Table of contents for September 2024 in Guitar Player

THERE IS A moment in this issue’s interview with Al Di Meola that, for me, sums up what makes him the consummate musician. Riffing on the modern obsession with shred videos, Al tells interviewer Bill Milkowski there’s no denying the outsize guitar talents of these typically young players. But what gets overlooked — and what many of them apparently lack — is (my words) a holistic approach to musicianship. “Every time you turn on your phone these days there’s some new young gun playing with such phenomenal chops,” he offers. “But there’s no music! There’s no composition. In our era, we were known for our technique and our velocity and our accuracy and all of that, but it was never at the expense of composition. Composition is what holds the…

LIKE ANY LIFELONG musician, especially a successful one, John Oates has had a number of fine guitars come in and out of his possession. One that stands out is a 1964 Guild F-30 that he first saw Mississippi John Hurt play at the Philadelphia Folk Festival while Oates was attending college at Temple University. Oates’ ownership of the instrument traces back to when the New York–born guitarist moved to Philadelphia in the mid ’60s, choosing Temple over other schools that offered him wrestling scholarships. Needing a part-time job, he signed on to teach beginning guitar players at Esther Halpern’s folk music school. Halpern and her husband were co-founders of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, while Oates’ own guitar mentor, Jerry Ricks, was Hurt’s handler when the Mississippi bluesman came to town.…

DECEMBER 12, 19 4 3 – APRIL 18, 2 0 24 DICKEY BETTS WAS larger than life in both his personality and musical range. His death at age 80 on April 18 brought the full scope of his musical legacy into focus. As a composer and a guitarist, the founding member of the Allman Brothers Band left a towering legacy, one that is impossible to fully understand without grasping the complexity of his personality and musical interests. To the world at large, Betts was a songwriter whose compositions — including “Revival,” “Blue Sky” and “Jessica” — are among the most joyful compositions in the rock canon. Those tunes reflect his true belief in the hippie ethos. But within his inner circle, Betts had a reputation for drunken belligerence. He was…

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IT WOULD STAND to reason that PRS’s DG Custom 30 and Custom 50 amplifiers, released more than a decade ago, would eventually be joined by a lower-power version, and voila! — the DGT 15 has arrived. The single-channel 15-watt head already had much of its sonic DNA in place thanks to the heavy lifting done years ago by designer Doug Sewell and guitarist David Grissom, who voiced the circuits of the original Customs to deliver the organic, touch-responsive tones Grisson coaxed from his prized vintage amps. Still, the DGT 15 is totally new in several ways and not just a downsized version of the Customs. “Initially, I wanted a lower-power version of my 30-watt amp so that I could get the same vintage output-stage overdrive at a lower volume, and…

MUIREANN BRADLEY MAY be a 17-year-old acoustic guitarist from rural Ireland, but she plays note-perfect renditions of acoustic-guitar ragtime blues classics like a seasoned Mississippi pro. Not only does Bradley possess impeccable technique but she has a great voice as well, factors that helped her 2023 debut album, I Kept These Old Blues (Tompkins Square), break into the top 10 on the U.K. album charts. Credit her stay-at-home guitar-playing father for the influence. “I’d always hear him playing guitar around the house. That was the first music that I heard,” she says. “When he’d play records, it was things like Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson. I really loved it and started to get curious about it.” To make things even more interesting, Dad had…

HOW IS IT that a tiny guitar amp with origins that date back 76 years is still considered a monster tone machine today? It’s because Fender got so much right with the humble Champ combo from the start, with “simplicity” as the watchword both then and now. Founded in 1946, Fender debuted its amp lineup that same year with the Princeton, Deluxe and Professional models. In 1948, the company introduced a “beginner” set that paired a Hawaiian lap-steel guitar with an amp designed to sit a rung lower than that initial trio. It was dubbed the Champion 800, a name that was soon after shortened to Champ. Some version of the diminutive combo has remained in Fender’s catalog ever since, although the narrow-panel tweed model of the mid ’50s to…

WHEN ERIC EARLEY recently unearthed a box of demos he’d made on a four-track cassette recorder in the 1990s, he thought it would be amusing to hear his old songs once again. “I borrowed a four-track cassette deck from a friend and started listening through some old tapes for fun,” the Blitzen Trapper guitarist explains. “These are songs I recorded when I was, like, 19 and 20, a long time before I had a band.” To his surprise, many of the tunes still held up after so many years. Rather than leave them in the past, he revived and in some cases rewrote the best of them for his band. “I felt some of them were great, so I decided to rework them,” he says. “That also made me want…

THE EXOTIC SOUND of the sitar as played by Indian master Ravi Shankar had a huge impact on George Harrison, who started playing one in 1965, famously using it on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown)” from Rubber Soul. That in turn inspired others to deploy the buzzy, droning sound on their own recordings, including Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who played a sitar on “Paint It Black” in 1966, following the Beatles by just a few months. Seeking a more practical instrument that could cop the sitar sound, New York City studio guitarist Vinnie Bell partnered with Nathan Daniel of Danelectro to create the Coral Vincent Bell Electric Sitar. Upon making its debut in 1967, the model carved out a niche on myriad pop songs from the ’60s…

BY HIS EARLY 20s, Oz Noy was already an in-demand session and live guitarist. Upon his arrival in New York City in the mid ’90s, he won acclaim on the scene and before long was sitting in on jams and maintaining a busy recording and performing schedule. His success was at least partly due to his impeccable chops and versatility: Rock, jazz, blues, funk and R&B — he does it all. As a result, Noy has worked with an impressive range of artists, including Cyndi Lauper, Harry Belafonte, Sting, Nile Rodgers, Gov’t Mule, Natasha Bedingfield, Don Henley and Mike Stern. And that’s when he’s not releasing his own music, which has filled more than a dozen solo albums to date. Oz isn’t sure why he’s so popular, but he knows…

THIS IS THE first record only available on CD that I’ve covered in eight years for the aptly named Vinyl Treasures column, so please don’t be too hard on me. Besides, the New Tony Williams Lifetime’s Live at the Village Gate should not be ignored just because it’s a CD. I bought this album two months ago and have been listening to it nonstop. I sent a copy to my friend, the guitarist Luca Benedetti, to get his opinion. Would he say, “Holdsworth might let his solos breathe a bit more”? Would he think Tony Williams played too bombastically? Would the sound quality put him off? No, Luca loved it and found it as inspiring as I did. Frankly, I don’t care if reviewers complain about the album’s rough sound.…

IT’S BEEN SIX years since Andy Powers introduced V-Class bracing on Taylor 12-strings, and 50 years since founders Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug introduced the world to a revolutionary new brand that’s gone on to become an acoustic icon. Taylor began releasing commemorative limited editions at a rate of one model per month starting in January and will continue to throughout 2024. As an homage to its founding year, no more than 1,974 guitars for each model will be made available worldwide. When GP got a preview of the collection representing the diversity of Taylor’s contemporary range, I immediately set my sights on this month’s 858e LTD. It’s a beautiful big-bodied 12-string that’s more attainable than some of the other anniversary editions, while being unique and collectible. Equipped with ES2…

SMALL-SHOP NEW HAMPSHIRE pickup maker Scott Miller of Stonewall Pickups has impressed me with a couple of designs I’ve reviewed here in recent years. So when he told me that the Signature Jazzmaster set is his personal favorite of all pickups he currently makes, it made an impression. The set is available on its own, in a pre-wired pickguard that uses high-quality components, and in a third option in which the traditional JM rhythm circuit is replaced by the Offset Fuzz Circuit, designed exclusively for Stonewall Pickups by Electric Squid Industries. This last selection is only available as an option in the fully loaded pickguard, which includes pickups, wiring, several choices of pickguard and the fuzz circuit. For my review, I looked at the pickups and Offset Fuzz Circuit. STONEWALL SIGNATURE…