Tabla de contenidos para April 2023 en Guitarist

If you were paying attention to the news in the past few weeks, you might have come across a rather startling headline. This year, a Grammy – the music world’s equivalent of an Oscar – for Song Of The Year was awarded to celebrated guitarist and singer Bonnie Raitt, for the track Just Like That from her latest album of the same name (it also won the award for Best American Roots Song, with Made Up Mind winning Best Americana Performance). Of course, Raitt’s career has unfolded in anything but a ‘just like that’ manner. Her debut album came out in 1971 and, over the course of a 50-plus-year career she has won 13 Grammy Awards and no less than 30 nominations. It’s hard to think of a more illustrious…

FIRST PLAYSOLDANO SUPER LEAD OVERDRIVE PEDAL Since its introduction in 1987, the Soldano Super Lead Overdrive 100-watt valve head has been the choice of a number of well-known players – plenty of them in the metal and hard-rock field, including Eddie Van Halen, but also the likes of Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler. Currently, you’d be looking at paying almost four grand for a new 100-watt head and a few hundred less for the 30-watt version. But if you want some Soldano in your rig at a more amenable price, there’s now the option with this new SLO pedal, which puts the company’s signature sound on your pedalboard. Soldano says that the pedal uses the same cascading gain stages as its flagship amplifier. It also has the same control layout…

Taylor American Dream Sunburst Trio From £2,039 CONTACT: Taylor Guitars PHONE: 00800 23750011 WEB: www.taylorguitars.com JARGON CRUNCHING C-Class Bracing Taylor’s V-Class bracing set a new standard for acoustic internals upon its launch. However, the C-Class bracing pattern (pictured above right) is designed specifically to boost low-end response thanks to an “asymmetrical, cantilevered design”, says Taylor, which gives the C-Class its name. The American Dream series already exists doesn’t it? What’s going on here? Correct. Taylor launched the American Dream Series during that virus-enforced period of downtime we all experienced, which, perhaps incredibly, was three years ago now. As you may recall, the American Dream Series name tips its hat to the guitar shop where Taylor first birthed its acoustic guitars, and the series represents a delivery of the Taylor features…

THE LINEUP Artist: Vinnie Moore Album: Double Exposure (Mind’s Eye Music) Another album that was conceived and recorded while we were all confined to quarters during lockdown, Double Exposure came to life when Vinnie Moore found himself in the situation now commonplace for music produced back then. “The drums were recorded in Huntington, New York, on Long Island,” he begins, “and all the guitars were recorded right here in my studio. I played some bass on the record, so that was done here, too. My friend John Cassidy played some keyboards and he did that at his studio, and the guest bassists also did their stuff at their studios.” This is a very ‘present day’ recording scenario. Did you find that a comfortable way of working, as opposed to previous…

RAISING THE TONE Opinion Sunbear pickups have been popping up in increasing numbers of high-end guitar builds at the moment, most notably in Ivison Guitars’ Firebird-like Dakota model. Sunbear Pickups’ founder, Stuart Robson, is endlessly fascinated by the roots of great guitar tone and, in particular, how pickups interact with the rest of your guitar rig to make incredible sounds – or not, as the case may be. So, as this month’s issue is more or less devoted to the quest for tone, I thought I’d tap Stuart up for some advice on getting the best from your pickups, starting with how he would recommend going about choosing a new set of pickups for a guitar that seems to be lacking a certain something. “The first thing that jumps to…

COMPETITION Pinegrove Leather Straps Based in the West Midlands and run by Rod and Lou Boyles, Pinegrove produces straps handmade from the finest leather, tanned using traditional methods with natural vegetable extracts. Each strap is unique and comfort is key – the wide designs ease the weight of heavy instruments and a special edge-polishing process prevents neck-cut. With a multitude of designs available, it’s never been easier to be the best dressed guitarist on the block. Pinegrove has kindly offered the three fabulous straps above to give away. To be in with a chance of winning one, answer the question below correctly on our online entry page. Good luck! Where in the UK is Pinegrove Leather now based? a) Shropshireb) Yorkshirec) Staffordshire Terms and conditions: Terms and conditions:…

Do you have a particular way of dialling in amps to sound good? “There are loads of different ways to do this, depending on what you want to achieve. A lot of people get things like Super Overdrives, Tube Screamers and Klons and use them into a clean amp and wonder why they sound terrible. But get some ‘hair’ on the amp and those kind of pedals will give you a lot more of what the amp’s doing. That’s how to use them, you know? “Adding an [overdrive] pedal to an amp with some ‘hair’ actually gives you more of what the amp’s doing and tightens the bottom-end up” ADRIAN EMSLEY “A lot of people who use pedals like this make that mistake and then go, ‘I can’t get a…

While the Rapier 22’s minihumbuckers are a pretty standard humbucking design, designer Alan Entwistle shares some additional info with us: “Each coil uses a steel blade polepiece and a ceramic bar magnet, and they’re wound with 44 AWG wire.” Meanwhile, the Saffire’s Astrosonic single coils are “based on the earliest version of the Burns Tri-Sonic pickup, which would have been around 1959/1960,” says Alan. “They used six Alnico magnets – they called them ‘Alcamax’ but it’s the same difference – but it was a nightmare to produce,” he adds. “I think [Burns] went on making them for a few years and then when they went on to produce models such as the short-scale Jazz Guitar [which was in production from 1962 to ’65] they thought, ‘Let’s make a simpler version.’…

MAESTRO PEDALS FROM £155 CONTACT Gibson WEB www.maestroelectronics.com What You Need To Know 1 More Maestros? Yep, another five to add to the five launched last year when Gibson resurrected the brand with the Fuzz‑Tone FZ‑M, Discover Delay, Comet Chorus, Ranger Overdrive and Invader Distortion. 2 What’s the deal this time? These follow exactly the same three-knob, single‑toggle‑switch format as previously but add another five effect types: envelope filter, compressor, phaser, tremolo and boost. 3 Do they do that same two-pedals-in-one trick? Yes, that’s what the toggle switch is for: giving you access to two different voices. The phaser offers both four‑ and six‑stage phasing, while the tremolo has Harmonic and Classic voicing. We were happy to see Gibson revive its Maestro brand last year and now…

At first glance, the 1959 debut Melody Maker closely resembles the original single-cut, sunburst-finish Les Paul Junior introduced earlier in 1954. Similarly constructed using a mahogany slab-body and neck with an unbound 22-fret Brazilian rosewood ’board featuring dot markers, it’s clear where this single-pickup guitar takes its design cues from. But with a depth of just 1 3/8-inch, the body of the Melody Maker is significantly thinner than the 1 ¾-inch deep Junior. Its headstock, too, is more slender than the Junior’s. With a straighter appearance it forgoes Gibson’s iconic profile. However, it’s the PU-380 pickup that really sets the Melody Maker apart in terms of sound. (For a great demo, check out Chris Buck’s Friday Fretworks YouTube episode ‘A 60s Gibson for less than a new one?!’) Inherited from…

FIRST PLAYFENDER TONE MASTER PRINCETON REVERB Leo Fender began building amplifiers under his own name in 1946, half a decade before the Telecaster, with the original trio of the Princeton, Deluxe and Professional. Often referred to as the ‘woody’ amps, because of their hardwood cabinets and fixed wooden handles, these were the first Fender-badged products made after Leo’s short-lived venture with Clayton Orr ‘Doc’ Kauffman (the ‘K’ in K&F Manufacturing). Ever since, the Princeton name has survived in various guises, with the mid-1960s valve-powered black-panel Princeton Reverb revered by many guitarists as one of the top three from the pre-CBS Fullerton era. More recently in 2019, Fender surprised a lot of people with the Tone Master range – recreations of those classic 60s amplifiers that replaced traditional valve circuitry with…

FIRST PLAYELECTRO-HARMONIX J MASCIS RAM’S HEAD BIG MUFF PI If anybody was going to have a signature Big Muff pedal it would be J Mascis. The Dinosaur Jr guitarist is well known for the use of the iconic pedals and has quite a collection of vintage examples as featured in the 2007 documentary Fuzz: The Sound That Revolutionized The World. Of course, there are many different variants of Big Muff out there on which to base a signature model, but J’s preference is for the early to mid-1970s version two Muff that is known as the Ram’s Head because of the odd little face on the front. This new model is a looker with a fresh white-and-violet paint job and the guitarist’s signature, but underneath the hood it’s actually the…

Artist: AA Williams Album: As The Moon Rests (Bella Union) London singer-songwriter AA Williams followed up the beautiful melancholy of gothic debut Forever Blue with As The Moon Rests last year, a journey further into post-rock stylings. A talented multi-instrumentalist, Williams found the guitar a little down the line. “I’d always listened to a lot of guitar-based music but hadn’t felt the compulsion to play any of it,” Williams tells us. “Years after studying piano and cello, someone a few doors down from me was throwing out this Squier Tele. It had a little sign under the strings saying, ‘Please take me, just needs work.’” Change Your Tune Although she had no prior experience of playing guitar, Williams’ classical training gave her a solid starting point on her six-string journey.…

NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE Some years ago Mick Taylor (of That Pedal Show fame) and I did a few gigs as an acoustic duo, and sometimes as a trio with our late lamented bassist friend Roger Newell. The three of us also had a decent pub rock band with another mate on drums. On one occasion it was just Mick and me playing our hotch‑potch of numbers to a happy audience in a village pub near Bath. I had borrowed a Martin 000‑18 from World Guitars, just to see if I got on with it and whether it worked in this context. It had a quality pickup fitted and, of course, it played and sounded great – but was hardly a killer in the looks department. Mick had a much more imposing…

SUBSTITUTE It’s one thing knowing a chord – but quite another knowing that chord so well that you can visualise a version of it wherever you are on the fretboard, whether for the purpose of accompaniment or to draw ideas from for melodic soloing or chord overdubs. Obviously, all that’s a tall order for a short feature such as this, but if you take note of these shapes and play them over each other with the help of a voice recorder or smartphone (anything will do for this purpose, quality isn’t the point), you will hear that they harmonise perfectly. Not quite Steve Hackett/early Genesis, but definitely a step or two along that road! You’ll see that some of the shapes require odd fingerings and muted strings in the middle…

For better and worse, nobody embodied the counterculture like David Crosby. Close your eyes now and you’ll picture him at his 60s peak, as an idealistic young rebel in fringed jacket and Obelix moustache, offering his worldview from a West Coast stage. Think of his music and you’ll recall the wild-honey voice that defied age and gravity all his life, or those underrated guitar skills, standing out even in line-ups that featured such stone-cold pickers as The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Quite rightly, it’s this benevolent side of ‘Croz’ that was evoked by the well-wishers when the 81-year-old passed over on 18 January. But it’s telling that even the most loving eulogies came with a caveat. “David and I butted heads a lot…

Being asked to write a piece on Tom Verlaine just after his passing at the relatively young age of 73 is very daunting. It feels hard to write about a hero and I want to do him justice. Recently, we’ve also sadly lost Jeff Beck, Keith Levene and Wilko Johnson among others. In remembering guitar players, what is it that sparks a memory? Perhaps they played on your favourite song, inspired you to play, made you feel happy when you heard them – and maybe even made you consider giving up! The guitarists mentioned before were all unique and influenced what came after. Tom Verlaine easily sits among this group of players. The first Television album, Marquee Moon, from 1977, was one of those rarities that seemed to come out…

TAYLOR AMERICAN DREAM AD12E-SB £2,159 CONTACT Taylor Guitars PHONE 00800 23750011 WEB www.taylorguitars.com What You Need To Know 1 Tell us more about this series. Taylor’s American Dream guitars are essentially stripped-back, no-frills instruments made from solid woods and voiced to give an optimum sound capability. So not having much in the way in terms of elaborate inlays, arm rests and other bells and whistles helps keep the price down and the bang-for-buck quotient up. 2 Is walnut a good tonewood, then? Indeed it is, and its use is becoming more and more commonplace in acoustic guitars. Sonically, it falls somewhere between the majestic warmth of Indian rosewood and the sweet, trebly bite of maple. Taylor also claims that walnut’s midrange becomes more pronounced as it’s played in.…

BOUGHT & SOLD What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money? “Well, from the age of 11 I started playing in my dad’s band, and we were playing at weddings and village hall dances and things. I got paid the same as the rest of the guys, which was anywhere between £3.50 to £4 – £4 was a good gig, we never hit the £5 mark. At the time I had a really terrible guitar with a real cheese-cutter action, but I just saved up and eventually I had 100 quid and so I went with a friend to the West End of London to a music shop at Centerpoint. The guy in the shop says to me, ‘Hey, what are you boys doing?’ And my…

All microphones are transducers and their sole purpose is to turn acoustic energy into electrical energy in the form of an alternating current. As guitarists, we use microphones to capture the sounds of our acoustic and electric instruments for recording onto hard drives – or tape, if you’re so inclined. In this issue’s feature we’ll be discussing how the various types of microphone work, as well as their pros and cons for guitar recording applications. Ribbon Microphones The term ‘dynamic microphone’ has become synonymous with moving coil types, but ribbons are dynamic mics, too. While both rely on electrodynamics, the way moving coil and ribbon microphones operate is quite different. Invented during the 1920s by an RCA engineer called Harry F Olson, the ribbon was the first high-fidelity microphone and…

“I have all the history on this guitar. It’s an interesting story. Back in 1998, the original owner – a guy by the name of Verlin Whitford – sent me photos of it. On the back of a photo, he’d written ‘1951 Tele and original case’ along with his name and phone number. So I called him right away and said, ‘Hey, that’s a cool Telecaster. Can you tell me about it?’ “As it turned out, Verlin and Leo Fender had a close mutual friend, and so he was able to visit the factory in person with the aim of collecting an Esquire he’d ordered. He lived right down the road in Fullerton. When he got there, he was told it wasn’t ready to collect. However, because his buddy was…

We have a rich industry of guitar makers here in the UK, but not all of their fabulous instruments can be classed as affordable. Well, affordability is the premise behind C9 Custom Guitars: a partnership between experienced production guitar specialist Mark Lamaq and high-end machinehead-maker Keith Robson, who has turned his attention to guitar making in the past few years. The duo only formed the company in 2022 (though Mark had previously been helping Keith to create instruments under the Robson brand), but they’ve already attracted the attention of Northern heroes such as Tim Burgess, Mani and Paul Arthurs. Our review guitar, the Ventura, is effectively a production prototype and is one of three models in the range. So while it’s early days for C9, this guitar illustrates the intended…

WISHLIST Gibson Custom BB King ‘Live At The Regal’ ES-335 Gibson Custom BB King ‘Live At The Regal’ ES-335 £8,799 CONTACT Gibson WEB www.gibson.com BB King’s 1965 album Live At The Regal is a landmark in so many respects. Even though by this time blues artists such as Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and others had released live albums, BB’s masterpiece would cross over to young audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, desperate for music brimming with both gravitas and history. King’s playing on that album would influence Peter Green, Robben Ford and even John Lennon. Asked if there was anything he still wished for, the Beatle replied, “Yeah, to play guitar like BB King.” Well, listen to John’s solos on Get Back and the link is…

Joe Bonamassa Tales Of Time J&R Adventures/Provogue (release date: 14 April) 10/10 JoBo steps out in style to perform his latest studio release live on stage at Red Rocks, Colorado It would be fair to say Joe Bonamassa’s career has been well documented since exploding into the public consciousness over a decade ago. And Tales Of Time extends things further. This live release is essentially his last studio album, Time Clocks, performed in full at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Colorado, in August 2022. Naturally, it’s also available as a DVD and Blu‑ray, plus all the regular audio‑only formats. If you’re a fan, you’ll know exactly what to expect – consummate blues-rock guitar performed with a band rehearsed to a standard of military precision. “This live show represents our most progressive and…

CONFESSIONS OF A LUTHIER One frequent question I’m asked about guitar making is, “What is the hardest part about building a guitar?” It’s normally preceded by, “How long does a guitar take to build?” (somewhere between 100 hours and one lifetime) and “Where do you get the wood from?” (well, this one was built from a chopped up dining table…). The truth is that the easy part of guitar making is actually making the guitar, and the hardest part is working out how you’re going to go about it in the first place. “This crucial junction is essentially the marriage between two components: the playable neck of the guitar and the tone-producing soundbox” This is especially true when considering the join between the neck and the body of a guitar.…

STAR LETTER STAY OR GO? Halfway through a 40-year career with a well-known aircraft manufacturer, the company gifted me my choice of an Epiphone 335-alike. I’d been wrangling a dreadnought since childhood and fancied some electric blues. With a familiar fretboard and body shape, it should have been just the ticket, but for the last 20 years it has sat unloved on the rack, between my go-to 12-string and my National Tricone. The guitar is saturated with fond memories of past colleagues, projects and places I’ve worked, but, musically, we just don’t click. I can’t get the tone in my head out of the amp, the pots have become scratchy, the pickup selector horribly intermittent and the nut grabs the strings making tuning a perversely jerky affair, despite plenty of…

Psychedelic rock has never really gone away, but there’s a palpable sense it is having a bit of a resurgence – or at least a very vivid flashback – at the moment. And right at the centre of that growing musical mandala is Kavus Torabi. A former member of seminal art-pop outfit Cardiacs, he’s been the frontman of Gong for the past eight years, broadening that band’s rich catalogue of lysergic prog with compelling new music. Somewhat improbably, he’s also the musical partner-in-crime of snooker legend Steve Davis, who has found his new métier playing modular synth in an improvisational trio called The Utopia Strong with Kavus and traditional pipes specialist Mike York. We venture out to Glastonbury – still a centre for esoterica of all stripes – to find…

Matt Gleeson, founder of Monty’s Guitars, is a professional tone-tweaker to the bone. From his hand-wound pickups, to the upgraded wiring looms and specialist capacitors Monty’s sells, his daily round is devoted almost exclusively to making guitars sound and play better. Who better, then, to ask about the best general tone upgrades for the main types of electric guitar we all play. Before we get into that, however, Matt is careful to start with the most important tone-tweaking measure of all… “The best approach with any guitar, of any brand or type – acoustic, bass, anything – is to get it set up properly before you do anything else, so everything’s balanced and the strings can vibrate freely, as they should do. Then you know that they’re giving out and…

Part of the appeal of the Telecaster is its simplicity, particularly since it doesn’t have a vibrato, unlike the other Fender classics, the Stratocaster, Jazzmaster and Jaguar. Admittedly, that’s not the whole truth – but out of some 61 production Telecasters listed on Fender’s current website, only two have vibratos: the Vintera ’60s Telecaster Bigsby and the American Ultra Luxe Telecaster Floyd Rose HH – a classic vibrato and a modern dive‑bombing whammy. There are some Tele‑aimed vibratos available, such as the Super‑Vee Maverick, but that is essentially a Strat‑style vibrato and requires considerable routing of the body. The Stetsbar, meanwhile, is described as “a professional tremolo that stays in tune and does not require any additional holes or route” and is another option that certainly changes the look. You…

Seeing things from a different perspective can be hard. Luckily, hearing things from a different perspective is easy; we just sometimes need a little nudge to know it can be done. This issue we’re going to take a look at how – without changing our equipment – we can hear things in a slightly different way. A few years ago I started to hear an argument surface stating that vertical speaker cabinets are mathematically better than their horizontal siblings. I’ve always been quite good at and interested in maths, and obviously interested in speaker cabinets, but other than possible reflections from the floor, it was hard for me to see how maths would have any real bearing on what was effectively a very similar cab just rotated by 90 degrees.…

Soloing With Chords Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Knaggs Choptank & Vox AC15 C1 Difficulty | 10 mins per example OUR ABILITY TO SOLO over any chord progression is greatly enhanced by understanding the content of those chords, even if we choose to stay purely within the pentatonic/blues scale shapes. With this example solo, I’m essentially turning this approach on its head, building chord/solo ideas over a fairly harmonically simple bass and drum backing. In other words, there are just two chords! You’re free to fill the space between the bass and drums in a variety of ways. My approach was to steal some ideas from Kirk Fletcher and string together different chord inversions or triads around the fretboard. I saw these as my building blocks in the same…