Tabla de contenidos para December 2022 en Guitar Player

THE MID-TO-LATE ’60s psychedelic movement was a remarkable time when rock musicians began to see themselves as sonic pioneers, creating new sounds and developing innovative musical approaches. The scene tends to be viewed, retrospectively, as limited to a few years of activity, mostly in London and on the U.S. West Coast. But in fact it was a much larger phenomenon that drove music, gear and production in innovative ways that are still relevant to this day. But it had another impact, as well, in how it made us hear and think about sound. It’s this influence that continually came to my mind as we were making this issue, and not incidentally. I was born in the early 1960s and came of age, musically speaking, during the psych-rock boom. For my seventh…

THE PURPOSE OF the Celebrating David Bowie show is simply that — to praise Bowie’s music and rejoice in the joy of listening to some of his greatest songs in the rock canon. The band is assembled from fans and former Bowie band members, who play with passion and verse as they aim to capture the essence of what made his music so iconic and influential. The show has been put together by music business veteran Miles Copeland and guitarist Scrote, who has a long track record of producing shows celebrating landmark artists, including the Beatles and Miles Davis. While the Bowie show has toured sporadically since 2015, this year sees the first full tour of North America and features the unique talents of Adrian Belew, who not only played…

IT WAS THE 1960s, and everything was groovy. Musicians pushed the boundaries of sonic expression and experimentation, with guitarists boldly leading the way. The hallucinogenic effects of mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD, are credited to have contributed to the creation of a new “psychedelic” sound, with guitarists developing a unique and colorful palette of fuzzed-out — and sometimes just plain weird — tones, inspiring generations of players to come. While we don’t encourage you to indulge in hallucinogenics, we do suggest you grab your guitar, as we begin our adventure into psychedelic guitar playing. One simply cannot revisit the 1960s without paying tribute to the Beatles, who began as a mop-topped pop quartet, but soon morphed into a psychedelic songwriting juggernaut with multiple iconic album releases spanning 1966 and 1967,…

FOUNDED IN 2012, Donner is a global brand manufacturer of pedals, acoustic and electric guitars, ukuleles, electronic drums, MIDI keyboards, digital pianos and other instruments. Relying on an R&D team of more than 200 people based in China, Donner has become well known for its wide range of innovative musical instruments since it started with a mini pedal 10 years ago. On review for this issue is the Seeker Series DST-400, an S-style guitar that features a solid alder body finished in gloss green (also available in black) and a satin-finished maple neck with back stripe that’s carved in a comfortable Slim C shape and capped with a laurel fingerboard carrying 22 medium frets. As with any budget guitar, how it feels in the hands is everything, and the DST-400…

THE PROMISE OF an authentic-sounding P-90 in a humbucker-sized mounting has been afloat for many years now, with several prominent pickup makers throwing their hats into the ring. I’ve played plenty of them, and while many sound pretty good, I’ve never thought any quite got there. So it’s all the more impressive that a boutique winder from the seacoast region of New Hampshire and southern Maine cracked the code so effectively — and that he did it by applying such an alternative approach to the problem. The crux of the problem is that the shape of any pickup’s coil plays a huge part in forming its voice, and you simply can’t fit the same coil within the footprint of two differently shaped pickups. As a result, something has to be…

ZEPPARELLA GUITARIST AND solo star Gretchen Menn is happy to offer her tips to fellow guitar players. But she’s quick to add that she doesn’t consider herself any kind of six-string authority. “I’m in the same boat as everybody else who plays guitar,” she says. “I’m still learning something new about the instrument every day.” She pauses, then adds, “That’s the point, really — I’m trying to learn something new. I never want to assume that I’ve got it all down.” For Menn, the art of playing and studying guitar is a journey fraught with conflicting emotions. “It’s thrilling, fun, aggravating and humbling — everything rolled into one,” she says. “But I keep at it. Some days the progress is fast; other days it feels like a grind. That’s when…

IN A WORLD where Gibson’s 1958–’60 sunburst Les Paul Standard reigns supreme for collectability and tone, the down-to-earth Gibson SG Special has long been seen as the rowdy younger sibling: brash, raw, a little unrefined and occasionally ill mannered. Given both its low cost and golden-era lineage, it became a nifty pawnshop find, even as the ’Burst values soared. Many punks and garage rockers were among the clued-in guitarists who knew it to be a stealth behemoth in the tone stakes. The SG Special arrived in 1959 as the predecessor to the single-cutaway Les Paul Special of 1955–’58. The SG Special embraced all of that guitar’s features, but its double-cutaway styling gave it a sleeker and racier appearance. Players throughout the wider guitar world might generally refer to guitars like…

NINETEEN SIXTY-FIVE was the year rock and roll grew a pair. After its raucous birth in the 1950s and early demise following Buddy Holly’s death, Chuck Berry’s imprisonment, Elvis Presley’s Army enlistment and Little Richard’s spiritual rebirth, rock and roll shriveled up. The epicene years from 1960 to 1964 had been a formative but difficult period in which garage rock bands claimed back a piece of the teen pop charts before the British Invasion groups led the way to a rock and roll victory. Those spirited rebels were anything but monolithic. Many brought together influences of early rock, folk, blues, soul, trad jazz and more. It’s hardly surprising that the old formulas for songwriting and music production were inadequate to the aims of these young and ambitious performers. Something had…

SOME THINGS — the Porsche 911 GT3 comes to mind — just plain look fast. Others — like the tail of a scorpion — look obviously dangerous. Then there are those objects that exude both those qualities. In the world of guitars, one such fast and dangerous object is the new Jackson American Series Soloist SL3. Rigged with a locking nut and two dozen thick, slippery nickel rails, its speedy neck dares you to, sonically speaking, burn rubber as fast as you can up and down its ebony dragstrip of a fretboard. Meanwhile, the guitar’s menacing, backward-angled headstock is so pointy, you’d almost expect a drop of venom to be dangling from it. (Bandmates beware!) Until September of this year, you could only get Jackson Soloists as imports — or,…

THE RECORDING OF the Talking Heads’ epochal 1980 album Remain in Light marked a dramatic difference from how the band had previously operated. On prior long-players, singer-guitarist David Byrne, guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Franz began album sessions with fully or mostly finished songs. This time, the quartet, with producer Brian Eno, spent weeks in Compass Point in the Bahamas creating loops out of improvisations without knowing what the arrangements would ultimately become. “It presented challenges for David when he wrote melodies and lyrics,” Harrison says, “because there weren’t many chord changes to help him go somewhere. It really was a new way for us to record. And for any band, I think.” When the Heads returned to New York City to finish the album, they…

A WHILE BACK, while doing a radio interview, I was asked about my cover of the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet track “No Expectations,” from my album Orange. I resigned to be totally honest with the interviewer and admitted the producer, Anton Fier, chose the song after politely vetoing my original selection, the traditional pop tune “Hawaiian Wedding Song.” As it turned out, my version of “No Expectations” has become a Campilongo fan favorite and another entry in the column titled “If It Hadn’t Been for the Producer…” After the interview, I put on Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk, and while I listened, I pondered: Might our purposely free and vibey performance of “No Expectations” or Talk’s Talk’s Spirit of Eden have ever existed without the Stones’ Exile on Main…

“ALTHOUGH IT WAS listed as a 1941 Martin at auction,” Jordan says, “the serial number and the ebony truss rod clearly indicate a wartime instrument created in 1943.” Logan and Jordan conclude that this is the same acoustic long misidentified as a D-18. “There are no herringbone D-18s,” Jordan explains. This guitar’s back and sides are made from very distinguishable streaked Brazilian rosewood, and the top is Adirondack spruce. The whole guitar has an extra coat of finish sprayed over it. There’s also a hole from a primitive sound hole pickup installation and battle scars from where an oddly placed output jack on the lower bout didn’t work out very well. Photographs suggests those jobs were from a previous owner. A defunct dual-element pickup system added much later remains, which Logan…

AS THE NAME implies, Aclam’s product designers were inspired by Eric Clapton’s legendary Cream-era “woman tone” to create the Spanish company’s latest release, and the result promises an impressive shortcut to that sound. But I feel it’s also important to say up front that this product shouldn’t be written off by players uninterested in chasing Clapton’s Gibson SG–into–Marshall Super Lead sounds of more than half a century ago. The truth is, if you just need an extremely well-built Marshall-in-a-box (MIAB) overdrive for any situation in the broad range of rock sonic stylings — one that also happens to carry a nifty bonus feature — read on. Based in Barcelona, Spain, Aclam was founded as a guitar-accessory maker around 10 years ago, and segued into high-quality, boutique-grade effects pedals shortly after…