Innehållsförteckning för November 2024 från Guitarist

Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA Telephone 01225 442244 Email guitarist@futurenet.com Online www.guitarist.co.uk This month’s cover feature with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry (see page 60) and our look back on Tull’s classic 1971 album, Aqualung, with guitarist Martin Barre (see page 52) speak to the value of both experience… and inexperience. Martin Barre in particular is wise, I think, to recognise the value of naivety and the ‘mistakes’ you make when finding your feet creatively. Who these days would go into the studio still teaching the bass player the basics of playing the instrument? And yet the fact that Tull trusted each other to explore, grow and make mistakes within the band enabled them to craft a totally unique sound – and one of the great…

Here at Guitarist we’re used to instruments arriving at our door in guitar-shaped cases. And so when Furch’s Little Jane turned up in something that closely resembled a hiker’s backpack it became the talking point of the afternoon. A guitar that folds down into three separate parts? It sounded a little like a dark ‘some assembly required’ nightmare. As it happens, we were in for a pleasant surprise. Travel guitars are far from being a new concept. Possibly the first commercially successful model was Martin’s Backpacker, which appeared on the radar in the early 1990s and enjoyed a trip to space on NASA’s Space Shuttle in 1994, as well as subsequently journeying up Mount Everest – and you can’t get any more well travelled than that. The only downside to…

FIRST PLAYDIRTY BOY PREAMP The Dirty Boy name has been around for quite a while, but this new preamp pedal represents a new chapter for the boutique gear company whose founder, Alex Saraceno (father of the Kingdom Come and ex-Poison guitarist Blues Saraceno), has now retired. The brand has been acquired by musician and product designer Danny Gomez, who is known for his proprietary TAE (Tube Amp Emulation) technology. The Dirty Boy Preamp is the first product under the new regime and is based on an amplifier designed by Alex Saraceno. What you get is a fully analogue amp simulator in pedal form that can be used in a number of ways. The pedal features two outputs. One delivers the raw sound of the preamp for use with a power…

Artist: Seb Wesson Album: The Man From The Moon (Gentlemen Recordings) Hertfordshire-based Seb Wesson’s new Man From The Moon album is his first full-length solo release, following his 2017 Tigers EP. Cutting his teeth in indie-rock band Munkster, Seb started playing solo and session music after the group’s demise, as well as providing lead guitar licks for alternative-rock outfit Captain. It’s a busy musical life, and there’s really one man to thank. “I started playing when I was seven or eight and I was really into Queen,” Seb begins. “I had their greatest hits on vinyl and cassette, and I was a Brian May obsessive. I had the ‘Star Licks’ video and had learned it all by the time I was 14.” Moving Forward When listening to Seb’s solo music…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE Toto session legend Steve Lukather was recently posed a question that went: ‘Do you play another instrument well enough to do so in a band and, if so, have you ever done it?’ His response was: “I played bass on Michael Jackson’s Beat It…” Steve’s immense solos have flattered many great songs, including Randy Crawford’s You Might Need Somebody, Running With The Night by Lionel Richie, and Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry, along with a thousand others, including also devising the stonking guitar riff to Beat It. Then there’s his own band’s amazing tracks: Hold The Line, the beautiful I Won’t Hold You Back, and the jaw-dropping end solo on Rosanna. As great a resumé as any musician could want, you’d think. But, not to lessen Steve’s stellar work…

SUBSTITUTE AUDIO http://bit.ly/guitaristextra Chords, scales and harmony are subjects you could spend your whole life studying – and perhaps that complexity and sense of infinite possibilities is what keeps most of us hooked. There are various ways in which we can approach any one aspect of chords and their extensions, but for this feature I’ve chosen to highlight polychords and slash chords, clarifying what each term means – and what the difference is between them. A slash chord such as A/B features a triad over a non-root bass note. In this case, an A major with a B in the bass (check out Examples 1 and 2 below). A polychord contains two complete triads played together. This isn’t always easy on the guitar, but the Em/maj9 (E minor and B…

INTERVIEW GREAT GUITAR ALBUMS As Martin Barre reflects with a wry smile, the late 60s were a glorious time to be a square peg. Formed in Blackpool as reluctant blues-boomers, under the de facto leadership of frontman Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull soon outgrew those roots, turning heads across London with their splice of classical, folk and chirruping flute. Defying both the strictures of genre and the pleas of their record label, by 1971 the band had released Aqualung, the classic fourth album that stands as a monument to a time when artists, not their paymasters, held the creative reins. “We were lucky because we were left to our own devices,” considers the Birmingham-born guitarist, now a wry and tack-sharp 77 year old who pulls each memory from Aqualung’s long-distant…

REVIEWTC ELECTRONIC 2290 P DYNAMIC DIGITAL DELAY TC ELECTRONIC 2290 P DYNAMIC DIGITAL DELAY £299 CONTACT TC Electronic WEB www.tcelectronic.com What You Need To Know 1 2290… isn’t that a vintage rackmount unit? Spot on! And this is the 2290 P, a pedal version of that digital delay that was launched in the 1980s and became a vital component of the rigs of many prominent guitarists. 2 Is this exactly the same, then? Well, TC describes it as a recreation with added modern features, improved bits and pieces, and expanded selected effect parameter ranges, particularly with the guitar-playing experience in mind. 3 What’s so special about it? It can deliver a wide range of delay and modulation effects – but it's particularly known for delays that react to playing dynamics.…

Bought & Sold What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “The first serious guitar I bought with my own money was a new sunburst Strat in 1967. I later took the neck off that one, put it on a Tele, and ended up with humbuckers and single-coil pickups – my ‘FrankenTele’. The pickup layout became the starting point of my [Steve Morse signature] Music Man guitars.” What was the last guitar you bought and why? “The last guitar I bought was a Godin classical. The reason was that my custom-made Buscarino classical guitar, with the Roland synth module built in, was stolen while we were on tour. I needed something quick to do the duets and nylon-string stuff – the quiet moments of the [Dixie]…

At the risk of offending Burns, Grimshaw and Shergold enthusiasts, British guitars of the vintage era have never been as highly regarded as the big American brands. In contrast, Vox and Marshall amplifiers always held their own, but some pieces still remain under the radar and are therefore surprisingly affordable. Our recent interview and video with Richard Hawley featured a Watkins Scout, which is one of his favourite amplifiers. In the scheme of things, Watkins amplifiers are largely overlooked and their most famous product remains the Copicat tape echo. The only Watkins amplifier that does excite collectors and players is the V-front Dominator. This is hardly surprising given that some consider the Dominator to have ‘inspired’ Marshall’s 18-watt models in much the same way that Fender’s Tweed Bassman inspired the…

Sliding In Standard Tuning Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Knagggs SSC, Fender light brass slide & Vox AC15 C1 Difficulty | 20 mins per example WHEN PEOPLE TALK about playing slide, the conversation often progresses on to open tunings, heavier strings and a high action. It’s true that these can make things easier and, in some cases such as traditional acoustic blues, give a more authentic result. But not everyone wants to carry an extra guitar with a different setup and tuning – and we know Derek Trucks sets his action low enough to play slide and non-slide on the same guitar. As well as this, he uses an 11-gauge for the first string – not way heavier than most of us, so at least some of the ‘trick’…

Plane Jane Furch’s ingenious Little Jane acoustic is a first for us – a travel acoustic that doesn’t sacrifice anything tonally to be carry-on capable p14 Wonderful Watkins Huw Price reveals why the venerable Watkins Westminster MK II will give vintage Marshalls a serious run for their money p120 Bert & Gordon Acoustic master Gordon Giltrap had a treat for us this month when he brought in Bert Jansch’s old Fylde acoustic to look at on p74…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER For anyone who is beginning to explore the possibility of building their own acoustic guitar, you may have realised that there are two ways of doing so. I would describe these as the ‘external mould’ method and the ‘Spanish’ method. I was taught to build a guitar using an external mould to build the body, and then build the neck separately. The key moment in this process occurs when the neck is grafted onto the body, and bringing those two components together gives us the familiar shape of a guitar. It’s the way the majority of luthiers build their instruments today. However, when we picture guitar making, we probably visualise the stereotypical Spanish luthier’s workshop: guitar-shaped parts hanging up in a hot dusty workshop, the aroma…

STAR LETTER DAD’S GUITAR I wanted to share something with you that happened to me recently that came totally out of the blue. A gentleman named David Williams had placed an advert in the Thurrock Gazette, a local paper in the Essex area I’m originally from. He was searching for the children of my late father in order to pass back to the family a bass guitar that had belonged to him. David had been friends with my dad, Terry Bushell, back in the early 70s, bonding over after-work drinks and a love of music having both been in different bands; in my dad’s case it was local band ‘The Rockin’ Devils’. David was interested in moving from the drums to other instruments and, as my dad was no longer…

Leading up to August of this year, Joe Perry was busy preparing for a tour. Not just any tour – he was saddling up for what was to be Aerosmith’s rebooted Peace Out tour. The same one that came to a screeching halt after a performance at the UBS Arena in Elmont, Long Island, on 9 September 2023, when normally evergreen vocalist Steven Tyler suffered an injury during the show and fractured his larynx. But all that changed just weeks ago on 2 August when Aerosmith issued a joint statement informing the world that there would be no second chance at ‘Peacing Out’. “It has been the honor of our lives to have our music become part of yours…” said the statement that ran across all Aero‑related social media. “Steven’s…

PRS SE CUSTOM 24 SEMI-HOLLOW PIEZO £1,499 CONTACT PRS Europe WEB 01223 874301 WEB www.prsguitars.com What You Need To Know 1 PRS seems to be one of the few big-name brands still offering piezo-equipped electric guitars. Yes, this new-for-2025 model is the latest PRS guitar that uses a piezo acoustic system to augment the standard magnetic electric sounds. It’s an evolved version of the LR Baggs/PRS piezo system originally fitted to the Holllowbody and Archtop from 1999. 2 Does PRS still make other piezo-equipped models? Along with the current SE Hollowbody Piezo Standard and II models, there’s also the USA-made Core Custom 24 Piezo and the Hollowbody II Piezo. 3 PRS doesn’t seem to offer many Semi-Hollow guitars these days… Although the SE Custom 22 Semi-Hollow was ‘retired’ at the…

BLUEPRINT: Crazy Tube Circuits Greece is, perhaps, not the very first country that comes to mind when you think of premier-grade effects. But some of the best pedals in the world right now are coming out of the Mediterranean country, not least from the workshops of Athens-based pedal maker Crazy Tube Circuits, whose whole design philosophy grew out of a love for vintage and classic valve amps. But despite this emphasis on tradition, CTC pedals stand out for their imaginative pairings of sought-after vintage sounds and clever methods to enhance the feature set of their multi-functional pedals. We catch up with the man behind the madness, Christos Ntaifotis, to get his take on making effects that are at once classic yet just a little different. How did you get started…

A guitar design that was championed by a mere handful of players – Johnny Winter and Mike Campbell to name but two – the Gibson Firebird is a bona fide classic that far fewer of us own compared with the good ol’ Les Paul. Why? Because it’s huge! Great for big stages, but for most of today’s musicians, well, good luck. It’s exactly the experience of Darren Horton, the solo Brit-builder behind Daniels Guitars: “I made a Firebird I[-inspired model] for someone last year. I loved the sound of it: it blew me away. But then it’s about 10ft long and I just thought, no.” Darren dropped off his latest guitar with us in a rather old-looking tweed case, and you can’t help but do a double take when you…

FIRST PLAYELECTRO-HARMONIX LIZARD KING OCTAVE/DISTORTION Last year Electro-Harmonix debuted the Lizard Queen octave fuzz pedal, which was based on an imagined vintage EHX design. Since the brand never made an octave fuzz back in the day, it got together with Josh Scott of JHS Pedals and came up with the sort of pedal that Electro-Harmonix could have made in the 1970s – but didn’t. Moving on a year or so, the company has added another octave fuzz to its roster with the Lizard King, which starts with the circuitry from the Lizard Queen but adds new twists, optimising it for bass and, in doing so, building in extra flexibility that six-stringers may also find useful. The Lizard King retains the Volume and Octave knobs from the Queen but eschews the…

Artist: Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour Album: Friendlytown (Mascot Label Group/Provogue) With respected producer Jon Tiven at the helm, the session icon is back again with Friendlytown, the follow-up to Fire It Up, the critically acclaimed debut album from his quintet Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour. But this time, he’s called in some larger-than-life pals, Billy Gibbons and Brian May, to spice things up. In celebration, Guitarist checked in with the trio of guitar masters to break down their relationship in and out of the studio. Steve, tell us about the origins of your new album, Friendlytown. What kicked this off? Steve Cropper: “Well, I think Mascot got us going, especially after getting a Grammy nomination last time [with Fire It Up]. Once the budget came in for…

RAISING THE TONE Opinion There can be few brands as committed to the glorious sound of valves doing what they do best than Orange. And that’s due, in no small part, to the efforts of the company’s amp design guru Adrian Emsley, a man who has analogue guitar tone running in his veins, so to speak. Here at Guitarist, we’ve become big fans of his 70s-style single-channel OR30 head, which doesn’t seem to have a bad tone in it and works impeccably for classic rock. Adrian’s also a master of high-gain designs such as the Dual Dark 100 and, perhaps less obviously, he’s also given the world a brilliant clean amp in the TremLord combo. So there can be few people more qualified than he to dispense advice on getting…

FACEMI There’s no doubt that the key to great guitar tone is to zone in on the fundamentals, and that’s exactly what we’re giving nine lucky readers the chance to do by winning a pedal from this excellent range from the Walrus Audio stable. Each of the pedals – Phaser, Drive, Tremolo, Chorus, Reverb, Distortion, Fuzz, Delay and Ambient – enjoys straightforward functionality when it comes down to operation, with three sliders and a three-way switch offering variations to the pedal’s basic sound. It’s very much a case of what you see is what you get: step on the button, navigate the control layout and you’re good to go. Fundamental, y’see? All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning one of this lovely lot is…

HISTORIC Back in the early 1970s, acoustic guitarist and songwriter Bert Jansch was already a legend. His albums became inspirational reference points for a whole generation of instrumental players, and his name was readily associated with the likes of other acoustic pioneers such as Davey Graham and John Renbourn. At the time, premium-quality acoustic guitars were quite the rarity in these isles and dedicated builders not as plentiful as they are today. Word of mouth was often the starting point that matched a player to such an instrument – and this was the case when Gordon Giltrap first met Bert and recommended that he commission a build from Roger Bucknall, at the time when Roger’s enterprise, Fylde Guitars, was in start-up mode. Although Bert never really settled with his Fylde,…

Creating a successful 40-year-old company is far from an easy thing to do, not least in the fickle, often fashion-led world of the electric guitar. But it won’t be long before PRS’s SE division hits its mid-20s, and in many ways it now seems like a guitar company within a guitar company – not least, of course, that the SEs have always been made ‘offshore’, originally in Korea and now primarily in Indonesia. The SE acoustics and Hollowbodies are made by Cor-Tek in China. But when the SE line kicked off with a single-guitar introduction in 2001, plenty of people thought it was the beginning of the end, the ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of price and probably quality, and the opposite of the high-level instruments that PRS had…

Regular readers will know that the last time I took the Boss Cube Street II out, I was in rehearsal for a debut gig in London. The slight twist was that I decided to rehearse on the streets of Glastonbury, by busking my way through my set over the course of several lunchtimes. After all, there’s nothing like performing for an audience – even one composed of passing pedestrians – to sharpen up your playing fast. Despite these preparations, as the night of the gig approached I started to feel a few butterflies. I was booked to play the Clerkenwell ArtsLab event at the Betsey Trotwood (do check it out, it’s a regular fixture and always great) with a debut performance of songs from my fingerstyle acoustic album, Withershins, released…

The MOD SQUAD It’s hardly a “Hold the front page!” moment, but latest releases in Gibson’s expansive aftermarket Pickup Shop collection include a pair of sets – the perennial ’57 Classic and the back-to-the-70s Dirty Fingers hot humbuckers – that come with what many thought were the brand’s ‘forgotten’ Quick Connect plugs. The what? Well, with these connectors attached to the four-conductor pickup lead, they’re a push-fit into the relevant PCB-style Gibson control circuit that can give you some tricky additional sounds. We last discussed these quick fixes about five years ago in The Mod Squad (issue 451) and, to be honest, we thought that Gibson – not least under its new management – had abandoned this simple and nifty idea, at least in terms of aftermarket retrofits. However, chatting…

“They made them later on, but it’s not something I’ve ever seen this early. I can’t say for certain that it’s the only maple-cap Jazz Bass Fender made in 1965, but we have asked around online with all the guitar-based communities and so far nobody has reported seeing another one. “It has a regular alder body construction and inside everything is as it should be. There’s a transition logo and the ‘A’ neck is on the narrow side, but it’s very well balanced and doesn’t dip at the headstock or lean into your body too much when you’re playing it on a strap. It’s in the mid-8lb range, so not super light or heavy by bass standards. “I bought this from a dealer friend of mine last November and it’s…