Table of contents for February 2023 in Guitar Player

JAZZ HAS ADMITTEDLY been a tangential interest in my life. My mother passed her love of Dixieland and big band to me, providing me with a decent foundation on which to build my modest knowledge of ensemble jazz. Later in life I cultivated an affection for be-bop, building a library of albums by Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. I dug fusion, but nothing modern clicked with me until I discovered ECM Records in the mid 1970s, several years after its inception. The label’s artists and aesthetic meshed well with my interest in meditative and ambient music, and many of the musicians — like Gary Burton and Ralph Towner — crossed over to other artists I had a liking for. It was in this way I first came to hear…

CLASSICAL GUITAR ALBUMS can be staid affairs. Casually Classic is an exception. It’s a record that breaks through to feel free, loose and in-flight. It’s a first-class journey, courtesy of Los Indios Tabajaras, a guitar duo that consisted of brothers Antenor and Natalicio (Nato) Lima. Los Indios Tabajaras translates to “people who live in the north-east of Brazil,” which is literal, to say the least. The brothers were indigenous Brazilians from the Tabajara tribe. They spent three years traveling on foot 1,200 miles to Rio de Janeiro, where their musicality was forged. Most of their musical background is vague, but I did find they were self-taught, recorded for RCA Latin America, and took a break to study music before resuming their career as Los Indios Tabajaras. The brothers were then…

TOM MISCH LONDON-BORN TOM MISCH is something of a modern-day renaissance man, whose talents include DJ-ing, playing the piano and violin and having impressive vocal chops. But what separates the 27-year-old singer-songwriter-producer from his peers is his dexterity with the electric guitar, from which he effortlessly blends contemporary jazz, neo-soul, funk and R&B, his chameleonic style supplying an organic feel to his otherwise beat-focussed sound. Misch studied jazz guitar at London’s Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and his fingerstyle approach of using alternating chords spliced with short licks has formed the basis of some of his most well-loved compositions. A superfan of iconic crate-digging producer J Dilla, Misch uses modern tech to create lush worlds of texture, often multi-tracking his guitar atop washed-out synth pads and string drones. He frequently pulls from…

MORE ONLINE! For audio of this lesson, go to guitarplayer.com/feb23-lesson WHEN I WAS 10 years old, I began taking guitar lessons with Bob, a teacher who would become my all-time favorite. Sadly, after one year, Bob left to pursue life as a truck driver, and our paths would never cross again. True to form, though, at our final lesson, he gave me a couple of his favorite albums, one of which was Boston’s 1976 self-titled debut. I can still remember putting the vinyl on my turntable and instantly being mesmerized. Years later, things would come full circle when, as a professional music transcriber, I had the opportunity to create the official note-for note guitar tab books for Boston and its 1978 follow-up, Don’t Look Back. I may have known Bob…

A GUITAR WITH a Jaguar-style, offset semihollow body and a Tele/Gib pickup setup could easily describe a pricey boutique affair that borrows from Fullerton and Kalamazoo designs of the ’50s and ’60s to create a cool modern-day hybrid. It also describes to a tee the Slick SL56, which, besides being extremely affordable, goes all the way into boutique territory by featuring a P-90 in the neck position and a T-style single-coil sitting next to a custom solid-brass wraparound bridge with six chunky brass adjustable saddles. Brass was deemed the “musical metal” in the days of yore, and its use is straight out of the playbook of Alembic and others from the late ’60s and ’70s, when brass was thought to equal greater sustain and generally better tone. Here it adds…

INTRODUCED IN 1978, the Boss DS-1 Distortion was the first such pedal released by Boss, arriving just two years after the release of the company’s debut pedal, the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble. For this reason, it was many players’ first distortion pedal. Like the ProCo Rat that arrived the same year, the DS-1 used two hard-clipping diodes for an aggressive edge. This became known as distortion, rather than the smoother overdrive of soft-clipping stompboxes. The DS-1 was not op-amp based. Instead, it used the Toshiba TA7136AP preamplifier, for a gritty and warm overdrive tone. When the Toshiba preamp became harder to source, the circuit was redesigned in 1994. All three post-1994 DS-1 models would share the same circuit, and in turn, the same trio of quirks. First, they were not very…

OVER THE YEARS, the Jetstar name has appeared on guitars branded by Guild, Galanti and DeArmond. This guitar’s nameplate came from a piece of vintage luggage. I just can’t get behind a guitar that doesn’t have a headstock logo, and neither can my buddy Ardy, who built this cool green mash-up. The guitar pictured here was most definitely made in Japan, but just where and by whom is hard to say. Using Frank Meyers’ wonderfully comprehensive History of Japanese Electric Guitars (Centerstream), I determined that the body, neck and bridge could be from FujiGen Gakki, while the gold-foil pickup looks to be made by Teisco and the pickguard could be by Sakai. The Kluson-style tuners are mint-green aftermarkets, and the green knobs are from a discarded ’60s Airline record player.…

DONNER’S LATEST ENTRY in the acoustic guitar market is the Rising-G Pro, a compact instrument made almost entirely of carbon fiber. Measuring 38 inches long and weighing a little over four pounds, it qualifies as a travel guitar, and is certainly is well suited to taking into extreme conditions thanks to a one-piece body that is said to remain stable and nondeforming at temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees centigrade (-4 ˚F) and as high as 80 degrees centigrade (176 ˚F) while being immune to humidity. To achieve its goal of creating a guitar made of carbon that sounds like a wood instrument, Donner also developed an A-shaped bracing design which it says “helps make the vibration transfer between strings and body smoother,” while ensuring that “each frequency band…

INTRODUCED IN 1961 as what would appear to be a rather obvious rival to Gibson’s Les Paul/SG Junior, the Gretsch Corvette never really graduated to pro-player status like the guitar maker’s Duo Jet or 6120 models, but it makes a particularly interesting “B-list vintage” guitar. Gretsch first used the Corvette name on a guitar in its lower-priced hollowbody Electromatic series of 1954–’59. This was a non-cutaway archtop with a single DeArmond Model 200 (a.k.a. Dynasonic) pickup in the neck position and relatively modest cosmetics beyond the block fingerboard inlays. Shortly after, Gretsch headed back to the drawing board to concoct a student model that would be more appropriate for the times, and the new and entirely revamped Corvette fit the bill. Although Gretsch had unveiled the Duo Jet ostensibly as…

IT’S EARLY — barely past sunrise — in Nils Lofgren’s area of Arizona, not far from Scottsdale. But the veteran multi-instrumentalist is awake and into his day, accompanied by Rose, the 95-pound mixed-breed Lofgren and his wife, Amy, rescued last year. She and the couple’s 14-year-old Chihuahua, Outlaw Pete, meanwhile, are still asleep. “I like getting up super early, sometimes in the dark,” Lofgren, 72, says. “When I’m on the road it’s different; I can’t sleep because of the performance adrenalin. But at home, when I’m able to get a little sleep, I’m an early riser.” Lofgren isn’t one to waste any of that time, either. He’s been a recording artist since he was a teenager in the band Grin — which got its break thanks to the patronage of…

THROUGH THE COURSE of five evocative ECM albums, Danish guitarist Jakob Bro has forged a distinctive musical identity with a deft fingerstyle approach to his instrument, along with a penchant for delicate lyricism and intuitive flights that often take him into the unknown. Making subtle use of looping technology, backward effects and the occasional onslaught of distortion has allowed him to go from soothing introspection to translucent soundscapes to angular skronking, sometimes within the same piece. The 44-year-old sonic explorer made his ECM debut on drummer Paul Motian’s 2006 album Garden of Eden, which featured the three guitars of Ben Monder, Steve Cardenas and Bro blending brilliantly in the mix. He appeared three years later on Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s darkly introspective 2009 outing on ECM, Dark Eyes, then debuted as…

The Les Paul Foundation is honoring its namesake with the exhibition Les Paul Thru the Lens, a traveling gallery of rare photos that chronicle the life and career of the inventor, musician and icon. The Foundation has granted Guitar Player exclusive access to these treasures, as seen on these pages. Following a display at Memphis’ Stax Museum of American Soul Music, the Foundation is arranging the 2023 schedule, which touts an added element. “[American artist] LeRoy Nieman once visited Les at the Iridium and sketched him in different poses,” says Michael Braunstein, the Foundation’s executive director. “The plan is to include those in the exhibit adding another chance to see how Les influenced people from all walks of life.” Venues interested in hosting the exhibition may email caroline@m2mpr.com…

BRITISH MAKER ORIGIN Effects ascended quickly into the upper echelon of high-end boutique pedal makers largely with its Cali76 compressor, based on the legendary Urei 1176 studio rack compressor. They’re back at it with the new M-EQ Driver, which channels another classic processor, the vaunted Pultec passive EQ made famous in the 1950s for its ability to sweeten and boost, in particular, a signal’s midrange. Rather than tap the Pultec circuit purely for its frequency-adjusting capabilities, Origin takes advantage of the original circuit’s ability to drive a signal into sweet, harmonically saturated distortion. It’s a low-gain overdrive at best, but a succulent and musically enriching effect that has become as much a part of the Pultec’s magic as its EQ capabilities themselves. Put it all together, and the Origin M-EQ…