYPE: Single-cutaway solidbody electric BODY: Light ash NECK: Maple bolt-on SCALE LENGTH: 648mm (25.5”) NUT/WIDTH: Synthetic bone/ 40.53mm FINGERBOARD: Maple, black dot markers, 184mm (7.25”) radius FRETS: 22, medium jumbo HARDWARE: Hardtail 6-saddle bridge w/ through-body stringing, vintage-style tuners – chrome/nickel-plated STRING SPACING, BRIDGE: 54mm ELECTRICS: Seymour Duncan Hot Rails single coil-sized humbucker (bridge) and zebra ’59 standard-sized humbucker (neck), 3-way lever pickup selector, master volume and tone WEIGHT (kg/lb): 3/6.6 OPTIONS: None RANGE OPTIONS: It remains the only single-cutaway Pacifica in the Yamaha range. Other Japanese-made models include the Revstar RSP20CR (£1,496), the long-running SA2200 (£1,978) and the modern SG 1800 trio at £3,200 each LEFT-HANDERS: No FINISHES: Natural (as reviewed). High gloss body, oil-finished neck 9/10 PROS Beautiful ‘simple is best’ design and build;…

1 Isn’t Tommy a Maton endorsee? Indeed he is. Tommy has been using his Maton TE Series guitars live on stage for many years. The story with the Larrivée C-03R-TE Custom began around 20 years ago when Jean Larrivée built Tommy a custom C-10 12-fretter, which has featured on many of TE’s recordings and is an instrument he still uses today. The C-03R-TE is a tribute to the original, designed via a collaboration between Tommy and Jean Larrivée. 2 So, he has two signature models? Tommy is a man of many signature guitars, almost exclusively Maton. The current series extends to five models: the EBG808TE, the cutaway version EBG808TEC, the dreadnought TE1 as well as the TE Personal and EMTE Mini models. He also has his own signature version of…

MANUFACTURER WALRUS AUDIO MODEL AGES PRICE £179 CONTACT FACE BVBA +32 3 844 67 97 WWW.WALRUSAUDIO.COM It’s not uncommon to see multiple drive pedals on a ’board, each with its own characteristics to suit a range of scenarios. But another option is a single drive pedal that can provide a choice of overdrive flavours. The Ages overdrive does just that with five distinct variations on its basic overdrive voice. It follows standard drive pedal protocol with volume, gain, bass and treble knobs but is equipped with a rotary switch offering five different clipping modes. Furthermore, there’s a knob to mix your dry sound with the drive for myriad variations. The drive is provided by symmetric silicon diode or LED soft clipping with low-gain and high-gain modes for each plus an…

Gordon Smith Guitars was founded in 1974 by Gordon Whitham and John Smith and its instruments were known for their basic no-nonsense looks and functional playability. If you wanted a mahogany-bodied single-humbucker guitar with no unnecessary frills, finery and an American price tag then Gordon Smith was the first number to dial. But simple good looks weren’t the brand’s only asset; the guitars that the Partington-based workshop turned out back then could deliver the goods. John Smith’s design ethic was that he wanted a guitar to be made like a Zippo lighter – in that it did one thing really well, playing the role of a basic rock ’n’ roll machine. Since 2015 the brand has been in the hands of Auden Guitars in Higham Ferrers, where the company is…

“When I play live I usually use two Fender Hot Rod DeVilles. One of them is a dry amp and the second Hot Rod DeVille will be used for an effect or wet amp. I have two pedalboards (see images below). The guitar is a Custom Shop Fender Strat that has two Lollar Imperial humbuckers that are basically PAF-style. So it’s a Les Paul-alike sound with a Strat feel. I like the scale length on a Strat much better – the longer scale with more tension – and the feel of the Strat is nicer to me. Just being able to sit on the couch with it is more comfortable and then, of course, the tremolo. I set it up with the 500k pots so it really does have a…

Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi Although many people identify the Big Muff Pi as a fuzz pedal, Electro-Harmonix describes its most revered of stompboxes as a “distortion/sustainer”. The distinctions between fuzz, distortion and overdrive are as fuzzy as the sounds themselves, and in the early days, these kinds of tones were often created by accident. Such was the case when recording engineer Glenn Snoddy took the first commercially available transistorised fuzz pedal – the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone – to market in 1962 with Gibson, after hearing the ‘fuzz tone’ produced by a faulty console preamp while recording an electric bass guitar (as heard on Marty Robbins’ 1961 hit Don’t Worry). Gibson was so impressed with this discovery that it released a variation of the EB-0 electric bass with a built-in ‘Fuzztone’…