Over the course of his long career, Vince Gill has been a session artist, a member of Pure Prairie League, a solo giant and, today, a member of the Eagles.

And he’s done it largely with a range of Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster electric guitars, as well as a nice selection of Gibson and Martin acoustics.

Given his somewhat infrequent use of a Les Paul, Gill never felt a need to add a vintage ‘Burst to his collection. But a sad and deeply personal twist of events brought one into his life.

“I bought a ’59 Les Paul from my brother-in-law from my first marriage [to country singer Janis Oliver],” Gill told Guitar Aficionado in 2017. “We were great friends, and he owned this great ’59 sunburst since 1959.

“He’d played it his whole life but got sick a couple of years ago. He called me and said, ‘There’s not much they can do for me. I’m probably not gonna make it. You’ve always been my favorite guitar player. Will you buy my Les Paul?’

“I didn’t have a sunburst Les Paul in my collection, and I previously couldn’t justify the expense because I don’t play a Les Paul that much, But this one came along and I said, ‘There you go,’” Gill continued. “I got the one I was supposed to have. My friend played it for 40 years, and now it gets to live on and still make music.”

The 'Burst occupies pride of place in Gill's collection, which is largely housed in his home studio. Of his collecting habit, Gill, with a chuckle, told Guitar Player in 2022, “I’m sure I’ve got a couple of hundred guitars, but I don’t have a boat or multiple houses or cars. I wouldn’t say it’s out of control, but it’s borderline.”

Gill has shared stories behind other guitars he owns, including the Martin D-28 Herringbone acoustic he purchased with his last dollar in the 1970s, then used to launch his career. He’s also spoke about the Telecaster he calls “the definitive guitar in my life.”

Welcome to the Ultimate Eric Clapton Guitar Quiz, where we test your knowledge of his guitars and music with 10 questions.

From the celebrated electric guitars he played in the Yardbirds and Cream to the acoustic guitar he co-owned with George Harrison — they’re all here. We’ve even included some difficult questions about songs and live shows.

All the questions are multiple choice. Sign in or register for free and see where you end up on the leaderboard.

Standard six-string guitars have never had much appeal for Manowar guitarist Michael Angelo Batio. Long before shredders like John Petrucci and Korn’s James “Munky” Shaffer and Brian “Head” Welch adopted seven-string guitars in the 1990s, Batio was using them to play his high-octane neoclassical rock.

“I had some of the very first seven-string guitars in rock music,” Batio tells Guitar Player. “I know Steve Vai says he did have one for the Whitesnake album [1989’s Slip of the Tongue], but I actually had one before he did, though mine had a high A string,” he notes, rather than a low B string.

But a seven-string guitar was nothing compared with the four-necked Quad guitar that the shredding wizard concocted around the same time. Batio, who at the time was performing with his glam-speed-metal band Nitro, created the boundary-pushing, custom-made quadruple-neck guitar, which comprised two seven-string guitars on top and two six-string guitars on the bottom.

The development of the Quad guitar evolved from Batio’s earlier conception of his twin-necked V-shaped guitar, with its 115-degree-angled necks, which at the time was quite revolutionary. The idea for his double-neck guitar had come about after Batio witnessed a saxophonist playing two saxes simultaneously. Batio’s V-shaped design would later inspire fellow contemporary shredder Steve Vai in developing his famed triple-neck, heart-shaped electric guitar.

“I was at a Poison concert in 1986 and Steve, out of all the people in the audience, comes up to me for no apparent reason wanting to talk to me about this guitar that he’s got an idea for,” recalls Batio. “I had a Polaroid in my wallet, I took it out and said, ‘You mean like this, Steve?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, my God.’

“Two years later, the David Lee Roth video for ‘Just Like Paradise’ debuts on television. And there’s Steve with this triple-neck heart guitar!”

Batio felt slighted by Vai, as they had only recently run into each other while in an L.A. recording studio. The two had a conversation during which Vai made no mention of his heart-shaped guitar.

“Jim [Gillette, Nitro singer] and I were in one of the big studios in L.A. looking at some equipment that we wanted to rent,” he says. “And Steve is there. I go, ‘Hey, Steve, what’s going on?’ And we just talked, but he didn’t say anything to me about his heart guitar, which was weird, considering that I knew him and that I already had the double guitar.”

Shortly after the music video for “Just Like Paradise” aired, Batio received a call from his record label asking him to come into its offices for an urgent meeting.

“So the president of our label goes, ‘Michael Angelo, what’s this? You’ve got two necks. Steve Vai’s got three. What can you do?’ And I go, ‘Four!’ And they’re like, ‘Can you do this?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I can.’”

The guitar-neck war was officially on. But there was one more thing the label wanted.

“They wanted me to challenge him to a duel,” Batio says, “but I wasn’t interested, as I genuinely respect Steve. It’s the music business, not the music game. Steve was only trying to do what he could do with David Lee Roth, so I respect and understand that.”

After the meeting, Batio went home and began mapping out ideas for a four-neck guitar. Having already successfully devised the V-shaped double neck, he formulated a design in which two V-shaped double necks would be joined to form an X-shaped guitar. With the layout in hand, he approached his good friend Wayne Charvel, who at the time was working for Gibson Guitars.

“Wayne Charvel was one of the greatest guitar builders in the world, so he could realize the potential of my vision on guitar,” Batio says. “People were very surprised at the engineering of the Quad, as it was completely different from anything else.

“And the way it fitted together was pretty unique, too. The guitars on the Quad guitar are kind of like a rifle, meaning smaller, rectangular bodies for each of the guitars. Each guitar on the Quad is its own separate guitar. The back plates dictate the shape, and also the degree of the neck angles. It can look like an X-wing: two in line on each side, and even one, two or three instead of using all four guitars. And from that, the Quad guitar was born!”

The guitar can be seen in Nitro’s video for “Freight Train.” But as fate would have it, Batio only had the famed instrument in his hands for a brief stretch of time before it was stolen on the second night of Nitro’s 1989 tour.

“It happened while we were in El Paso, Texas,” he says. “We had really good label and tour support, so we had a tour bus, another truck, and I had brought along my Quad guitar. And that’s where it got stolen. As it was the second show of the tour, I never really got to play it. The Quad guitar was in two cases. Two of the guitars were in one case, while the two were in another, and they stole both.”

It was only years later, in 2004, that one half of the guitar miraculously resurfaced while Batio was in England undertaking a seminar for Dean Guitars.

“One of the guys that worked at Dean over there said to me, ‘Michael, I’ve been on the Jackson forum and this guy is bragging that he bought the two top parts of your Quad guitar,’” Batio recalls. “This guy was a collector of Charvel guitars. So I had Dean contact the guy in the U.K., as he was in London. When contacted, the guy claimed that he didn’t know that it was my guitar, yet we had the record of the online chat, but I didn’t say anything about it. He said that he had bought it for £1,500, which was dirt cheap to me, so I bought it back at the same price.”

“It came back in really poor condition, and I only got two of the back plates, along with the two top seven-string guitars. We never located the bottom ones. I’ve searched all over planet Earth. I’m well known enough that people would know it was my guitar, especially anybody that knew anything about guitars, but we haven’t been able to find it.”

Batio has since rebuilt a replica of the Quad guitar using the same technology but with six strings on each neck. As for the original, he looks on the bright side.

“The good thing is that double-guitar part is now housed in a museum in France. I only ever played the Quad guitar at that first show and once in a video, and only did two photo sessions with it. And that’s all I ever did.”

Realism matters when making a film, but sometimes the pursuit of authenticity can have unexpected consequences. That was certainly the case on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, when a rare 1870 Martin was brought onto the set for a scene in which Kurt Russell’s character smashes a guitar against a wooden support.

The incident occurs when John “the Hangman” Ruth, played by Russell, becomes angry with the guitar playing of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue. He takes the acoustic guitar from her and smashes it against a wooden support, to Leigh’s very real shock and dismay.

The story at the time of the film’s 2015 release was that a prop guitar had been prepared for the scene. Russell was supposed to mime destroying the vintage instrument, at which point Tarantino would yell “cut” and a dummy guitar would be substituted for the destruction. But, allegedly, a miscommunication resulted in Russell destroying the actual vintage Martin.

Dick Boak doesn’t believe it. Boak was Martin’s in-house historian at the time of the filming. In a new interview with the Gear Gab Podcast with Eric Dahl, he suggests the destruction may not have been an accident after all.

“Tarantino filmed it at night on purpose so that the guitar tech wouldn’t be there,” Boak claims. “He [the tech] had gone home, and they never brought the papier-mâché guitars out. They just had the regular guitar.

“She [Leigh] played her little thing, and Kurt Russell grabbed it out of her hands. Tarantino wanted to get the genuine reaction out of her. And yeah, he did. I’ll never forget it, you know — the reaction on her face and everything from that.”

The incident divided opinion among the personnel at Martin. Upon learning that a 145-year-old acoustic had been destroyed, Boak says he “was so upset,” and even “thought I would even get fired over this.”

Chris Martin, the firm’s then-CEO, however, viewed the incident more positively.

“He was terrific,” Boak recalls. “He said, ‘It’s fantastic. It’s going to be in a famous movie. The publicity value in the movie is greater than the guitar could ever be.”

Pre-war Martins are an extremely rare commodity in the 21st century. That’s why, when Joe Bonamassa discovered a “museum-grade” 1941 Martin, he called it “the honor of a lifetime.” For context, the guitar Kurt Russell destroyed was 70 years older. A 19th-century Martin could be worth as much as $15,000 today.

But Chris Martin was right. The story boosted the brand’s profile, and the remains of the guitar became a curiosity in their own right. At NAMM 2024, the remnants were put on display at the Martin booth for visitors to admire — and perhaps wince at.

Authenticity has long been important to filmmakers, even when it comes at a cost. That’s why, when filming the Oscar-winning Sinners, composer Ludwig Göransson scoured the globe for 1930s Dobro guitars.

A 2024 interview with Russell offered further insight into the guitar’s unexpected afterlife. He revealed that Leigh had been drawn to the 1870 Martin and had used it to practice the folk tune “Jim Jones at Botany Bay” ahead of filming.

“No one ever said it was 145 years old,” he said. “It was [just] a Martin. Then comes the day to shoot it, and I couldn’t imagine they were going to use that guitar.”

“When we did the take, you can even see it. I kind of give it an extra beat,” he adds. And it’s true: Russell can be seen looking off set, seemingly waiting for a nod of approval before swinging the guitar violently into a wooden pillar.

“I go ahead and smash the guitar,” he continues. “When I grab her and sit her down, I can tell she’s not happy about this. It’s like: Something’s wrong. So as soon as it’s over, I say, ‘Tell me that’s not the guitar you’ve been practicing with,’ and she [nods].

“I only felt bad about that [Leigh being upset],” he adds. “I didn’t give a shit about the guitar.”

If the guitar was worth $15,000 in one piece, its story has apparently caused its value to skyrocket to around $40,000-$45,000 — at least according to Russell. Not bad for what is essentially a pile of wooden debris.

Still, it has a long way to go before it eclipses Kurt Cobain’s 1959 Martin D-18E as the world’s most expensive acoustic guitar. Cobain’s guitar sold at auction for $6.01 million in 2020. Only three guitars have sold for more, and all three were part of Jim Irsay’s bumper auction last November.

As the leaves start to turn and the days grow shorter, most folks think of cozy sweaters and pumpkin spice everything. But for us at Guitar Player, October isn't just about cider and costumes, it's all about cranking up the volume! Get ready for an electrifying Rocktober like no other, courtesy of Musician's Friend. They’re hosting a jaw-dropping sale with discounts of up to 50% on gear from the biggest names around.

I've gone through the sale, and there's really something for everyone in this glorious assortment. We're talking a buffet of guitars from iconic brands like Fender, Schecter, and Ernie Ball. And hey, it’s not just about guitars. Snag great deals on everything from must-have accessories to live sound gear and even drums.

To help you navigate this treasure trove of deals, I’ve handpicked some highlights.

First up is the rather cool Schecter MV-6, which has an impressive £300 off right now. It's classically styled, highly spec'd, and perfect for those players who want modern sounds and contemporary playability with a more orthodox, Stratocaster-inspired vibe.

Next is the gorgeous Epiphone 1963 Firebird V Maestro, which has $320 off. Honestly, we love everything about this guitar. It looks fabulous, plays really nicely right out of its huge leather-look black case, and sounds phenomenal.

Last but definitely not least, feast your eyes on the fabulous Gretsch 5427TG, now available for only $769.99. With $250 knocked off, this retro gem packs Gretsch's FT-5E Filter'Tron pickups and a Bigsby vibrato into a stunning Midnight Sapphire finish.

But don’t stop there! With so many amazing finds waiting, we encourage you to dive into the full Rocktober catalog. And if you’re still hunting for killer deals, check out our Prime Day guitar deals hub for even more discounted guitars, amps, and pedals.

Dolly Parton made a massive impact on music history with her little size 5 Martin terz guitar, and even before her passing there was a groundswell of players asking for the return of such a short-scale instrument to the line.

The Martin 5-28 Terz is a 12-fret Standard Series model in Style 28, meaning it’s made in America with solid East Indian rosewood back and sides, a solid spruce top, and classic Style 28 appointments, including a multi-stripe design for the rosette and top inlay, and mother-of-pearl fretboard inlays.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a terz guitar is a small-scale acoustic guitar designed to be tuned a minor third higher than standard. From low to high it’s tuned G, C, F, A#, D, G. The resulting tone is bright and rings like a little bell.

Size 5 is an old-world designation that was around before the 0 system was introduced. Back in the late 1800s, all guitars were tiny by modern standards, and a size 5 was small even back then. According to the old system, the smaller the number, the larger the guitar, so a size 1 was the largest. There was essentially nowhere to go from there but 0, which is how we got from there to the current system. What we pronounce as “Oh” is actually zero. In any case, “0” is now the smallest, and a 0000 or M Grand Auditorium is the largest in the traditional hourglass body shape.

Back in the old days, the guitar’s body shape was a bit more elongated, harkening to predecessors such as the Renaissance Guitar, and that old-world parlor guitar form is back in play on the Martin 5-28 Terz. It looks truly historic hanging on a wall next to modern guitars, and you can really appreciate just how tiny it is by comparison hanging next to a 00 — the Terz is way smaller. Its Size 5 Modern Straightline ebony bridge is a classic old-world appointment, giving it a look like some of the earliest Martins ever made.

The Terz makes you play differently, but not because of any limitations on the fretboard. It’s just that, again, size matters. It affects one’s overall approach, from the angle of the arm dangle to the feel of its fingerboard with 12 frets to the compact body.

I found crazy chords I’d never played before and wound up playing more chromatic passages in single-note runs, simply because of the way one’s fingers fall on such a short-scale neck of 21.38 inches. For reference, a typical 00 measures 24.9.

The 5-28 Terz is so small that you don’t really need a strap to walk around and play; you can cradle it like a ukulele under your strumming arm. But it definitely plays like a “real” guitar. In fact, the width at the nut is 1 3/4 inches, the same as the modern standard for a full-sized acoustic. The neck is what Martin refers to as “Modified Low Oval with High-Performance Taper.” It feels like a very playable modern Martin neck. Every note on the fretboard is a viable musical option.

The Martin 5-28 Terz sounds alive. Projection is impressive as the sound bursts forth from the top, and the same for the sustain that seems to hang around for eternity before a gradual, natural decay. It’s fun to hold the petite body on your lap and feel its pronounced resonance. Harmonics are downright heavenly.

It’s also fun to try alternative, slack-terz tunings. For example, dropping the top and bottom strings a whole step puts it in drop F. So, when you finger and strum what would be a dropped D chord, the sound is a high, extra-resonant F. Playing a powerful tune like Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” sounds crazy cool. And the Martin Terz has plenty of headroom to handle powerful playing. It’s a tough little cookie.

You can also simply tune it down to standard, but for that Martin recommends putting on medium-gauge strings and getting a setup to accommodate the change.

As for who the Martin 5-28 Terz is for, I can think of several player categories. Anyone looking for a new tool in the studio could find the Terz handy as well as inspirational. You will wind up playing unique parts. Songwriters will certainly come up with different stuff. Students and all small folk will appreciate its diminutive body, which is surely one of the reasons Dolly Parton was a terz player. Her fans will likely dig the Martin 5-28. Collectors seeking something unique will also appreciate it.

I had a ball putting this instrument through the paces. I can’t really think of anything negative to say about the experience. It plays and sounds like a dream, and the craftsmanship is impeccable. The only cautionary statements I’d mention concern price and tone.

Having spoken with prominent makers at length about the topic of small guitars, I can testify that they’ll all tell you it’s harder to make a great-sounding little acoustic — not easier. That makes them more labor-intensive to build. So, while it’s natural to expect, say, a hamburger at McDonald’s to cost less than a quarter pounder, that doesn’t apply to acoustic guitars. A small guitar may take a little less wood to make than a big one, but it’s more arduous to assemble, leading to a comparable cost.

As for tone, a terz guitar is supposed to sound bright, chimey, and ring like a little bell. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. This one has that light tone in spades, and it springs forth from the instrument like a ray of sunshine bursting through a cloudy day. Pick one up if you’re down to brighten up your tonal palate.

SPECIFICATIONS

Terz 5-28

CONTACT martinguitar.com

PRICE $3,599 street, hardshell case included

NUT WIDTH 1.75", bone

NECK Select hardwood, satin finish, Modified Low Oval with High-Performance Taper

INLAYS Mother-of-pearl

FRETBOARD West African ebony, 21.38" scale

FRETS 18

TUNERS Nickel open gear with butterbean knobs

BODY Solid East Indian rosewood back & sides, solid spruce top with Aging Toner color and gloss finish

BRIDGE Ebony with bone saddle

ELECTRONICS None

FACTORY STRINGS Martin Authentic Acoustic Lifespan 2.0 Phosphor Bronze Custom Light gauges .011—.052

WEIGHT 3.1 lbs (as tested)

BUILT USA

PRO Fantastic, fabulous pop, projection and playability from the smallest Martin

CON None, but be aware a terz guitar is meant to be tuned up a minor third for a bright tone

This October, guitar collectors will get a chance to become part of a genuinely outlaw rock-and-roll story — without worrying that the police will come knocking at their door.

ANALOGr is launching an auction of 16 guitars from the Outlaw Custom Shop Guitar Collection, a group of one-of-a-kind Gibson-inspired instruments created in the late 1980s by master luthier Roger Giffin and vintage-gear expert Brett Allen. The guitars were conceived and built while Giffin was running Gibson’s West Coast Custom Shop in Los Angeles.

But they weren’t part of Gibson’s official lineup. In fact, they were never supposed to exist at all.

Now, for the first time, guitar collectors will get the chance to own one of these rogue Gibson creations.

Giffin is famous as the guitar maker to the stars, having created custom instruments for Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, Keith Richards and many others. But his work on the Outlaw collection could have earned him a very different kind of reputation — as the guitar maker behind bars.

The story began in 1988, when Giffin took over Gibson’s West Coast Custom Shop in Los Angeles and met Allen, a vintage-gear expert who had served as AC/DC’s guitar tech and owned Brett Allen Studio Rental. The two bonded over a shared obsession with guitar tone, a taste for rebellion and a desire to see what Giffin could create without Gibson’s usual design restrictions, as dictated by then-Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz.

“What Roger wanted to do at the time was piss Henry off,” Allen recently told Guitar World. “We used to call him ‘Henry Just-a-twit.’ Henry was getting on his case from the time he started.”

The duo’s outlaw guitar making started innocently enough. Allen wanted to know what kind of guitar Giffin would build if he were free from Gibson’s rules. The answer was a Les Paul with a Gretsch-style hollowbody construction.

The pair went on to create 16 one-of-a-kind electric guitars, basses and acoustics. Giffin would visit Gibson’s Nashville headquarters and “borrow” parts for the instruments, which were then shipped back to Los Angeles.

“I’d wander around in the wood mill and just say, ‘Can I have that and that and that?’” Giffin recalled. “And they’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, just take it.’ I would take all this stuff on the trolley and wheel it back to the other end of the shop. They’d just crate it up and ship it to me in LA.”

The guitars they built from those parts were anything but standard Gibson fare. Giffin experimented with sparkle finishes, hollowbody constructions and what he describes as the only two Les Paul baritones ever made. He even made a Goldtop 12-string Les Paul and a gold-sparkle model with three P-90s. Both guitars are among those going on the auction block.

The baritones are particularly unusual. Giffin had to build them without the benefit of existing Gibson baritone necks.

“The hollowbodies didn’t exist,” he said. “Those were built from scratch. I probably used Gibson necks on some of them, but not all of them, especially not the baritones, because there were no baritone necks.”

One of those baritones would eventually find an admirer in Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell. After playing the guitar, Cantrell described it as “the most evil guitar” he had ever played and offered Allen $30,000 for it.

Allen turned him down.

“He played the one with P-90s in it — it’s got ’54 cream-top P-90s. They sound amazing,” Allen said. “Jerry played it for about a minute and a half. He looked at me and he said, ‘This is pure fucking evil, and I want it.’”

For all the audacity that went into creating the guitars, there was a very real reason to keep them out of sight. Giffin had built the 16 instruments without Gibson’s official approval. Allen ultimately stored the collection under his bed, where it remained for roughly 30 years.

“If they found out, we’d be in jail,” Allen said. “Or I would be. I was the instigator.”

Now the guitars are finally coming out of hiding. All 16 Outlaw Custom Shop Guitar Collection guitars will go to auction through ANALOGr beginning October 20, giving collectors a chance to own a remarkable — and genuinely unauthorized — chapter of Gibson-inspired guitar history.

Four decades after Giffin and Allen first decided to see what might happen if they stopped playing by the rules, the Outlaw Custom Shop Guitar Collection is ready for its next owners.

Visit ANALOGr.com for more details and to bid.

As Rick Nielsen’s guitars, cars and memorabilia head to the Julien’s auction block in October, it’s a good time to recall some of the vintage and one-of-a-kind guitars the Cheap Trick guitarist has owned over the years. Several are among the offerings in the October 24 Rick Nielsen Collection auction.

One of the most conspicuous is the stage-played 2004 Hamer “Five Neck” Korina, which will be offered for sale publicly for the first time ever in the landmark auction.

The unusual electric is among three five-necked models Nielsen had built to his custom specs. The original orange-finished example was made in 1981. He explained its origins to Guitar Aficionado magazine.

“How did I come up with such a backbreaking idea for an instrument? Well, back at shows in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I used to stack up as many as five guitars for my guitar solo. I'd play one for a little bit, then throw it away and play the one hanging underneath it.”

This eventually led to the birth of the five-necked guitar. Nielsen originally envisioned it as a six-necked model “that spun like a roulette wheel, so that I could play one neck and then rotate to the next,” he explained. “But then I decided to go with something more conservative — five necks in a row!”

He admitted that the monster of a guitar was a chore to build, due not only to its size and wiring but because of his specifications for each of the guitars. “I wanted a 12-string and a fretless, and one that sounded like a Stratocaster and one that sounded like a Junior,” he said. “But Hamer, never to be daunted, managed to put all the ideas together and made it work.”

It was left to Hamer’s Frank Untermeyer to bring Nielsen’s creation to life.

“Rick's out of his mind, but in a wonderful way,” Untermeyer told Guitar Aficionado. “By 1981, we had already done some pretty wacky stuff for him and Cheap Trick, like the checkerboard Standard, an electric mandocello, and a 12-string bass, so we were used to the fact that they set all standards for going to the limit.

“For this guitar, we cut apart five double-cutaway Hamer Special bodies and laminated them together, and then sanded in between the necks to get that sort of swoopy look. As I recall, routing the wires through this thing was also a huge pain in the ass.”

Hamer subsequently built two more five-neck guitars for Nielsen, including the 2004 Korina model now headed to auction.

The auction guitar has had a substantial stage career of its own. Nielsen used it at the 2004 Another State of Mind benefit show at Chicago’s Metro and continued playing it through at least 2013, when Cheap Trick performed its Budokan 35th Anniversary concert at the CBGB’s John Varvatos venue in New York. The guitar also appears in an episode of Gibson Guitars’ The Collection series featuring Nielsen.

As the guitarist and songwriter behind Cheap Trick, Nielsen helped create some of the band’s most enduring songs, including “Surrender” and “Dream Police,” while his distinctive guitar work and larger-than-life stage presence helped propel the group from Rockford, Illinois, to international stardom.

Nielsen grew up around his parents’ music store and started out as a drummer before the Beatles and Rolling Stones helped turn his attention toward the guitar. He bought his first Les Paul — a 1955 Goldtop — for $65 and still owns it. Over the decades, his collection expanded to include rare and unusual instruments ranging from two 1958 Gibson Explorers to a 1963 Guild Merle Travis, one of only three ever made.

“I couldn’t sing or dance, but I was big into songwriting, and I tried to put everything I had into that,” Nielsen said. “I never wanted to be like anybody else — I just wanted to be me. I knew I was never going to be a virtuoso, so I ended up being a ‘medium-oso.’”

Now, after more than five decades of collecting, Nielsen is parting with a portion of that archive.

“I started out with one guitar, and over the years the collection just kept growing. It seemed like a good time to sell some of it — you can’t take it with you. When it’s all over, hopefully I’ll still have one guitar.”

More Rick Nielsen guitars headed to auction

The five-neck Hamer is far from the only notable guitar in The Rick Nielsen Collection.

Among the other highlights is a stage-played 1975 Hamer Standard, which Nielsen used on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert on November 10, 1977, and during Cheap Trick’s April 28, 1978 performance at Japan’s Budokan. It carries an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000.

Also offered is a sunburst 1963 Fender Stratocaster with a mint-green pickguard, chrome tremolo bridge and output jack plate, and white pickup covers and knobs. Its estimate is $40,000 to $60,000.

A 1984 Gibson Les Paul XPL is another unusual entry. The model combines the Les Paul body shape with the Explorer headstock, part of Gibson’s mid-1980s experiments with pairing the Explorer headstock with other body designs. Nielsen’s sunburst example comes with its original rectangular Gibson hardshell case and carries an estimate of $15,000 to $20,000.

The October 24 Rick Nielsen Collection auction will also include cars, stage-worn clothing, awards and other personal memorabilia. The sale will benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and will be held live at the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum at the Historic Nashville Municipal Auditorium.

Visit Julien’s Auctions to view the collection.

Johnny Marr has just made headlines after selling nearly 100 guitars from his collection for just shy of $5 million at auction. That’s a lot of cherished instruments to let go of, but it turns out he only feels he — and every player, in fact — needs three specific guitars.

During last week’s Christie’s auction, the former Smiths guitarist saw several of his historic instruments fetch six-figure sums. A whopping £3,649,280, or around $4.87 million, was spent during the auction, with the money going to selected charities.

During a recent interview with one-time Top Gear host Chris Evans for Virgin Radio, Johnny Marr made it clear why he was happy to slim down his collection. He was asked a hypothetical question: If he could only have three guitars in his life, what would he choose? He answered it with ease.

First up is a bona fide classic electric guitar.

“So, you get a Gibson ES-335, ideally from between 1961 and 1963,” he says. “The reason is that they’re versatile, and they have a really rich, dark sound, made famous by Eric Clapton in Cream.”

As he says, one of Clapton’s main Cream workhorses was a 1964 Gibson ES-335 in its usual and iconic Cherry Red finish. As Guitar World reports, conflicting stories exist about how he got the guitar, but the most likely scenario is that he acquired it in 1968, which is why it became such an important instrument for Cream during the London dates of Cream’s farewell tour just weeks later.

It stayed in his collection until 2004, when it was auctioned off for his Crossroads charity. It sold for $847,500. That lineage, in turn, inspired Marr to get his own mid-’60s Cherry Red 335, with a ’63 model heard across his latest solo album, The Age of Everything.

“They just do a thing that other guitars can’t do,” he says.

Next up, Marr picks a guitar even closer to home.

“The other guitar, in all honesty, you get my signature Jag,” he explains. “The reason is because of the way my signature Jag sounds; you don’t have to get a Rickenbacker, and you don’t have to get a Gretsch, a Jazzmaster or a Strat, because, inadvertently, I ended up designing a guitar that does all the things [those three guitars do].”

Marr’s signature Fender Jaguar first arrived in 2012, with key features including a four-position Tele-style pickup selector that replaced the Jag’s high-pass filter and individual pickup on/off switches, allowing players to flit between the bridge position, both pickups in parallel or both in series.

Its bridge saddle is also inspired by Fender Mustang guitars, which have better tuning stability when abusing the whammy bar. It became one of Fender’s best-selling signature guitars.

An updated version arrived last year, and Marr reinvented the Jag all over again. New lipstick pickups and a whole new pickup system were noteworthy changes.

“I would have said you need a Rickenbacker for that jangle, and you need a Strat for that slinky sort of thing, and maybe a Gretsch for that ringing thing,” Marr extends. “Well, because all of those are encompassing sort of my sound, I realized after I designed my Jag, it did all three.”

Last but not least, he unplugs to complete the trio.

“Then I’d get a Martin acoustic guitar, a D-28, because if you’ve got to be able to play the acoustic,” he quips. “It’s a little bit of a clumsy comparison, but if you can’t, it’s like learning to drive an automatic car, then getting into a manual.

“Being able to play acoustic makes you infinitely better on the electric, and vice versa,” he reasons.

For Marr — a player with a hatred for satin necks and Yngwie Malmsteen — those guitars are the holy trinity. Other players may disagree, but it’s a versatile trio whichever way you look at it.

Elsewhere, he’s talked about his strange method to avoid impulse buying guitars, explained how Paul McCartney came to his aid when the Smiths broke up, and what made his songwriting tandem with Morrissey magic.

For years after Mick Ronson’s death, the where-abouts of his stripped 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom – the Ziggy Stardust guitar – were a mystery even to those who had been closest to him.

When Rick Tedesco asked Ronson’s friend and fellow performer Ian Hunter about it, the former Mott the Hoople frontman shrugged.

“God only knows where that went,” he replied. “Mick probably gave it to some guy walking across the street. He didn’t care about gear. It was just a tool to him.”

For Tedesco, finding the guitar became a mission.

A guitarist, producer and engineer whose credits include work with Hunter, Alice Cooper and former Cooper band members Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith, Tedesco had become a Bowie fanatic through the artist’s 1974 album, Diamond Dogs.

“I was a 13-year-old kid who was just obsessed with horror movies,” he recalls. “And then I saw that album cover. I just absolutely loved that album. I was like, ‘I’m done. That’s what I want to do.’”

Working his way backward through Bowie’s catalog, he soon discovered Ronson’s signature performances on the albums Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups.

Eventually he caught D.A. Pennebaker’s 1973 Ziggy Stardust concert film on television. “There was Mick,” he recalls. “And that’s what I wanted to be – David Bowie’s guitarist.”

Tedesco was particularly drawn to Ronson’s Les Paul Custom. Originally a Black Beauty, the guitar was stripped in 1970 after Ronson heard that removing the finish could improve resonance and high-frequency tone.

He subsequently used it on his first record with Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World, right through Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups, making it the vehicle for each album’s searing power chords, singing leads and lyrical solos.

For Tedesco, a hardcore Bowie and Ronson fan, the guitar was an indelible part of his own identity as a guitarist.

By the 1990s, he was working at a music store in Danbury, Connecticut, when one day Hunter strolled in.

“Ian happened to live about 45 minutes away at the time,” he says. “I was like, Holy shit, it’s Ian Hunter! I even had posters of him and Mick on my wall.”

Hunter made repeat visits, and a friendship developed after Tedesco helped him refurbish his studio with an ADAT system.

“Mick had passed, and Ian didn’t really know what the hell to do,” Tedesco says. “He didn’t have his right-hand man anymore. So he started asking me, ‘Do you want to put some stuff down on this song?’”

Before he knew it, Tedesco was working with Hunter, who also introduced him to some members of Alice Cooper’s camp.

Hunter still had several of Ronson’s guitars, which he was holding onto for Suzi, Mick’s wife, but the stripped Les Paul Custom wasn’t among them.

“Nobody knew where it was,” Tedesco says. “I did some research and talked to one guy who thought he remembered an interview where Mick said he’d given it to the Hard Rock Cafe.”

Tedesco began calling Hard Rock locations, asking if they had the guitar, but a sweep of the company’s database came up empty.

“They had nothing of his at all,” he says.

Afterward, Tedesco’s source confirmed that the guitar had gone to the Hard Rock, adding that the restaurant was located in Australia. Because that facility is licensed from, but not owned by, the Hard Rock, its holdings weren’t listed in the company’s records.

Tedesco felt a glimmer of hope.

One call to the restaurant was all it took. “I asked a guy there if they had Mick’s guitar, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m standing right next to it,’” Tedesco says. “They had it hanging on the wall. I went through the roof.”

As it happened, the Hard Rock was open to a trade if Tedesco could give them a guitar to replace it.

“A lot of people like myself are huge fans of Mick’s, but he wasn’t a giant marquee name, so they didn’t really care about the guitar,” he explains.

He offered them a small collection that included some guitars signed by Hunter as well as some bearing Gene Simmons’ signature, and the deal was done.

It wasn’t without complications, though. In his excitement, Tedesco accidentally addressed his package to Newcastle, rather than Castle Hill, Australia. His guitars spent six weeks lost in a UPS lockup until the error was discovered.

Soon after, Ronson’s electric guitar showed up at his house.

“I had been out running some errands and got home to find this box leaning against my garage door,” Tedesco recalls. “I was so excited. And then I opened it up and saw a headstock. There was no case. The guitar came all the way from Australia covered in bubble wrap.”

To his relief, it made the trip unscathed, and with a bit of cleaning of its electronics, it was back in action.

For Tedesco, who’d purchased his childhood home after his parents retired, the coolest part of the experience was playing Ronson’s Les Paul in the very room where he’d first discovered the guitarist in the Ziggy Stardust film.

“It was such a weird cosmic circle,” he says.

Over the years, he put the guitar to good use. In addition to the Les Paul Custom, he’s owned Ronson’s Marshall Major tube amp head, among other gear, and two-inch tapes from the guitarist’s studio.

He made a video of his collection, allowing fans to see and hear these instruments for the first time in years.

He also loaned the guitar to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and shared it with fans who stopped by the Guitar Hangar, the musical instrument shop he opened in 1999.

Eventually, he offered a limited-edition Mick Ronson Tribute Guitar based on the Les Paul Custom. “I did all this with no intention of doing anything but sharing what I had with the Mick-loving world,” he says.

But eventually, Tedesco began receiving offers to buy the guitar. In 2014, he rejected one for $50,000 from producer Bob Rock, funneled to him by Suzi Ronson.

Soon after, a fan from England – Simon Dolan, the multimillionaire entrepreneur and race car driver – asked about buying both the guitar and Ronson’s Marshall Major head.

“‘It would have to be for stupid money, and I’m not looking to sell,’” Tedesco recalls telling him. “I said it would take at least 200 thousand, just for the guitar alone. And he goes, ‘Done!’

"And I thought, Oh god. Did I just sell my Mick Ronson guitar?”

Two days later, the wire transfer came through his bank.

“I cried,” Tedesco says. “I’d never been so sad and sick over selling something.

“I called Ian up, crying, and he started laughing at me,” he says, cracking up at the memory. “He said, ‘You silly bastard! Mick would tell you you’re a fucking wanker. That’s why you buy something like that. It’s an investment. And it paid off!’

“But I felt like I had sold my soul. It took me several months to get over that.”

In the end, the money went to good use. At the time, Tedesco was getting ready for the grand opening of a new and larger Guitar Hangar in Brookfield, Connecticut, the store’s current location.

“It allowed me to open in style, with tons of gear and without going into massive debt,” he says.

“But owning that guitar was never ever about money. I knew it was worth a lot, but I never envisioned parting with it. It was where I was forged. It put all of my parts together and made me go, Ah, there’s a place for me on planet Earth!

“And then it was gone.”

Order Lisa S. Johnson's 108 Rock Star Guitars here and Immortal Axes: Guitars That Rock here.

This story originally ran in the June 2022 issue of Guitar Player.

Although the original Silvertone 1446 hollowbody electric was born in the early 1960s, these days you’ll often hear the instrument referred to as “the Chris Isaak guitar.” That’s on account of the fact that the retro crooner cradled one in publicity photos around the same time his moody “Wicked Game” became a huge radio hit in 1990. (Incidentally, the tune’s lilting guitar lines were played by lead guitarist James Calvin Wilsey on a Fender Stratocaster.)

Regardless of your familiarity with (or affinity for) Isaak, old Harmony and Silvertone guitars have long been a more accessible entry point to the vintage guitar market than more prominent names, partially because they feature construction details some players, rightly or not, consider cost-cutting compromises. For example, Silvertones typically had three-bolt neck joints rather than the set-neck construction found on more expensive Gibson and Gretsch instruments of the era.

The latter was true of the original Silvertone 1446, which was built by the Chicago-based Harmony Guitar Company and sold in Sears catalogs and department stores, yet it was still considered a top-of-the-line instrument. Beyond its swanky looks — including distinctive hexagonal pickup surrounds and diamond-shaped selector plate — the vintage 1446 also boasted characterful mini humbuckers designed by Gibson pickup pioneer Seth Lover, creator of the legendary PAF (Patent Applied For) humbuckers in highly sought-after Les Pauls and SGs.

The Silvertone brand has changed hands a few times, most recently in 2020, when Texas-based RBI Music bought rights from Korean manufacturer Samick. With the launch of the 1446 seen here, RBI offers a modernized instrument that mates iconic visuals of yore with set-neck construction and a semi-hollow rather than a hollow body.

In place of the 24-inch-scale original’s wood bridge mounted to a “floating” wood foot, the 24 3/4-inch-scale reissue has a center-block-anchored, Tune-o-matic-type bridge with roller saddles meant to offer more stable tuning and smoother action with the Bigsby B70 vibrato. (Trapeze-tailpiece versions are also available in Gloss Black and Tobacco Sunburst.)

The pickups feature sharp-looking brushed-steel covers and surrounds that look pretty much identical to the originals. At the other end of the 12-inch-radius rosewood fretboard, Waverly-style open-gear tuners look equally elegant. The instrument streets for $999 sans case and is made in China.

RBI says the Alnico 5 magnet mini-humbuckers were designed by Trev Wilkinson and are “exacting era-specific recreations inspired by the rare original P19 pickups.” To my ear, they sound hotter than one would expect from a vintage guitar from the early ’60s. Particularly the bridge pickup.

Plugged in to an edge-of-breakup vintage Supro-style combo amp, in addition to silver-panel Fender combos, our test 1446 proved surprisingly toothsome and plenty bright with the treble pickup soloed and full-up. Pushed to varying degrees with a J. Rockett Archer and a Catalinbread Skewer treble booster, it can get downright vicious. Not metal vicious by any means, but certainly more ripping than some might anticipate from the guitar’s sophisticated old-school looks.

Even so, notes remained clear and well defined. What’s more, backing off the bridge pickup’s volume knob a quarter of the way and dialing the tone back perhaps two-thirds availed a balance of bite and responsiveness that felt more in keeping with the model’s sonic roots.

The neck pickup sounds a bit more polished, but still clear and assertive. Capable of both muscular corpulence and chimey detail, the neck ’bucker had me working knobs less, too. Either soloed or in tandem with the bridge pickup, it yielded a range of vibes from jazzy to soulful/rootsy and chukka-chukka reggae-ready. In fact, brighter bridge-pickup settings were quite useful in expanding the range of dual-pickup tones, even into quasi-Strat-like territories.

For funsies, I compared the 1446 to both my recent-make Gretsch Broadkaster (a semi-hollowbody with Filter’Tron-style pickups) and a Guild X-175 Manhattan hollowbody with authentic old Franz-style “soapbar” pickups. The R pickups out-muscled both. And, of course, the 1446 handled high volumes much better than the Guild — even with a bunch of Auralex foam stuffed inside it.

Conclusion

I’ve long been interested in original Silvertone 1446s, but have never had the opportunity to play one. However, with the plethora of construction departures on this new iteration, it’s safe to say an A/B test with a vintage specimen would be an apples-to-oranges aural affair. Watching videos of original 1446s, one immediately discerns a sense of hollow earthiness that is no doubt inextricably linked to its bolt-on neck design, among other things.

The new 1446, with its set neck and center block — which spans the entire length of the body, splitting it into two smaller sound chambers rather than a large one — was clearly intended to be a handsome rocker. And that it is.

But it’s also much, much more than that. Vintage nitpickery aside, it constitutes a fantastic alternative to the usual semi-hollowbody options — especially at this price point. At $999 street, it is a mid-priced steal, on par in every way and then some with competing options from Gretsch, Guild, Ibanez, Epiphone and others.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT silvertoneguitars.com

PRICE $999 street

BODY Arched maple-laminate semi-hollowbody with center block,

PICKUPS Wilkinson R-Series mini humbuckers

SCALE 24 3/4"

NECK Soft C-shaped mahogany with 12"-radius rosewood fretboard and pearloid block inlays and 20 Silvertone “Easy Feel” ball-end frets

CONTROLS Two Volume and two tone knobs with vintage-style “cupcake” knobs, 3-way pickup selector

HARDWARE Bigsby B70 vibrato, Tune-o-matic-style bridge with roller saddles, single-ply cream pickguard, chrome hardware

FINISH Gloss Black

ASSEMBLED China

PRO Nice setup with smooth, comfortable frets. Versatile, quality pickups by Trev Wilkinson. Modernized center-block and set-neck construction facilitate high-volume friendliness and more sustain than a vintage 1446

CON Departures from original hollowbody and bolt-on construction make this more of a visual tribute than a bona fide reissue. Vibrato bar slightly loose

“For me, Martin is the songwriter’s guitar,” says British folk-rock phenom Jake Bugg, knocking out a few cool voicings backstage on one of Martin’s new 00L-16E models. “Maybe it’s the warmth, or the midrange quality, but if you just hold a chord and really listen, it’s like the guitar is trying to tell you where to go.”

That’s as good a description of the magic of a good guitar as you’re likely to hear. And it’s the unspoken philosophy behind Martin’s latest “refresh” of one of their less storied guitar lines, the oft under-the-radar 16 Series. Indeed, Martin launched 11 brand new 16 models — with three new finishes: Cherry Cola, Blue Denim and Cream — on September 15 with much fanfare, cocktails, hot chicken, and buzz aplenty at SoBro’s uber-hip InDo Nashville event space as the kick-off event for the city’s annual AmericanaFest celebrations.

Packed to the gills, the afternoon bash included excellent solo performances by Bugg, Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter Brandy Clark, Canadian country star Tenille Townes, as well as Gunnar and Matthew Nelson and rising American acoustic duet Marfa. Notable attendees sipping bevvies included YouTube guitar instruction powerhouse Marty Schwartz, vintage guitar authority George Gruhn, Martin CEO Thomas Ripsam and roots rock legend Webb Wilder.

Evident among the throng was a small fleet of local pickers adorned with silver clothing and silver head-to-toe makeup. Why the silver, you ask? Well, it’s a nod to the adventurous spirit of the revamped 16 line, and their cool cast of custom colors, the type of thing literally no one wants to see on a D-28 or D-18.

“That’s what so fun about the 16 line for us,” says Martin’s Director of Product Management, Joey Osisek, a.k.a. Joey O. “With the 28 and 18s, we’re very aware of maintaining a certain tradition there—in a way, we’re almost shadow boxing with that legacy, and even those materials and finishes.

“But the 16s never had that consistent identity, so it’s much more open-ended, and we’re able to really have fun with it. I’m telling ya,” Osisek laughs, “we’re going to get weird with it, brother.”

Weird is good! But a little history first. Martin's style 16 dates back to 1961, when the company introduced it as an affordable, understated alternative to its more ornately appointed instruments. It offered mahogany guitars built to style 18 construction standards, but with simpler trim. The 16s briefly resurfaced in the 1980s as a catch-all designation for trade show specials that were not for wider sale, but allowed Martin to experiment with outside-the-box designs.

Soon after, the first D-16s reached general release in mahogany, ash, walnut, and koa, and by the early ’90s, the D-16 was featuring scalloped, forward-shifted bracing, along with tortoise binding and pickguards. In the decade to follow, the 16 Series became Martin’s outlet to explore more “outside” tonewoods, construction methods and body configurations, eventually settling into the acoustic-electric, all-solid-wood niche most players know today.

In a sense, then, the 16 series was the perfect line for a funky refresh, and that was certainly the impression the Nashville launch was intended to convey. In addition to the three new finishes, the lineup comprises 11 new models, and marks a genuine departure in body-shape terms. The range now features three very rarely seen body shapes in the Martin canon, from intimate, responsive 00Ls and warm, punchy sloped-shoulder dreads to powerful Jumbos, a balanced Grand Performance cutaway, and a room-filling Grand Jumbo 12-string.

The new DSS-16E is Martin's first-ever short-scale slope-shoulder Dreadnought, with a 24.9-inch scale, akin to a certain other noted maker’s best-known acoustic. (“Keep in mind,” notes Osisek, “the first dreadnought Martin ever built was a slope-shouldered dread for Gibson, so that’s part of our legacy, too.”) The built-in electronics have shifted, too. The outgoing generation used Martin's in-house E1 preamp, while the new models switch to an L.R. Baggs Element preamp (a sonic upgrade that trades away the E1's built-in tuner).

Where the refresh really announces itself, though, is in its finishes. Bold gloss-top finish options including Blue Denim, Cherry Cola, Cream, Black Smoke and 1935 Burst sit alongside more traditional natural tops with a vintage tint. While the price tag on the 16s is typically less than the Standard series, it’s worth noting that this is decidedly not a “budget line.” Each guitar is still handcrafted in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, with all-solid-wood construction.

As the afternoon strummed on, Martin set up a Wheel-of-Fortune-style prize wheel somewhere near the bar (sorry, details get hazy at this point…) and a clutch of lucky winners wobbled off with a small run of Series 16 accessories and lifestyle merchandise, including Blue Denim and Cherry Cola steins, a Cherry Cola ringer T-shirt, a Blue Denim corduroy hat, and a Blue Fade leather strap. (Hey, how come I didn’t walk away with any swag!).

For those of you who missed this one-of-a-kind Martin Sweet 16 party, here are the salient details of each of the new Style 16 models.

00L-16E (1935 Burst, Black Smoke, Blue Denim. $2,499.99 each)

A slope-shoulder 00 body pairs a gloss spruce top with satin solid mahogany back and sides for a warm, woody voice with punchy mids and controlled lows. It runs the short 24.9" scale with scalloped X-bracing, built for fingerstyle players and songwriters who want touch and response from a compact body.

DSS-16E (1935 Burst, Black Smoke, Cherry Cola. $2,499.99 each)

Martin's first-ever short-scale slope-shoulder Dreadnought, also on the 24.9" scale. Solid spruce top over solid mahogany back and sides, ebony fingerboard and bridge, 20 frets, open-gear nickel tuners. A warm, punchy dreadnought voice in a more compact-feeling package.

J-16E (1935 Burst, Cream, Black Smoke. $2,599.99 each)

The Jumbo body in the lineup, aimed at players who want bold volume and deep bass for stage work. The Cream finish is built with a solid spruce top over solid East Indian rosewood back-and-sides—the one rosewood guitar among the three Jumbo finishes—giving it extra low-end depth and shimmer compared to its mahogany siblings.

GPC-16E ($2,599.99)

A Grand Performance cutaway with 000 depth, finished in a more traditional natural top with vintage tint rather than the bold gloss colors. It's pitched as the balanced, comfortable option in the range, a stage-ready cutaway for easy upper-fret access.

Grand J-16E 12-String ($2,599.99)

A Grand Jumbo 12-string, also in natural top with vintage tint, built for lush shimmer, rich overtones, and room-filling sound. The big, chorus-textured option for broad strummed chords or layered accompaniment in a live set.

The Guitar Center Guitar-A-Thon is officially underway, and running now 'til October 7, you can find up to 30% off an absolutely massive selection of gear. I've spent hours combing through the inventory, and thankfully, this isn't just a clearance bin of unwanted accessories.

We're talking substantial discounts on heavy-hitting electric guitars, acoustic guitars, bass guitars, guitar pedals, and guitar amps from top-tier names like Fender, Epiphone, Sterling by Music Man, and MXR.

Guitar-A-Thon usually heralds the start of the Black Friday guitar deals, so it’s well worth stopping by for a browse to see what early deals you can pick up ahead of the rush!

Whenever a major event drops, my eyes immediately dart toward the big manufacturers, and I was pleased to see a massive $267 slashed off the Fender Player II Stratocaster HSS. This isn't last decade's surplus; the Player II series brings heavily requested upgrades like rolled fingerboard edges and the triumphant return of real rosewood.

At $622.99, down from $889.99, getting your hands on this limited-edition Ocean Turquoise beauty feels like an absolute steal. The HSS pickup configuration is what really sells it for me, giving you everything from glassy, classic Strat chime in the neck to a thick, punchy humbucker roar in the bridge.

If the low-end is more your territory, however, the Sterling by Music Man DarkRay Electric Bass Guitar is sitting at a hefty $336 discount, bringing it down to $1,263.99. This is essentially a dream collaboration for modern rock and metal bassists, taking the iconic, punchy StingRay platform and shoving a custom Darkglass 2-band active preamp straight into it.

The built-in Alpha and Omega distortion circuits mean you can dial in earth-shattering, modern grit right from the control plate without ever touching a pedalboard. Having spent time putting the DarkRay through its paces, we can confidently say the Galaxy Shimmer finish looks just as good as this bass sounds.

If you’re interested in adding to your pedalboard, you really can't walk away from a gear purge like this without treating yourself to a new stompbox, and the MXR M94SE Fat Sugar Drive immediately caught my attention.

Reduced from $139.99 to a very comfortable $94.99, this sparkly pink pedal houses one of the most sought-after overdrive circuits in modern pedal history. It’s essentially Way Huge’s acclaimed Sugar Drive - a meticulous Klon Centaur clone - stuffed into a rugged, pedalboard-friendly MXR enclosure. It works beautifully as a transparent clean boost to push your tube amp into natural breakup, or you can crank the drive for a thick, harmonically rich overdrive that refuses to get muddy.

If none of those happen to strike a chord with you, don’t stress - these are just a few of my personal favorites. With hundreds of items heavily marked down across the entire site, I highly recommend brewing yourself a coffee and browsing the full sale for yourself.

Ever since becoming Guitar Center CEO in late 2023, Gabe Dalporto has been determined to turn the store’s fortunes around. His latest idea: an in-house guitar brand.

It’s a plan that’s been mooted for some time, with the news hitting Guitar World back in April. Now the store is ready to get its first guitars in the hands of a small core of players to test out, but those who do will be sworn to secrecy.

German giant Thomann launched the budget-friendly Harley Benton range and is now a major player in the accessibly priced guitar market. But Dalporto isn’t in the mood for copying Thomann's winning formula note for note.

“Guitars haven’t changed that much in the last 50 years,” he said in a TikTok in April. “We’re about to change that. We are going to build a revolutionary guitar and guitar brand from the ground up."

He also said he wants customers to shape the final designs of these models through direct feedback. Later, he doubled down on his revolutionary claims by stressing that the brand wasn’t leaning on copycat designs to shift units, which has long been Harley Benton’s approach.

Guitar Center is now ready for the next step in its impending brand launch.

“We’ve been building and creating a new guitar line from scratch, and that new guitar line has been based on interactions with you and your feedback,” Dalporto details in an Instagram post. “You guys have been giving us tons of feedback on your aspirations, dreams, and hopes for what you would like to see in a new guitar.

“We are now at the point where we’re getting prototypes into our office, and we want real-world feedback from you.”

There are, of course, stipulations for getting involved. That includes all participants signing a Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA) so its presumably six-stringed revolution remains top secret.

Testing will take place in late September and early October at the Guitar Center HQ in Westlake Village, CA. According to Rich Thrush, who is leading the project dubbed Guitar Labs, phones will also need to be left outside. All measures are being made to keep its work-in-progress guitars under lock and key.

“We’re looking for genuine players who are willing to share honest opinions,” Thrush writes in a Reddit post. “If you’re primarily an influencer or represent a brand, please let us know when you reach out. We’d still love to connect, but we’ll likely involve you at a later stage of the project.”

Brick-and-mortar stores continue to struggle against the might of online brands. Sam Ash shuttered its doors after 100 years of business in 2024, and a host of UK stores, including PMT and GAK, have since followed suit.

It’s an interesting new chapter from a firm which, Dalporto believes, is already on the up. In August 2025, he admitted the firm has been far from perfect, but reiterated his desire to win back customers’ trust and use its physical, rather than strictly online, presence to its advantage. Whether this latest move works or not remains to be seen, but it will be hoping to emulate Harley Benton’s success, with customer feedback as its cornerstone.

Guitar Center asks interested players to email info@GCPLB.com and include background information on themselves and their playing style.

Meanwhile, Fender and Thomann remained locked in legal disputes after Fender’s cease-and-desist campaign.

Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck were close friends and briefly shared the stage in the Yardbirds. But as Page recently revealed, his role in getting Beck into the band resulted in a special gift from his fellow guitarist — one that would remain with him through one of the most important chapters of his career.

The story goes back to 1965, when Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Clapton recommended Page as his replacement, but Page, then barely 21 and already making a name for himself as a session guitarist in London, turned the opportunity down. Instead, he suggested Beck for the job.

It proved to be an inspired recommendation. Beck joined the Yardbirds and quickly began pushing the band into more adventurous territory, helping establish them as one of the most innovative groups on the British rock scene.

Beck evidently didn't forget who had put his name forward. After the Yardbirds signed a new record deal, he paid Page a visit at his parents’ home in Epsom — arriving in a newly purchased 1963 Corvette Stingray with an electric guitar in hand.

“I was still living with my parents at the time in Epsom. And I heard this car come roaring up,” Page recalls in Fender’s new documentary, The Fender Telecaster: The One That Started It All.

“I looked out the window and I saw this blue Stingray outside… and Jeff’s coming out and he’s holding this guitar. [I thought] ‘Oh, he’s come to have a play.’

“He knocked on the door and explained that [the Yardbirds] had just done a new deal and he bought the Stingray with it. Then he said, ‘Here, this is yours’ and gave me his 1959 Telecaster. He said, ‘This is yours for getting me in the Yardbirds.’ Well, obviously, I was really moved, you know, because there was a lot of love in that gesture of giving it to me.”

The 1959 Telecaster had already played a part in Beck’s early career. He had used it with the Deltones after borrowing it from bandmate John Owen, before moving on to the 1954 Fender Esquire that became his primary guitar. During his time in the Yardbirds, the Telecaster served as a backup and alternative to the Esquire.

By the time Beck handed it to Page, he had moved on to other guitars, making the Telecaster a particularly generous gift for a young British guitarist at a time when Fender instruments were difficult to come by in the U.K.

Page used the guitar throughout his time with the Yardbirds. Then, in 1968, it followed him into the next chapter of his career when the Yardbirds dissolved and he formed the New Yardbirds with John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plant.

By then he had customized it by adding round mirrors to the body, to reflect light back at the audience. But he soon stripped the finish off the guitar and painted it himself, with a psychedelic design.

“I painted it in one go over the course of an evening, finishing it the next day,” Page explained. “The pattern took on the imagery of a dragon. I was quite happy with the way it ended up. Now it was the Dragoncaster.”

The New Yardbirds soon became Led Zeppelin, and the Telecaster remained an important part of Page’s early work with the band.

“I played it on the last Yardbirds recordings at the Anderson Theater in New York and on Led Zeppelin,” Page says. “Once it was created and painted it became like the legendary Excalibur as it traveled from the Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin.”

My love of weird electric guitars has helped me meet many people who share my fascination for these instruments. Around the time I began contributing to Guitar Player 25 years ago, I met kindred spirit Mike Robinson, who ran the site MyRareGuitars.com. It was from there that he eventually started Eastwood Guitars, where he has been re-creating some of the vintage guitar world’s hard-to-find classic whack jobs.

The La Baye 2x4 was the first guitar off his line way back in 2014, and it is still in production. The example shown here is from the second run, in 2024, and is the second piece I’ve bought from Eastwood.

Originally made in 1967 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, by luthier Dan Helland, the La Baye 2x4 grew out of an idea Helland had developed around 1964 or ’65 while working at Henri’s Music, an area music-store chain owned by Henri Czachor.

Around the same time, Holman-Woodell Inc. of Neodesha, Kansas, had begun making guitars for Wurlitzer, the piano and organ manufacturer, but that arrangement fell apart in 1967 when the guitars’ finishes began to flake. Helland entered the picture soon after, combining his unconventional two-by-four bodies with Holman-Woodell necks in an attempt to keep the company in the guitar business.

Unfortunately, the La Baye 2x4 was an absolute flop, selling only about 45 instruments, including 12-string and bass models. But 10 years later, Devo’s Bob Mothersbaugh (a.k.a. Bob 1) used one in a couple of the group’s videos, most notably the quirky and jerky rendition of the Stones’ classic “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which helped cement the guitar’s cult status.

The shape recalls Les Paul’s Log guitar, the crude two-by-four lab guitar that was the basis for his experiments with solidbody guitar design. (Helland’s son says his father wasn't aware of the Log.) But whereas Paul’s design was essentially a neck-through design, the La Baye 2x4 features a two-by-four body bolted to a neck, similar to the original design.

Due to the lack of space on the front of the guitar, the control knobs are located on the upper bout, which proves to be pretty convenient. But other than the look of this guitar, there’s nothing weird about it. This is a quality build, with modern and familiar components.

It’s not the easiest thing to play while sitting, but the La Baye 2x4 is really meant to be onstage anyway. Some players find the guitar a bit headstock-heavy and opt to move the strap pins around to compensate for this, but I find it’s quite comfortable to play while standing just as it is. The neck is fast, the medium-jumbo frets are dressed beautifully, the action is low, and the neck contour is quite reminiscent of a modern Fender, Charvel, Ibanez or Schecter with a modern C-shape.

The original La Baye 2x4 came stock with Holman-Woodell pickups, just like the ones used on the 1960s American-made Wurlitzer guitars. Eastwood fitted this baby with a pair of nicely voiced P90-style pickups, each with its own set of volume and tone controls. In the spirit of P90s, these single-coils are bright and loud, but the neck pickup offers plenty of jazz mojo with the tone dialed back a bit, so it’s a versatile-sounding guitar as well.

There’s a three-way pickup selector, Kluson-style tuners, and a Tune-o-matic intonatable bridge. As an option, I was able to order mine with a “Les Trem” vibrato that works very smoothly. The 22-fret maple neck has a rosewood fingerboard and cream binding with mother-of-pearl dot inlays.

I bought mine new, from the factory, for about $800; the tremolo was an additional cost of $200. That seems like a bargain considering that original La Bayes from the 1960s are fetching from three to six thousand online.

Obviously, it rules because of its looks, but it’s also a great-playing and great-sounding guitar. I’d be more than happy to play this for a whole set. Weighing in at around six pounds, it’s light and versatile. And man, what an attention-getter!

Thanks to Mike Robinson at Eastwood for walking me through the order process. Important to note, I didn’t identify myself as being from a guitar magazine; I wanted to be treated just as he’d treat anyone. I was not disappointed. The guitar is a great value; it shipped in a gigbag just when they said it would, and I received email updates with shipping status. Nice job, guys!

The 1969 Woodstock festival produced some of rock’s most iconic guitar moments: Richie Havens strumming his beat-up open-tuned Guild D-40 acoustic as he improvised “Freedom.” Pete Townshend taking his Gibson SG to Abbie Hoffman’s head after the political activist interrupted the Who’s set. And Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on a white Fender Stratocaster.

Among those standouts performances is Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee leading the group through “I’m Going Home” while playing the heavily stickered and modified Gibson ES-335 he called Big Red. The instrument would go on to become one of the most recognizable and prized electric guitars in rock history, and is currently under lock and key in the possession of his daughter Jasmin.

The guitar’s legend began in 1963 when Lee purchased it for £45 with a fitted case from Jack Brentnall’s, a musical instrument store in his hometown of Nottingham, England. By the time Big Red made its live debut a few years later, Lee had already begun modifying the instrument. The first distinctive change was the addition of a Fender single-coil pickup in the middle position, between the guitar’s two PAF humbuckers, giving it a brighter, sharper tone when needed.

“I now have a Gibson which sounds like a Tele just when I want it to,” Lee explained in an August 1975 interview with International Musician & Recording World.

At the same time, he began covering the instrument with stickers: peace signs, psychedelic decals, astrological imagery and the logo of the Ten Years After Music Lovers Society. By the time Lee walked onstage at Woodstock, Big Red already looked unlike any other Gibson in rock.

“Dad was always tinkering with the guitar doing stuff with it,” Jasmin tells Guitar Player. “In early 1970, he took the Bigsby off and replaced it with a TP-6 tailpiece with fine tuners. And because of that, he put more stickers on it.”

Ironically, the guitar’s appearance was permanently frozen in time by accident. During a 1972 show at London’s Marquee Club, Lee threw the guitar in the air and smashed the neck against the venue’s low ceiling.

“He used to throw it around quite a lot onstage,” Jasmin says. “Unfortunately on this particular night he threw it up and broke the dot-inlaid neck right off the guitar.”

Lee sent Big Red to Gibson for repairs. When it returned, the original neck had been replaced with a block-inlay version, and all the stickers had been lacquered over.

“The stickers became part of the guitar,” Jasmin says. “He couldn't take any off or change them.”

Gibson’s unsolicited preservation act ultimately helped turn Big Red into an artifact of classic rock history. It also obscured the guitar’s date of manufacture. Lee referred to it as a 1958 model, but without the original neck, it’s impossible to know.

Lee continued using the guitar throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s, but as its value climbed he gradually retired it from the stage. By 1992, insurance costs forced him to place it in storage altogether.

Years later, Gibson attempted to produce a signature replica, resulting in a painstaking Woodstock 50th-anniversary re-creation in 2019.

“Gibson actually worked quite closely with Dad on this guitar,” Jasmin says. “They sent him quite a few prototypes, but he was like, ‘Nope, nope, that’s not right.’”

Today, the original Big Red remains secured in storage while its replicas hang at Dean St. Studios in London. The Lee family hopes the original instrument will eventually find a new owner who understands both its musical significance and the decades of history embedded in every scratch, modification and sticker sealed beneath its lacquer finish.

While Norman’s Rare Guitars has built its reputation as one of the world’s premier vintage guitar shops, Norman Harris’ influence extends far beyond buying and selling old instruments. For decades, he’s also used the store’s considerable reach to help young musicians find an audience.

That side of Harris’ legacy is highlighted in the recent documentary Norman’s Rare Guitars, which explores not only the store’s celebrity clientele and vintage electric and acoustic guitar treasures but also the musicians who’ve found exposure through its popular “Guitar of the Day” videos.

“The way he helps struggling artists that come through the store, like, ‘Hey, come play a song, we’ll put it on our YouTube channel,’” Joe Bonamassa says in the film.

“And you can sit on that sofa, and you can play, and they’ll put it out,” adds Malcolm McDowell. “It’s such an important place for a young musician to go and get a little exposure. He nurtures.”

A quick scroll through the store’s YouTube channel reveals countless young players showcasing everything from blues and country to rock and fingerstyle guitar. For many, the videos provided exposure they might not have found elsewhere.

“He’s finding musicians and bands that he thinks are worth breaking, sets them up in here, and makes them play,” actor Kiefer Sutherland says. “He’s actually making a difference.”

One musician who benefited directly from that exposure is slide guitarist ace Sarah Rogo, who later became a regular presenter on the channel.

“Norm’s platform definitely helped elevate my platform a lot,” she says. “With the YouTube algorithm, someone will punch in the name of a unique guitar, and Norman’s Rare Guitars is the first place that pops up, and they’ll see me playing the guitar. Billy Gibbons called the store one day and said, ‘Who’s that girl playing the resonator guitars?’”

But perhaps the most notable success story to emerge from the channel is Marcus King.

Mark Agnesi, who managed the store before joining Gibson, remembers filming a young King during a visit to the shop.

“I remember when he came into the store,” Agnesi recalls. “We start rolling the video, he starts playing, and then he opens his mouth and starts singing. It stopped you dead in your tracks; it was like, ‘Oh my god, I am watching the real deal right now, this kid is gonna have a serious career.’”

Agnesi’s prediction proved accurate. Since then, King has released seven albums, earned a Grammy nomination, and landed signature gear deals with Gibson and Orange.

“That video launched a career,” King says.

The clip eventually surpassed two million views, and Bonamassa was among those who took notice. According to Agnesi, Bonamassa’s reaction was simple: it wasn’t a question of whether King would make it, but when — and that time was already arriving.

As Harris puts it in the film, “giving back is very important.” Through Norman’s Rare Guitars, he’s done far more than connect players with vintage instruments; he’s helped connect promising musicians with the audiences they needed to reach.

Ben Harper is the kind of cat who can put a guitar together from scratch, so his input on a signature model carries extra gravitas. His Taylor Gold Label 512ce SE Grand Concert is the first new acoustic he’s endorsed in many moons, and this edition holds special promise.

Taylor introduced its transformative Gold Label design featuring fanned V-Class bracing in 2025 on select Super Auditoriums and Dreadnoughts to a chorus of rave reviews for its bountiful warm tone. I remember talking to Harper about his gig routine during the time frame when the Gold Label Collection was rolling out, and happened to mention how I felt that Taylor had a true breakthrough on its hands. He surprised me by saying that he was obsessed with a prototype Gold Label 510e, which is a dreadnought.

So it’s interesting that for his signature model he wound up going with the same wood combination of mahogany and spruce, but on a more compact Grand Concert. What’s also noteworthy is that it’s part of a suite of newfangled Grand Concerts featuring a slightly shorter scale length and a bit of increased body depth. The concept is that it would all add up to what Taylor describes as “a supremely comfortable, intimate feeling guitar to match its articulate, warm sound.”

I watched Harper and Taylor’s Andy Powers unveil his signature model at the NAMM Show at a duo performance they put on for a lucky little audience that was either in the know or happened to be hanging around the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus. Harper’s tone sounded amazing through the P.A., and he handed his guitar to me for a Quick Look after the set. It felt great in hand then, and I’m excited to have a review unit to put through thorough paces now.

A Burst of Sunshine

Harper’s signature model radiates with a sunny aesthetic. Its gorgeous top features a stunning golden-brown shaded edgeburst and fine glossy finish. Complementary cream pickguard and cream Crest inlays make it one of the warmest-looking, most inviting acoustics I’ve ever seen. The first thing I thought when I took it out of its distinctive British Cocoa Bronco case was that if this baby sounds like it looks, then it’s going to be a perfect day of picking and grinning on the back porch.

Warming Up to the New Grand Concert

Plucking and strumming in all sorts of ways, my first impression was that it delivered a nice blend of warmth and articulation as expected. There didn’t seem to be as much bass and power acoustically as I’d remembered hearing from the stage, and of course there was less than the larger Gold Label models I’d tried previously, which notably had chunkier-sounding rosewood back and sides. Players in search of that tone on a new Grand Concert might audition the 712e as well.

Considering the Grand Concert’s somewhat compact shape there sure is a decent sense of sonic depth, perhaps a tad more than typical from being a 1/4" deeper than a traditional Grand Concert, although that doesn’t transform this into some sort of boomer edition. It’s very balanced from low to high with a focus in the middle range.

Fanned V-Class bracing clearly sounds different on different body and wood types, and mahogany can sound very different from one guitar to another depending on the cut. In this case it sounds more refined and articulate than the fundamentally darker tones of some mahogany models, and surely a good deal of that is attributable to its torrefied spruce top.

I had a couple other guitars in similar sizes on hand for comparisons, and the Harper Grand Concert was, well, comparable. I didn’t find it to be bigger or louder, but it did feel silkier and sound smoother. It’s somehow vintage in its mellow warmth, yet simultaneously quite contemporary in its precision. That’s the essence of the Gold Label design.

Plug & Play

After plenty of acoustic auditioning, I remembered to plug the BH GL 512e into a Circa 74 and… That’s the sound I’d heard at the NAMM Show when Harper and Powers played onstage, and it completely belies the body size. Taylor’s new Claria acoustic pickup system packs a lot of power into its punchy-sounding preamp, which is capable of tonal transformation through amplification.

Roll back the Mid-Contour control to mellow it out, bring out the bass, and turn what is a natural fingerpicking instrument into more of a strummer, moving towards dreadnought territory. Push it forward and the pop-factor is off the charts. Fingerstyle passages come alive like Frampton in ’76. Every nuance of a bluesy finger bend becomes apparent.

Play With Me

The bottom line was that I couldn’t stop playing Harper’s Grand Concert. I’d put it down, and pick it right back up again. There’s something truly intimate about the way this Gold Label 512e feels — the neck in your hand, its body in your bosom. It’s very light, resonant and responsive. The short scale makes strings easy to bend. Harmonics leap forth with ease and bloom with fabulous sustain.

The Harper signature seems to get where you’re coming from and help you express that feeling. It’s very responsive to a light touch, so you can play with great delicacy. One of my favorite things to do was lower the tuning and fingerpick some string-snapping, old-timey blues with crazy string bends, harmonic flares and pick squeals à la Catfish Keith. The compact body and short scale length make it ideal for that kind of stuff.

Or you can play a happy song such as Harper’s “Steal My Kisses” and it bounces right along on your lap. Sometimes I’d wander aimlessly for a while staring off at the horizon or the television and almost forget it’s even there until a sequence of notes or a chord I’d never considered appeared out of thin air.

As always with all new Gold Label and Next Generation Taylors, I appreciate the precision flexibility of the Action Control Neck. Andy Powers says, “Simply turn the adjuster screw to dial in the string height after dialing in the neck relief with the truss rod.” I simply wish the groovy tool in the demo videos came with the guitar for those handy, on-the-fly adjustments that can be made right through the sound hole while the strings are still attached.

Express Yourself

Ben Harper is one of the most expressive performers on the planet. He’s always had a unique ability to get his point across with a whisper or a scream. It follows that his signature Taylor would possess that quality above all else. The Ben Harper Gold Label 512e Special Edition Grand Concert is one of the most expressive acoustics you’ll find, the kind that helps you develop your own signature voice on the instrument.

SPECIFICATIONS

Ben Harper Gold Label 512e SE

CONTACT taylorguitars.com

PRICE $2,999 street, British Cocoa Bronco deluxe hardshell case included

NUT WIDTH 1.75", white Tusq

NECK Neo-tropical mahogany, standard carve, satin finish, cream Crest inlays

FRETBOARD Honduran rosewood, 24.875" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Taylor polished bronze

BODY Solid mahogany back & sides, torrefied spruce top with fanned V-class bracing with tonal rout

BRIDGE Honduran rosewood with compensated white Micarta saddle

ELECTRONICS Claria pickup system with volume, tone and Mid-Contour controls mounted in sound hole

POWER 9V battery

FACTORY STRINGS D’Addario XS Coated Phosphor Bronze Light gauges .012 - .053

WEIGHT 4.2 lbs (as tested)

BUILT USA

PRO Beautiful, comfortable, light, resonate, very dynamically responsive. Surprisingly bold amplified tone perfect for live performance

CON I was hoping for a little more oomph acoustically, although the response to nuance is quite nice. Would be handy to include tool for adjusting the Action Control neck

From the legendary Telecaster and Stratocaster to the powerful Precision Bass, Fender instruments have played a major role in shaping modern music.

If you’ve ever wanted to add a Fender instrument to your collection, now is a great opportunity. Several major music retailers are currently offering significant discounts on Fender products.

And better yet, it’s not just Fender guitars on sale. You’ll also find deals on other Fender-owned brands like Gretsch, Jackson, EVH, and Charvel.

Okay, I know there are lots of guitars on offer. So, with that in mind, I thought I'd share my personal recommendations.

One standout model for me is the American Professional II Telecaster Deluxe. This modern version builds on the Tele Deluxe legacy and, in my opinion, offers excellent tone and playability. It features a unique Deep "C"-shaped neck profile and rolled fingerboard edges for superb comfort and playability. The V-Mod II Double Tap humbuckers deliver everything from hard rock grit to blues, clean country, and even metal.

Another eye-catching option is the Player II Stratocaster in a striking Candy Red Burst finish.

This guitar features a contemporary C neck profile with a smooth satin urethane finish, a 9.5”-radius rosewood fingerboard, and 22 medium jumbo frets. It’s equipped with Player Series alnico V single-coil pickups, an alnico II humbucker, and ClassicGear tuning machines for reliable performance.

Another highlight is the EVH SA-126, Wolfgang Van Halen’s signature model. Its silhouette recalls Eddie Van Halen’s classic design, but this new version features a unique semi-hollow construction. You can save $250 right now.

Looking for something geared toward metal? The Jackson Dinky JS22-7 is a fast-playing instrument that excels at heavier styles. It’s an excellent option whether you’re new to seven-string guitars or just looking to expand your collection.

Many more models are available from brands like Gretsch and Charvel. Explore your favorite music retailers to see the full selection and take advantage of the latest deals before they come to an end at the end of the month.

Martin is releasing two new Joe Bonamassa signature acoustic guitars inspired by his treasured 1937 Martin 00-18 shade-top.

The 00-18 Joe Bonamassa ($3,999.99) and 00-10E Retro Joe Bonamassa ($1,299.99) are available now from Martin dealers and at martinguitar.com.

Although he’s widely known as one of the foremost blues-rock guitarists today, Bonamassa is an acoustic player as well. He purchased the shade-top from John Shults at True Vintage Guitar, “who found it in Ohio and bought it from the original owners family,” Bonamassa revealed in a June 15 Facebook post. “Price tag of 45 dollars still on it.”

The new Martin guitars include a handcrafted Nazareth-built model and a more accessible version produced at Martin's Navojoa, Mexico facility. Both feature a custom 1937-style sunburst and carefully replicated top wear based on Bonamassa's original guitar, capturing the appearance of an instrument that has spent decades making music.

This collaboration is Bonamassa’s second with Martin, following on his 2024 Martin 000-45 Joe Bonamassa Limited Edition.

“If you told me when I was a kid that I'd be sitting here in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, with not one, but two signature guitars, I'd be like, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Bonamassa said.

“This is the high-water mark for me, because you’re going, ‘It’s a Martin!’”

Handcrafted in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, the 00-18 Joe Bonamassa pairs a solid spruce top with genuine mahogany back and sides for a warm, clear, and responsive voice. Its compact 00 body offers balanced tone and comfortable playability equally well suited to blues, folk, fingerstyle playing, and songwriting.

Golden Era scalloped X-bracing delivers an open, dynamic response, while faux tortoise binding, the custom 1937-style sunburst, and replicated top wear faithfully reflect the appearance of Bonamassa's original pre-war instrument. A Golden Era Modified Low Oval neck profile with a standard taper provides a comfortable vintage-inspired feel.

Bonamassa brought an early prototype into the studio and compared it directly against his original 1937 Martin.

“When we put the mic in front of it, my producer said, 'I like that one better,’” Bonamassa recalled of the Nazareth-built model.

Each 00-18 Joe Bonamassa includes a hardshell case.

Crafted in Martin's Navojoa facility, the 00-10E Retro Joe Bonamassa pairs a solid spruce top with solid sapele back and sides for balanced tone, warmth, and focused projection. Its custom 1937-style sunburst and visually replicated top wear mirror the distinctive character of Bonamassa's original guitar. Scalloped spruce X-bracing supports a responsive acoustic voice, while a Performing Artist neck with a high-performance taper offers smooth, approachable playability.

The model also features Martin E1 electronics with volume, tone, and phase controls, along with a built-in chromatic tuner, making it equally at home onstage, in the studio, or around the house. Bonamassa personally tested the onboard electronics in live performance before approving the final production model.

Each 00-10E Retro Joe Bonamassa includes a softshell case.

After celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024 with special editions, including choice Legacy models honoring Bob Taylor’s most essential acoustic designs, Taylor is all about pushing the envelope further forward with the Next Generation. Primary features include an Action Control neck, scalloped V-Class bracing and Taylor’s new Claria acoustic pickup system.

Of all the Next Gen models, the Builder’s Edition 514ce is particularly interesting. The 514ce has always held a special place in the Taylor line and in the hearts of a great many players, including me. The traditional pairing of solid mahogany back and sides with a red cedar top yields a particularly warm tone that is plenty articulate, making it applicable to practically any musical style.

The Grand Auditorium body with a Venetian cutaway and electronics makes it super versatile and stage worthy. Being in the middle of the main American range means that the 514ce is in the middle of the price range as well, and it looks good without being too fancy. It’s simply a great, all-around workhorse.

The Next Generation Builder’s Edition 514ce promises to take everything to the next level, and it stands on the shoulders of some notable recent developments. In 2018, Andy Powers redesigned the 514ce with V-Class bracing. Taylor is always working with new tonewoods, and in 2022 Taylor revamped the 500 Series using sustainably sourced Urban Ironbark and switching to a torrefied Sitka spruce top.

For the 50th anniversary, they chose the 514ce as a historic model, representing the 30th anniversary of the iconic Grand Auditorium body style. Taylor recognized its significance with a Legacy Edition featuring throwback specs, including X-bracing and a return to the classic mahogany-and-cedar tonewood combination.

I have more experience playing a Taylor 514ce than any other acoustic since I picked up a 1998 edition back in 2008. As a result, I was compelled to review both the 514ce Urban Ironbark and the Legacy 514ce. The Next Generation 514ce is now available in both a standard edition, in traditional mahogany and cedar, and as a luxurious Builder’s Edition in either Natural or Kona Burst finish on a Sitka spruce top with Shamel Ash back and sides. I had to try the Builder’s Edition experience in Kona Burst.

Fresh Face

At first glance, this is the most attractive 514ce yet. The dusky sunburst top with glossy finish and Firestripe pickguard is uniquely beautiful. Large faux pearl Compass fretboard and peghead inlays add a bit of bling. So does the Antique Chrome hardware, although the golden hardware of a classic 514 might look even more complimentary.

The single-ring faux pearl rosette is a bit of a disappointment compared to the three-ring abalone rosette of a classic 514ce. But it’s still an unquestionably beautiful guitar, though perhaps not unquestionably more beautiful than my ’98, simply younger in a new style with a fresh face.

Modern/Classic Tone

The classic 514 tone shone through right away in this Next Gen model, and that’s a great thing. It’s not exactly the same as mahogany and cedar, but Shamel Ash and Sitka combine to render a very similar sound: woody with a dry finish. And it feels great to know that the former is harvested sustainably under Taylor’s Urban Wood Initiative.

While I appreciate the many attributes of V-Class bracing, such as superior sustain and tuning accuracy, I’ve also felt there was little something missing compared to the classic X-braced models. Perhaps V bracing was making the top a bit stiff and therefore slightly stiff sounding.

However, this guitar resonates right out of the box. It’s not quite as balmy in the bottom as some of the new Gold Label Taylors I’ve tried — more like the original 514 tone I’ve grown to know and love. Perhaps scalloping the bracing a bit has allowed the top to flex more freely, resulting in a friendlier tone that still has the deadly note precision of V-class.

Playability, Playability, Playability

This is where the Builder’s Edition 514ce truly shines. Every note is viable, from the very lowest to the very highest on each string. The neck and frets feel silky smooth, encouraging exploration, and intonation is spot-on everywhere. Chords come together with ease, while notes ring true with individual overtones.

Since this is a Builder’s Edition model, the body has beveled edges under the strumming arm and on the cutaway. That makes strumming feel comfortable and makes notes in those short fret rows at the very top of the fingerboard a bit easier to reach and hold.

I found the factory action agreeable and stable, but having the ability to make my own string height adjustments via Taylor’s Action Control Neck was handy. You can reach the adjustment screw through the sound hole and set string height to your preference. However, it would be nice if Taylor included a tool like the one shown in their demo videos. Either way, I wish every one of my acoustics had beveled edges and an Action Control Neck.

Plugged In with Claria

When Taylor started moving away from its long-standing Expression 2 System on some models, it seemed like maybe something was up, and apparently that was the Claria Pickup System. The new kid in town is actually a classic piezo undersaddle pickup with a flexible, proprietary preamp. It’s kind of crazy that after years of lobbying about piezo sensors sounding better when positioned behind the bridge, as in the ES2, Taylor is now back to the traditional undersaddle piezo strip.

But apparently it’s all about the new preamp. Tested through a Circa 74, it sounded supper peppy. There’s plenty of power with a noticeable zing compared to a basic undersaddle pickup. Controls include volume and tone, plus a handy Mid-Contour. I pegged the volume, put the tone at center indent and focused on the mids.

Rolling it back scoops the mids, which sounds nice and mellow when strumming a simple chord progression with a pick, such as Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” Pushing it forward makes notes project with ever-increasing articulation, which is perfect when you need a fingerstyle passage to pop.

Claria’s Mid-Contour control location near the fretboard side of the sound hole makes it very accessible on the fly, so you can truly use it to great effect during a performance. The downside, from my perspective, is there’s not enough room left to throw a magnetic pickup to run my usual dual-signal chain. The good news is that I generally use the sound hole pickup to add more string pop, and the Claria offers plenty of that, especially when pushing the Mid-Contour.

Taylor’s Next Generation features are awesome. I appreciate the acoustic-tone improvement from scalloping the V-bracing, the precision flexibility of the Action Control Neck, and the dynamic plugged-in pleasure of the Claria Pickup System. Having them on a fresh-looking, classic-sounding, modern-playing performance machine such as the 514ce is a big win.

I can honestly say that out of all the 514ce models I’ve tried, this is the one I’d prefer to take to the stage right now. Kudos to Taylor for making a lovely modern version of my ol’ fav.

SPECIFICATIONS

BE 514ce

CONTACT taylorguitars.com

PRICE $3,499 street, hardshell case included

NUT WIDTH 1.75", black Tusq

NECK Neo-tropical mahogany, long-tenon, standard carve, satin finish, faux pearl Compass inlays

FRETBOARD West African ebony, 25.5" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Gotoh 510 Antique Chrome

BODY Solid Shamel ash back & sides, solid Sitka spruce top with scalloped V-class bracing

BRIDGE West African ebony with compensated white Micarta saddle

ELECTRONICS Claria Pickup System with Volume, Tone, and Mid-Contour controls mounted in sound hole

POWER 9V battery

FACTORY STRINGS D’Addario XS Coated Phosphor Bronze Light gauges .012 - .053

WEIGHT 4.5 lbs (as tested)

BUILT USA

PRO Elegant, modern take on the classic 514 with fabulous playability and comfort. Articulate and warm acoustic tone; punchy, sculptable amplified tone

CON None, but it would be so handy if Taylor included a tool for adjusting the Action Control Neck

Marty Stuart’s enviable collection of historic guitars and country-music memorabilia is rooted in the same deep love for country’s rich legacy that inspires his music. More than a collection of rare instruments, it’s a personal mission to preserve pieces of American musical history before they’re lost forever.

As a boy growing up in Mississippi, Stuart collected autographs, set lists and used guitar picks from country musicians who passed through his hometown. In 1972, at just 14 years old, he joined bluegrass legend Lester Flatt’s band, putting him in an ideal position to acquire memorabilia and forge friendships with many of the artists whose legacies he would later help preserve.

With the rise of the 1980s urban-cowboy phenomenon, Stuart watched traditional country music fall out of fashion. Vintage electric and acoustic instruments and priceless artifacts were disappearing into pawnshops, private collections and overseas buyers, convincing him that someone needed to safeguard the genre’s history.

“The old-timers were kind of disregarded and put out to pasture,” he says. “Their costumes, manuscripts, instruments, and all things pertaining to the old world of country music were being forgotten. The guitars at the time were either going to George Gruhn’s or they’d get traded in pawnshops around town. Japanese collectors would come to Nashville and buy up country culture. It seemed like the family jewels were getting away.”

That conviction only deepened after Stuart joined Johnny Cash’s band in 1980. During a U.K. tour with Cash, he visited the London Hard Rock Cafe, which had recently begun displaying celebrity guitars and music memorabilia.

“I really understood and respected what they had going on,” Stuart recalls. “All the way back home to America, I kept going, ‘I know my mission. I’m going to self-appoint myself to save as much country-music old-world culture as I can.’ I see it as American culture and a great part of our story that’s been squandered, pawned and thrown away. So I got serious.”

The instrument that perhaps best embodies that mission is the sunburst 1954 Fender Telecaster that belonged to country-rock pioneer Clarence White. More than just White’s stage guitar with the Byrds, it’s one of the most influential Telecasters ever built.

White’s ’54 Telecaster was fitted with one of the earliest Parsons/White B-Benders, a groundbreaking mechanical device developed by White and Byrds drummer Gene Parsons that allowed a guitarist to raise the pitch of the B string by a whole step, recreating the soaring, weeping sound of a pedal steel.

The idea came to Parsons during a 1967 recording session for country duo Vern and Rex Gosdin. White wanted to bend a string behind the nut while simultaneously playing harmonics higher up the neck and joked that he’d need “a third hand” to pull it off. Parsons, a former machinist as well as a drummer and multi-instrumentalist, began wondering if a mechanical third hand could do the job instead.

His first prototype used a floor pedal, but White wasn’t interested.

“If I wanted to play pedal steel,” he told Parsons, “I’d play pedal steel!”

Working together, the pair devised a system of levers, springs and fulcrums activated by the guitar’s upper-bout strap button. By pushing down on the neck and releasing it, White could smoothly bend the B string while continuing to fret and pick normally. Parsons built the original mechanism from pedal-steel parts mounted to the back of White’s Telecaster beneath a wooden frame and Masonite cover. Later versions would become far more refined, but the original remains unlike any B-Bender that followed.

That’s exactly how Stuart prefers it.

“It’s an indescribable guitar,” he says. “You could put a hundred Telecasters in a row, and when you plug this guitar in it just has a voice all its own. It is absolutely one of the most magical guitars I ever played.”

The guitar’s unique personality isn’t down to the B-Bender alone. A hot-wound Stratocaster neck pickup crafted by pedal-steel legend Red Rhodes contributes to its unmistakable tone, giving the Tele a voice Stuart considers impossible to duplicate.

Stuart’s connection to the instrument stretches back long before he owned it. Clarence’s brother, bluegrass mandolin ace Roland White, was the man who got the teenage Stuart his job with Lester Flatt. Stuart later lived in Roland’s Nashville home and became close with Clarence’s widow, Susie White.

In 1980, Stuart traveled to Susie’s home in Elkhorn City, Kentucky, intending to buy a 1954 Stratocaster she had decided to sell. Knowing how deeply Stuart admired her late husband’s playing, she also brought out Clarence’s Telecaster and invited him to spend some time with it.

“She said, ‘That’s what you really want, isn’t it?’” Stuart recalls. “I said, ‘Absolutely, I would love to have it.’ She said, ‘Let me think about it.’

“Later in the afternoon, she said, ‘I’d be happy to sell it to you.’ So she sold me the ’54 Strat, Clarence’s Tele, a couple of his Nudie suits and a lot of Byrds memorabilia for $1,450.

“I couldn’t believe it. I had basically laid my checkbook on the table and said, ‘Susie, name your price.’ She could have asked for far more and I would gladly have paid.”

The Clarence Tele has occupied a central role in Stuart’s music ever since. It can be heard on “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” from Saturday Night, and has remained his constant companion onstage for decades.

The $1,450 price tag has become one of vintage guitar’s great bargains, but Stuart has never viewed Clarence as a collector’s trophy. For him, it’s a working instrument, a singular musical voice and a tangible piece of American history — the very kind of cultural treasure he set out to preserve when he made that promise to himself on the flight home from London.

Joe Bonamassa owns more than 600 guitars, including some of the world’s most coveted vintage instruments. But when asked to name one of his favorites, the blues star didn’t reach for a pristine six-figure Les Paul or rare Fender.

Instead, he picked a heavily modified 1968 Fender Telecaster.

Speaking to Guitar Center, Bonamassa explained that the guitar’s appeal has little to do with originality or collector value. In fact, its previous owner permanently altered it by routing the body to accommodate a pair of Gibson PAF humbuckers — one of the most sought-after pickups ever made.

Bonamassa isn’t the first guitarist to embrace the combination. Eddie Van Halen famously loaded Gibson PAF humbuckers into his legendary Frankenstein.

“I bought this guitar from a guy in Daytona Beach, Florida about 15 years ago. It wasn’t a lot of money,” Bonamassa says. “I plugged it in, and it was magic.”

“It’s basically a Gibson Les Paul jammed into a Fender Telecaster,” he continues. “But the difference is you have a maple neck and an ash body. And they sound great. Sometimes a hybrid can turn out to be the best.”

That recipe gives the guitar a distinctly different voice from a traditional Les Paul, whose mahogany body and neck produce a warmer, thicker sound. Bonamassa says the Telecaster’s ash body and maple neck bring extra clarity and bite to the vintage Gibson pickups.

“That’s the beauty of a Fender Telecaster,” he says. “You can pretty much do anything to it. The ash body does something cool with the humbucking pickups.”

He also points to the electric guitar’s 500k potentiometers, which help brighten the PAFs and tighten their high end, creating a remarkably versatile instrument.

“Now, do I suggest going out there and buying a very expensive vintage Telecaster, taking a pin router to it and jamming a whole bunch of pickups in there? No,” he says. “If they’re already modified, then that’s the beauty of it. You can save yourself some money and have literally just a utility plank that can play anything.”

That’s exactly how Bonamassa uses it.

“I’ve used this guitar for jazz fusion gigs; I’ve used it for rock gigs. I’ve used it for everything, because it has so much flexibility.”

He laughs that audiences often underestimate the instrument before hearing it in action.

“This is one of my favorite secret weapons,” he says. “When I bring it out, people discount it. Then they hear it.”

The guitar now bears plenty of battle scars—many of them Bonamassa’s own—after years of regular use.

Its status as one of the most-played guitars in his collection is especially notable given Bonamassa’s changing attitude toward collecting. After the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year, the blues guitarist said he has begun curtailing his relentless pursuit of vintage gear, placing greater value on the instruments he already owns.

For Bonamassa, this modified Telecaster is proof that a guitar doesn’t have to be museum-grade to earn a permanent place in the rotation. Sometimes the best instrument is simply the one that makes you want to keep playing.

Two well-worn Kramer guitars that belonged to Eddie Van Halen have gone up for auction — complete with what are claimed to be cigarette butts the guitarist smoked, still wedged beneath the low strings behind the nut.

The electric guitars are among the headline lots in Backstage Auctions’ latest sale, which runs through August 8. Listed as “Edward Van Halen 1986 Zeke Clark Customized 5150 Kramer Guitar” and “Edward Van Halen 1987 Zeke Clark Customized 5150 Kramer Guitar,” each carries a starting bid of $50,000.

While their exact recording history can’t be verified, Backstage Auctions president Jacques van Gool says there’s little doubt the guitars saw extensive studio use during one of Van Halen’s most successful periods.

“Those two guitars were definitely and extensively used by Eddie in the studio,” van Gool said during an appearance on Final Resonance TV. “They were never taken out on the road. But Zeke doesn’t remember if those guitars were used on recordings. Most likely they were. But again, you cannot just fill in blanks. I mean, you either know or you don’t. And even if you know, then I always say, ‘We have proof.’

“But they have so much wear and tear on them and the usual cigarette burns on the headstock and all that good stuff. It’s fantastic that those pieces survived and that he hung on to them.”

Among the guitars’ more unusual features are the cigarette butts reportedly smoked by Van Halen himself, each left tucked beneath the strings on the headstock — a small but unmistakably personal detail that has become one of the auction’s biggest talking points.

Final Resonance TV host Jeff Goebel added that former Van Halen guitar technician Zeke Clark had shared the story behind the instruments, explaining that Van Halen initially had Clark build them to prove his abilities before keeping them as backup guitars.

“These were ones that Eddie made [Zeke] build to kind of get Ed’s approval of his skills,” Goebel said. “Then he had these as sort of backups, as well.”

Clark’s connection gives the instruments particularly strong provenance. A respected luthier and technician, he worked as Eddie Van Halen’s lead guitar and amp tech from 1985 to 1993, overseeing the guitarist’s gear throughout the 5150, OU812 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge eras.

According to the auction listing, Clark’s career also included building, repairing and maintaining equipment for artists including Prince, Sammy Hagar, Journey, Heart and Poison.

The sale features dozens of Van Halen-related artifacts drawn from the collections of Clark and longtime Van Halen associate Nick D’Andrea, offering collectors a rare glimpse inside the guitarist’s inner circle. Few lots, however, are likely to attract as much attention as the two battered Kramer guitars — not least because they still bear traces of Van Halen’s daily habits decades after they left his hands.

Bidding remains open through August 8. For collectors willing to meet the hefty opening price, the sale offers the chance to own not only two studio-used Kramer guitars with impeccable provenance, but also an unusually intimate piece of Eddie Van Halen history.

Designed to recreate the look, playing feel and sound of Fender’s iconic offset model from the mid 1960s, the Vintera III Jazzmaster has a sleek Jetsons-esque shape with a body made of alder, a traditional Fender tonewood that offers a balanced and lively tone with beefy mids and a robust low end.

Coupled to it via a four-bolt joint, the C-shaped maple neck starts off slim at the nut (1.65 inches) and widens moderately to slightly more than two inches at the 12th fret. Riding atop is a round-laminated 25.5 inch–scale rosewood fingerboard carrying 21 vintage-tall frets that provide slightly more height than vintage-style frets for ease of bending and a wider vibrato.

Dressed in Olympic White, and shown here in Candy Apple Red, the Vintera III Jazzmaster came out of its gig bag in tune and with a good factory setup. This cool-looking electric proved a satisfying player thanks to the neck’s slender profile, low, buzz-free action, polished frets and tuneful intonation.

While the fret tips were a bit sharp, the nut was well finished and properly notched so it doesn’t cause string pinching when tuning or using the trem. On a purely cosmetic note, and compared to the previous Vintera II Jazzmaster, the Vintera III features decals that are applied over the finish instead of under it, a genuine bone nut and period-correct clay fingerboard dots.

The vintage-style floating tremolo tailpiece and separate six-saddle adjustable bridge are a good combination that keeps the strings reliably in tune when you’re doing expressive warbles with the push-in bar. As per vintage spec, the tailpiece also features a lock button that’s intended to keep the guitar in tune if a string breaks. To use it, simply press the bar down, slide the button rearward, release the bar and rock on.

To test it out, I purposely snapped the high E string and the system responded by keeping the remaining five strings in good relative tune. However, they all went sharp and had to be retuned anyway. The device can be adjusted to improve tuning stability, and since all it takes is a screwdriver and a little patience it’s worth checking out online videos or other sources that explain how to do it.

The Vintera III’s pickups are also era correct, as opposed to “decade based,” and are optimized to capture the essence of classic Fender single-coil tone, which the company describes as “rich and full-bodied with the distinctive depth and clarity that made these offset guitars the choice of surf, pop and indie musicians.”

Through my PRS DGT 15 head and cabinet — along with a selection of distortion, compression and delay pedals — this acoustically lively guitar was easy to dial in for everything from clean and funky rhythm work to distorted crunch and lead playing. It’s cool how the Lead/Rhythm circuit — which has an on/off slider switch and a pair of volume and tone thumbwheels for the neck pickup — allows you to preset two distinct sounds while still having full control over your lead tone when the slider is flicked to the down position.

In this mode you can select neck, bridge or both pickups via the three-way toggle and control it with the volume and tone knobs. It’s a hip feature, especially for live performance, as it can lessen knob twiddling when going between clean and overdriven tones.

In all, the Vintera III Mid ’60s Jazzmaster is perhaps the best version that Fender has produced so far. It’s fun to play, it looks fantastic and the electronics enhance flexibility in ways that few vintage-style guitars can match. If there’s room in your garage for one of these retro-modern marvels, don’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

SPECIFICIATIONS

CONTACT fender.com

PRICE $1,349, gig-bag included

NUT Bone, 1.65" wide

NECK Maple bolt-on, Mid-’60s C shape

FINGERBOARD Round-laminated rosewood, 25.5" scale,7.25" radius

FRETS 21 vintage tall

TUNERS Fender vintage style, nickel plated

BODY Alder

BRIDGE Six-saddle vintage-style adjustable. Foating tremolo tailpiece with lock button and push-in arm

PICKUPS Era-correct mid-’60s Jazzmaster single-coils with Vintage White covers

CONTROLS Volume, tone, three-way pickup selector. Lead/Rhythm circuit on/off slide switch, thumbwheels for neck pickup volume and tone

FINISH Available in Candy Apple Red, Sonic Blue and Olympic White

WEIGHT 7.94 lbs (tested)

BUILT Ensenada, Mexico

PRO Excellent tones. Great playability. Innovative electronics and trem-lock function.

CON On the heavy side.

While he was lead guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell helped create a considerable number of now-classic songs in the heartland rock canon.

Today, some of the electric guitars Campbell used on those songs are famous in their own right. There’s his Broadcaster — the guitar he says “I can’t live without” — that featured on “American Girl,” the band’s third single, as well as his famous Red Dog Telecaster, heard on their 1980 hit “Refugee” and recently the focus of two new Fender Tribute models.

There are others, and they all have great stories, but nothing like the pair of tales Campbell tells about his 1962 Gibson Les Paul “SG” Junior, the guitar famously heard on the outro guitar solo from “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” the second single from Tom Petty’s 1989 solo record, Full Moon Fever.

“Great story about this,” Campbell tells Gibson TV. “I was in Hartford, Connecticut on tour, and I went for a walk, and I passed a video store. No guitars anywhere. I just walked in.

“And somehow in the conversation, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we have a couple of guitars.’ And this is one of them.”

Campbell has no idea why a video store had a pair of guitars inside, but it didn’t matter. He liked what he saw and decided to strike a deal.

“They had two in the back, and I bought them both,” he says. “It was like, I don't know, 120 bucks. I'm just lucky that way.”

As Campbell explains, while SGs feature minimal electronics, they are excellent-playing tone machines. “These are wonderful because they've just got the one pickup, one volume, one knob,” he says. “They play great. They're nice and lightweight.”

Campbell had the guitar with him by chance while he, Petty and producer Jeff Lynne were doing overdubs on “Runnin’ Down a Dream.”

“Tom and Jeff and I were working on the record, and it was one of the few songs that Tom and I wrote where we're gonna have an ending where the guitar is going to just go on for a while,” he explains.

“I pulled this guitar out, and I think I had an Ampeg amp or something. I was doing one of those licks on the solo,” he says, as he demonstrates it on the guitar. “And I remember Jeff was there, and he went like this.” Campbell lowers his sunglasses and makes a surprised face. “It's hard to impress Jeff. So, yeah, that was a good sign.

“But that was it — that was this guitar. It just happened to be there that day. I didn’t go looking for it. I just picked it up.”

It turned out to be a happy accident.

But there’s a bad accident to go with that story.

In 1986, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers supported Bob Dylan on his True Confessions tour. The tour was on its third-to-last stop, at the L.A. Forum on August 3, 1986, when tragedy struck. As Campbell recalls, the band was in between songs and Dylan was talking to the audience.

“I had this guitar on, and I’m standing there, trying to be cool,” Campbell elaborates. “And I kind of went like this to scratch my ears or whatever. And Bob was talking to the audience going on with some important spiel about something.

“And the strap came loose and [the volume control] was wide open. And it went ka-blam! Loud! You know, this thing's loud.”

“Bob turned around like, ‘What the fuck were you doing back there? I'm trying to talk up here!’”

Campbell looked down to see the headstock had split cleanly away from the neck.

“And my heart just broke, because I love that guitar, you know. I just thought they're gonna repair it, but it'll never be the same.

“But it kind of is,” he says. “They did a great job, and you can't even tell. It tunes good and plays good, and I still use it, you know? And it gets the job done every time.”

As Campbell has told us before, that wasn’t his only noteworthy encounter with Bob Dylan. Two years earlier, the folk-rock icon sought him out for advice on buying a drum machine after he heard Campbell had used a LinnDrum to help him compose “The Boys of Summer,” his 1984 hit cowrite with Don Henley. But as Campbell explained, the technology mystified Dylan.

The corporate buyouts of Fender and Gibson in the mid to late 1960s have long been perceived as a trigger for a significant dip in the quality of musical instrument manufacturing. But a session guitarist wants to dispel that belief. In fact, he points to the Beatles’ breakout success as the cause for the era’s production chaos.

The claim comes from Brad Allen Williams, who has worked with Alabama Shakes guitarist Brittany Howard, jazz drummer Nate Smith, and soul singer Bilal, amongst others. Of course, he acknowledges that the two biggest guitar firms of the period underwent tough changes at this time, which today are blemishes on their histories. Yet he feels the root of the problems can be traced back to February 9, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

It was the dawning of a turbulent time for instrument makers, with corporate buyouts, an overwhelming surge in demand, and experiments with production techniques creating a perfect storm that flooded the market with subpar instruments.

Two electric guitar giants, Fender and Gibson, were both on the end of buyouts that dramatically changed their operations. CBS acquired Fender for $13 million in 1965, with Leo Fender facing a staggering production backlog and health issues. He was happy to sell up. Gibson, meanwhile, was acquired by Norlin in 1969, while Baldwin assumed control of Gretsch upon the founders’ retirement.

For years, many guitarists have pointed to CBS’s cost-cutting measures as the reason its reputation started to slide, as it bid to churn out the instruments the market was ravenous for by any means necessary. Some view its moves as quantity over quality, and similar stories have been spun about the Norlin and Baldwin-era operations, too.

Williams, though, wants musicians to take a step back and assess the bigger picture.

“I don’t want to rage bait, but I am about to argue against probably one of the most widely held and uncontroversial beliefs about vintage guitars,” he says in an Instagram post. “That’s this idea that the big corporate acquisitions and mergers of the 1960s were what caused the decline in quality of the major American guitar brands. I don’t think it was.

“I do think quality was declining around the time,” he notes, “I just think that in most cases that was already well underway by the time the actual mergers happened, and if I had to affix a turning point, it would be the same date for every American guitar and drum company: February 9, 1964. That’s when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.”

Culturally, the Beatles’ five-song performance was a landmark moment. It was, for the likes of Tom Petty, Gene Simmons, Joe Perry, and Nancy Wilson, among so many others, the singular moment that made them want to pick up an instrument and play. That, from a supply-and-demand perspective, was troublesome.

“This was such a seismic pop culture moment that it caused this massive overnight sudden spike in demand,” Williams says. “And all these companies were blindsided. When Ted McCarty started at Gibson in 1948, total production was around 2,000–3,000 guitars a year [other sources claim the figures are around 1,100 and 3,700].

“By the time he was burnt out and leaving in 1966, that was over 100,000 guitars a year,” he expands. “When Leopeningnder sold to CBS in January 1965, Fender was something like $9 million in inventory backordered. In a later interview, he said that with the Fender Mustang alone, they were 150,000 units backordered.

“I don’t care who owns the company; if you’re trying to ramp up your production rate that fast, something’s got to give,” he adds. “You’re going to have a lot of people making guitars, amps, and drums who have never made them before.” One of the first things CBS did once it assumed control of the Big F was to expand its production operations, with new facilities opened in hopes of chipping away at those daunting backorder numbers. But he believes by the time their new corporate owners tweaked production and processes, these companies were already on the slide.

“Vintage Gibson collectors know that, 1969 with the Norlin era is not a hard cut off of the quality,” Williams continues. “You start to notice things changing as early as 1965 or 1966.”

He uses Ludwig “flinging” drums out of its factory before their finishes had even dried as evidence of “the environment these guitars were made in.”

“So, I don’t really think that the corporate buyouts were the cause,” he concludes. “I think they were more the effect.”

It’s a fascinating perspective. Music lovers are quick to point to the incredible impact the Beatles’ success had on Western musicians, and the list of future stars seduced by rock’ n’ roll after watching the Beatles on that February evening in 1964 underscores the romanticism swirling around that night. But there was a darker side to the story that is spoken about far less.

Still, CBS produced some iconic guitars despite its mounting challenges, and Stratocaster enthusiast Walter Trout believes CBS-era builds don’t deserve the bad rep they get. The Beatles helped reshape the music industry in a myriad of ways, but did their success also come at a price?

When J.J. Cale died in July, 2013, he left behind not only a stunning body of work filled with gorgeous songs and tasteful guitar playing, but a whole load of guitar players who discovered him via YouTube and were left wondering: "What kinda crazy guitar is THAT?"

Believe it or not, this electric guitar – that was Cale's number one guitar for many years – started life as a Harmony H162 acoustic guitar (pictured below).

When it was severely damaged during a flight, military-trained electronics expert Cale, who had also worked as a sound engineer, set about transforming it.

Marc O'Hara of The Unique Guitar Blog says: "He took the back off of the guitar, and put a cutaway on it. He used a series of metal rods and anchors to hold the body together.

"He also installed five pickups on the guitars top plus. Four of the pickups are Gibson, two of which are low impedance for recording direct. The other bar type pickup came from a Sears Silvertone guitar, it was manufactured by Dan Electro. It also had a Fishman piezo pickups in the saddle. The guitar has three high impedance outs and one low. These pickups would occasionally be swapped out. The low impedance pickups were the ones that allowed him to plug directly into a recording console, much like Les Paul's personal guitar.

"This guitar had seven control knobs, countless wires, buttons and switches, four outputs, and a big red light. He never bothered to put the back of the guitar on again. That way so he would have easy access for repairs and adjusting the action by means of a couple coins he had wedged into the thing."

Watch J.J. talk through the guitar in this clip (including describing how he punched a hole in it with a hammer so that he can fit a microphone!):

It shouldn't work, but it did. The guitar was used on many of his early, classic records.

It deteriorated over the years and became unsalvageable, even for Cale.

"I played a Stratocaster for some time after that," said Cale, "and also messed around with Les Pauls and 335s. The Harmony was good because it was an acoustic guitar and that got me into songwriting.”

See him in action with it, playing his classic song After Midnight, at Paradise Studios in LA, 1979, with Leon Russell. J.J.'s wife Christine Lakeland and session ace Bill Boatman are also on guitar.

If there’s one thing you can always count on, it’s that July 4th means big guitar deals, and this year, it’s the Les Paul that steals the show. Whether you’re a longtime fan or just curious to see what all the fuss is about with this famous singlecut, now is the time to grab one and add it to your collection.

This stunning guitar shaped the sound of rock ‘n’ roll and has been the axe of choice for some of music’s biggest icons, but unfortunately, they’re usually not cheap!

The good news is I’ve tracked down some sweet Les Paul deals at shops like Guitar Center, Sweetwater and Musician’s Friend, with savings up to $899 off. That’s not just for the fancy Gibsons, either. Yes, I’m a huge Gibson fan (13 out of my 25+ guitars are from them!), but I’ve got a soft spot for Epiphone, too. They’re making some seriously awesome guitars these days that combine classic looks and modern appointments, and they are way more wallet-friendly.

So, whether you’re looking to score your first Les Paul or add another beauty to your collection, check out my favorite Epiphone and Gibson deals from the July 4th sales below.

Joe Satriani has built his reputation on dazzling technique. But ask him what Sammy Hagar does better than he ever could, and his answer isn’t singing — it’s knowing when not to play.

The pair have spent years playing together, first in Chickenfoot and now in Hagar’s Best of All Worlds Band, celebrating the music of Eddie Van Halen. That close collaboration has given Satriani an appreciation for a side of Hagar’s musicianship that often gets overlooked.

“I’ll play too many notes, but he won’t,” Satriani tells Thinking About Guitar. “I always ask him, ‘Well, what is that?’ And of course, he doesn’t think about it. It’s totally natural to him.

“But he somehow plays the right notes with the right kind of vibrato. And that still fascinates me, as it did when I was a young kid growing up.”

Satriani says Hagar approaches the guitar like a great lead singer rather than a typical lead guitarist.

“I always thought that one of the coolest things about his guitar playing was that he somehow took the knowledge of being a really good lead vocalist and applied it to the way he played guitar,” he says. “He’s kind of a crazy shred guitar player on the one hand. But on the other hand, he’s got this editorial process that I personally recognize as being a lead singer.”

That ability to edit himself, Satriani believes, separates Hagar from many American rock guitarists.

“There aren’t many American guitar players who are well known for restraint,” he says. “I always saw that as something that would come from the U.K. or Ireland. You have these players like Eric Clapton or Brian May who just play the perfect notes. They don’t turn the amp up to eleven.

“I think [Hagar] would take that one step back from the edge of the cliff and make sure that he could pull it off. I hear it over and over again as a thing that really good lead vocalists have. And they apply it to their guitar playing.”

Hagar’s reputation has always been built first on his voice, but he arrived at guitar with a deep appreciation for melody and a $39.95 Silvertone electric guitar, which came with an amp. As per a 2024 Classic Rock interview, he got his education trying to learn every solo Eric Clapton had ever done, because.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2024, he recalled learning every Eric Clapton guitar solo he could find because “I was more into Clapton and Peter Green than, say, someone like Hendrix” — an influence that helps explain the economy and phrasing Satriani so admires today.

The Best of Both Worlds tour has just wrapped its June U.S. dates and heads to Europe for July before returning stateside in August.

Joe Bonamassa owns a collection of electric guitars with long, unusual histories. Among them is Terry Reid’s heavily modified 1952 Fender Telecaster, an instrument whose discovery he called “one of the greatest guitar safaris of my life.”

Reid was a British singer, guitarist and songwriter who emerged in the 1960s U.K. rock scene. Widely respected by his peers, he was Jimmy Page’s first choice to sing in Led Zeppelin before he declined and recommended Robert Plant for the job.

He went on to build a solo career that included acclaimed albums such as Seed of Memory and River, the latter of which featured guitarist David Lindley. Reid remained a cult figure in British rock up to his death on August 4, 2025, at the age of 75, from complications related to cancer.

As Bonamassa explains, Reid purchased the Telecaster in Chicago, circa 1968, while he was the support act for Cream’s final U.S. tour. When the neck pickup died during that tour, he had it replaced with a humbucker at Manny’s on New York City’s 48th Street Music Row.

The opportunity to buy his hero’s guitar arose in the summer of 2014 when Bonamassa received a call from a guitar dealer he knows, who asked if he had any interest in buying Reid’s guitar.

“I told him that of course I would love to own it,” Bonamassa said, “but even more so, if nothing else, just to meet the guy who gave a young David Lindley one of his first professional gigs.”

They agreed on a price, but when calls to Reid went unanswered for several days, Bonamassa figured the opportunity had passed.

Coincidentally, that same evening he received a message from a friend on Facebook asking if he was interested in Reid’s guitar.

“I replied, ‘Yes, but he can’t be reached so I guess it’s not available,’” Bonamassa recalled. “Long story short, my friend responded with Terry’s cell phone number and, lo and behold, I was speaking to him within minutes. We set a time the next day for me to drive way out into the desert to meet him and check out the guitar.”

“The following day I set out in my car from Los Angeles to Palm Desert. When I left my house the temperature was 82 degrees — mind you, it is August. As I approached the freeway exit in Palm Desert, it was a balmy 112!”

“I find Terry’s house, knock on the door, and there he is — one of my musical heroes and a super nice guy. I say, ‘Is it always this hot?’ He replies, ‘Nah... it’s kind of cool today.’”

Over the next two hours, Reid shared stories of the road and photos of Jimi Hendrix. Bonamassa described it as “a glimpse into a time that I wish I had lived in: London in the late ’60s.”

Bonamassa noted that Reid was invited not only to join Led Zeppelin but also Deep Purple, “but he chose to follow his own musical path, something I respect a great deal.”

As the visit came to an end, Bonamassa said he began to question whether he should proceed with the purchase.

“As it came time to leave I realized just how attached he was to the guitar,” he explained. “So I told him that it will forever be at his disposal and it will always be his — I will just look after it for a while. I gave him a big hug and said goodbye. I’m honored to have it and even more honored to call him my friend.”

Bonamassa has since taken the guitar out on the road and often uses it to play the song “Slow Train,” as seen in this clip from his 2017 show at Red Rocks.

Thomann, the world’s largest music retailer, is suing Fender in an effort to halt the company’s cease-and-desist campaign against guitar makers that use Stratocaster-style body designs.

In doing so, Thomann says it is standing up not only for its own Harley Benton brand, but also for other manufacturers affected by Fender’s legal action.

For weeks, Fender has been sending cease-and-desist letters to U.S. guitar makers such as PRS Guitars, as well as retailers of S-style electric guitars across Europe and the U.S.

The campaign stems from a December 2025 ruling by the Düsseldorf Regional Court, which determined that the Stratocaster’s body shape qualifies as a copyrighted work.

Since May, Fender has cited that decision in demanding that manufacturers and retailers cease production and sales of Stratocaster-style guitars. In addition, the company has called on them to recall instruments already sold and provide customer and sales data.

Fender CEO Edward “Bud” Cole said in June that Fender is not suing anyone, but simply enforcing its intellectual property rights. The company’s position directly affects Thomann, particularly its Harley Benton line of guitars.

However, Thomann says its lawsuit is about more than protecting its own interests.

“We used to be a small music store ourselves and know exactly where we have come from,” Thomann CEO Hans Thomann says. “Many of those affected do not have the financial and legal means to conduct such a legal dispute. We therefore see it as our responsibility to have this matter clarified in court not only for our own company, but for all parties involved.”

Thomann also notes that the Düsseldorf ruling was a default judgment issued after the defendant — a Chinese seller of Stratocaster-style guitars — failed to appear in court. By pursuing its case, Thomann hopes to have the copyright claim tested in a fully contested trial.

There is a personal side to the dispute as well. Thomann debuted in 1954, the same year Fender introduced the Stratocaster. Since then, the retailer has carried Fender products alongside S-style guitars made by numerous other manufacturers.

At the heart of Thomann’s case is the claim that form follows function — that the Stratocaster shape is not merely artistic but functional as well. The guitar’s double cutaways provide upper-fret access and help balance the body, making them practical design elements. Thomann also argues that Fender has benefited from the shape’s ubiquity, which can be seen in everything from Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein to the rise of the Superstrat.

Thomann is not seeking financial damages, but rather a determination that the use of an S-style body shape does not constitute copyright infringement.

Lenny Kravitz learned plenty about vintage electric guitars from Tom Petty and Mike Campbell. But one of the best lessons came later, when a man facing jail time pulled into a parking lot with a car full of vintage instruments — including the Les Paul that would become Kravitz’s number-one studio guitar.

Kravitz says his education in vintage gear began when he opened for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers following the release of his album Let Love Rule. Campbell, in particular, owns a number of classics, including the Fender Broadcaster he calls “the guitar I can’t live without.”

“When Let Love Rule came out, I opened for Tom Petty, and he and Mike Campbell taught me so much about vintage guitars,” Kravitz recalled. “I’m talking about ’89, when you could still find good things at really great prices. I’d go with Tom and Mike to stores in each city, and at that stage I couldn’t afford the things that they could, but I felt that they were educating me.”

Once albums like Mama Said and Are You Gonna Go My Way turned him into a major star, Kravitz was finally able to put those lessons to use.

“I really started to pick up a lot of great guitars,” he said. “People used to show up in the parking lot, find somebody from the crew and ask them to tell me that they had guitars to sell.”

One encounter proved particularly memorable.

“I got word that this guy was in the parking lot selling guitars,” Kravitz recalled. “And he, unfortunately, was facing jail time and needed to get a lawyer. I went out to his car, and I probably bought five guitars that day.”

The haul included a ’57 Telecaster, an early-’50s Stratocaster and a ’53 Les Paul Goldtop conversion that quickly became one of the most important guitars in his collection.

“It became my number one studio Les Paul from that time to now. It’s got a great Les Paul bite, and the distortion is really smooth and even, from the high end to the mids to the low. It’s on the slightly cleaner side — the pickups are not hot, but they’re just perfect. This has been on every album since I got it, starting with Are You Gonna Go My Way.”

Flatpicking queen Molly Tuttle epitomizes classic Americana artistry, so it’s a natural for her to put her fingerprint on a signature Martin — well actually, two Martins. The D-18 Molly Tuttle is her take on the all-American Dreadnought, while the D-X2E Molly Tuttle is made south of the border to deliver similar playability with far greater affordability. The raw ingredients are notably different, but both Martin Dreadnoughts share the same essential recipe and key specifications.

Tuttle is known to play a few guitar brands, but she’s been a true-blue Martin lover since she was a girl. She’s well aware of its history and what works for her approach. Molly went with mostly traditional specifications, and one that’s a bit of an outlier.

Her choice of a D-18 echoes the preference of a long line of acoustic icons from Hank Williams to Norman Blake, who praised the mahogany model on his iconic 1990 duet with Tony Rice, the “D-18 Song, (Thank You Mr. Martin).” Lots of bluegrassers favor mahogany back and sides for its articulate tonal nature. Tuttle’s D-18 features a throwback nut width measurement and an authentic 1941 neck profile with a Standard Taper. What’s particularly interesting about Tuttle’s D-18 is the rear-shifted scalloped bracing under its solid spruce top.

Rearward- Versus Forward-Shifted X-Bracing

Rearward-shifted X-bracing is designed to make the guitar sound even more articulate, and it goes against the grain to a degree. Forward-shifted X-bracing is designed to increase bass and resonance by moving the X closer to the sound hole, leaving more of the top to resonate more freely between it and the bridge. That’s the preference of players including Billy Strings who employed it on his signature D-28 that came out last year, and it has literally become standard at Martin as nearly all Standard Dreadnoughts since 2025 feature forward-shifted, GE-scalloped bracing. “GE” stands for Golden Era and refers to the period of approximately 1920 to 1942 when Martin meticulously shaved bracings down by hand to facilitate greater top flexibility. The D-18 Molly Tuttle features that GE-style scallop as well.

Molly and Billy’s Martins, Tonal Comparisons

So while the D-18 Molly Tuttle draws its inspiration from her own favorite 1943 D-18, its rear-shifted X brace is designed to tame bass boom while adding clarity and punch. That’s exactly the tonal hallmark of this guitar: it’s ultra-articulate and punchy. Note separation is exquisite, which makes sense for a guitar designed around her fabulous flatpicking skills.

Take a close look at her right-hand technique and notice how she alternates between plucking closer to and then further away from the neck at breakneck speed. Or check out her clawhammer approach, adapted from the banjo. You can see and hear why she’d appreciate that X brace being a bit further back towards the bridge and want a guitar with pinpoint tonal accuracy from note to note to match her own precision on the instrument.

And this is a Custom/Special Edition instrument with the kind of craftsmanship you’d expect from a guitar that costs significantly more than a Standard. It stands to reason that attention to detail, perhaps with a degree of hand-tuning factors into how Martin is able to make this D-18 sound so springy, airy and articulate while still having a nice low-end response.

It’s nowhere near as robust as, say, the D-28 Billy Strings with its forward shifted X-brace and hearty rosewood back and sides, but that’s clearly by design. Molly is going for a more refined tone compared to Billy’s burly tone. It’s kind of funny to make such a comparison, but they are essentially the current prince and princess of the bluegrass scene, and I suppose it’s rather natural for the boy to be a bit more rambunctious while the lady is graceful.

American Molly vs. Mexican Molly

It’s always a bit of a challenge to consider a guitar that costs 75 percent less in the same breath, and the greatest challenge for the manufacturer is clearly tone. The D-X2E Molly Tuttle has a standard X-brace, which makes sense for a guitar made of laminate, which is inherently brighter than solid wood.

Taken on its own, the D-X2E Molly Tuttle sounds pretty darn good. It delivers nice clarity and punch and decent low end that one can accentuate by plucking closer to the sound hole than the bridge. Side by side, the Mexican model is not in the same league as it’s American cousin, nor would I expect it to be.

That said, the D-X2E comes with a pickup while the D-18 version does not, and the D-X2E sounds big and bold when plugged into a nice acoustic amplifier, such as the Circa 74 used for these tests. The E1 pickup and preamp system with its onboard tuner tucked perfectly in the lip of the sound hole is super handy.

Playability

The D-18 Molly Tuttle and D-X2E Molly Tuttle are very playable guitars right out of the box with factory action, with the latter having lighter strings. You notice something as soon as you lay a hand in open position. Modern standard nut width is 1.75 inches, but many vintage Dreadnoughts measured 1.69 (1 11/16) inches. That’s the spec on both of Tuttle’s Martins, and I appreciate it. Being narrow at the nut helps a player get fingers on frets in ready fashion down in the longer fretted regions of the first few positions.

These necks are both built to 1941 profile specs with a Standard Taper, so the overall feel is quite similar. Both feel nice and chunky in hand, especially in lower positions. I seemed to feel more of a V shape, particularly on the D-18, further up the neck in higher positions.

No one in their right mind would ever hire me to play lead guitar in their bluegrass band, but I can muster up a few good licks with the right guitar in hand. The D-18 Molly Tuttle has such a bona fide classic Martin feel under the fingers that it’s easy to find yourself ripping off more than a few and taking them a bit further than you might otherwise do. I found that to be the case with the D-X2E too.

I’m mostly a fingerpicker that uses fake nails, but I was drawn to using a plectrum more often on these signature Molly Tuttle Martins. There’s something about having a high degree of tonal articulation that in turn makes you want to play more articulately. Both guitars pack plenty of projective power, and you truly get the most of that when you dig in with a serious pick.

Hey Good Lookin’

Let’s face it, lots of Martins look alike, but the D-18 Molly Tuttle is as unique as the player who picked it. I dig the vintage sunburst top with glossy finish, and her choice of Moon Phase inlays that practically appear to pop out from the fingerboard.

And in the aesthetics department, the D-X2E is in the same arena. From a distance, they appear quite similar. A closer look reveals subtle differences including a satin finish, and inlays made of faux mother of pearl and abalone instead of real seashells. Bottom line: both of Molly’s Martins look fabulous!

Major Tuttle fans and anyone after a super-sonic flatpicking D-18 tone shouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on the Molly Tuttle Signature. For those on a budget and/or want to plug in right out of the box, then the D-X2E serves those purposes and delivers a fine acoustic sound as well.

Either guitar is a strong value. Looking at the wider Martin Dreadnought range, the D-18 Custom shares the exact same price point of $4,199. From what I can tell, the D-18 Molly Tuttle is much more aesthetically interesting. I’ll be it plays a little easier as well, especially in the lower positions near that narrower nut. And the D-X2E Molly Tuttle delivers a lot of the same features and tone for about a quarter of the cash. Martin and Molly Tuttle have got a great thing going. Fans of both should be very happy with her new signature models.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT martinguitar.com

D-18 Molly Tuttle

PRICE $4,199 with molded hardshell case

NUT WIDTH 1 11/16", bone

NECK Mahogany, 1941 profile with Standard Taper, dovetail joint

FRETBOARD Ebony with Moon Phase mother-of-pearl inlays, 25.4" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Nickel open gear with oval knobs

BODY Solid mahogany back & sides, solid spruce top

BRIDGE Ebony with compensated bone saddle

ELECTRONICS None

FACTORY STRINGS Martin Authentic Acoustic Lifespan 2.0 Phosphor Bronze Medium gauges .013—.056

WEIGHT 3.8 lbs (as tested)

BUILT USA

KUDOS Gorgeous aesthetics, ultra-articulate tone without being too top heavy, fine playability

CONCERNS Articulate tone is very revealing and therefore not for the faint of heart

D-X2E Molly Tuttle

PRICE $999 street with softshell case

NUT WIDTH 1 11/16", white Corian

NECK Select hardwood, 1941 profile with Standard Taper, mortise & tenon joint

FRETBOARD Ebony, 25.4" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Nickel open gear with oval knobs

BODY Figured mahogany high-pressure laminate back & sides, spruce top

BRIDGE Ebony with compensated white Tusq saddle

ELECTRONICS Martin E1 with volume and tone flywheel controls plus tuner on/off and phase buttons in upper lip of sound hole; tuner in lower lip

FACTORY STRINGS Martin Authentic Acoustic Lifespan 2.0 Light gauges .012—.054

WEIGHT 4.5 lbs (as tested)

BUILT Mexico

KUDOS Great playability, strong amplified tone, affordable

CONCERNS Acoustic tone is quite bright

When Brad Paisley partnered with Fender last year to resurrect one of the company’s most notorious Telecaster finishes, the project was about more than a clever play on his surname. It represented the culmination of a decades-long fascination with one of Fender’s strangest and most short-lived creations.

The Paisley Red Telecaster debuted in 1968, when Fender — then under CBS ownership — attempted to capitalize on the psychedelic spirit of the era. Alongside the equally flamboyant Blue Flower finish, the guitar featured colorful Cling-Foil wallpaper applied directly to the body and covered with a translucent burst finish. It was Fender’s attempt to pay tribute to the Summer of Love.

The look was unforgettable. The execution was not.

The thick decorative paper, inexpensive adhesives and heavy polyester clear coats proved to be a disastrous combination. The finishes cracked, chipped and peeled prematurely, becoming victims of the same cost-cutting measures that defined much of Fender’s CBS era. By 1969, the experiment was over. Production ceased, and many owners stripped or refinished their electric guitars altogether.

That should have been the end of the story.

Instead, decades later, the forgotten finish found an unlikely champion in Paisley.

“It’s unreal that my own name is one of the coolest finishes I think Fender has ever done,” he said when Fender unveiled his signature Limited Edition Brad Paisley 1967 “Lost Paisley” Telecaster in 2024. “This is an attempt to show what this lost color could have been. It’s the best guitar I’ve ever had.”

Long before Fender enlisted him to help revive the design, Paisley had been on a mission to track down surviving examples of original Paisley Telecasters and restore them whenever possible. That was easier said than done. With relatively few produced — estimates generally place the number between 300 and 400 — most had long since been refinished, their psychedelic origins buried beneath later paint jobs.

Still, the hunt fascinated him.

“There’s nothing more beautiful to me than a ’50s Blackguard Tele, a ’54 Strat, or an original Paisley Tele — any of those things that frequently got stripped and mutilated,” he told Rick Beato. “Some of those refins are the best guitars I’ve ever had. It’s therapy to be able to take something and restore it.”

The obsession eventually led him to master builder Bill Crook. Together, they began trying to reverse-engineer the original Paisley finish, assuming that uncovering an authentic example hidden beneath a refinish would be nearly impossible.

Then fate intervened.

“Let me find the right guitar first,” Paisley told Crook.

That search led him to Chicago Music Exchange, where he asked if they had a refinished 1968 Telecaster for sale.

“They said, ‘Yeah, we have a black one, but it’s not a good paint job,’” Paisley recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t care.’

“I pick it up, it’s a good guitar, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna turn this into a Paisley.’”

Crook agreed to take on the project. But once the guitar arrived, something caught his eye.

“He gets it, throws the thing on a guitar stand, and is looking at it hanging on the wall,” Paisley explained. “He looks at the way that the black finish is cracking, and he goes, ‘No.’”

Crook removed the neck and neck plate for a closer inspection. Beneath the black paint was exactly what Paisley had spent years searching for.

“There’s a paisley staring at him,” Paisley said. “He took the finish off with thinner, and that’s 100 percent original paper.

“I had accidentally bought a Paisley Tele, thinking I would turn it into a Paisley Tele!”

The story became even more remarkable when Paisley tracked down the guitar’s original owner. According to Paisley, the owner had purchased the instrument at a discount because the Paisley models weren't selling and later sprayed it black in his backyard.

What had spent decades disguised beneath an amateur refin was suddenly revealed as one of Fender’s rarest late-'60s guitars.

Paisley named the instrument La Brea, comparing it to a fossil preserved in the famous Los Angeles tar pits.

“I called it La Brea because it’s like a fossil in a tar pit,” he said.

Today, the guitar could command tens of thousands of dollars on the vintage market. But for Paisley, its value has little to do with money. After years spent chasing lost Paisley Telecasters, he had finally stumbled across the real thing by complete accident.

Phoebe Bridgers has just played her first shows since 2023, with a short run of dates concluding at Madison Square Garden. She will see out the rest of the year with performances in the U.S., U.K., and Europe.

But for a time, the indie folk singer-songwriter feared a freak accident at home could significantly alter the way she played guitar—or even halt her performing career altogether.

“I fucked up my finger like a year and a half ago,” she told Guitar World in 2020. “It stopped me from playing E and F, which were in so many of my songs.”

“I was cutting stems on flowers, and the knife flipped and just hacked right on my knuckle,” she said. “Since then, it’s been really stiff, and it hurts like shit. I hope that one day it heals, but that’s been making me more experimental with chords [and tunings].”

Across guitar history, similar physical setbacks have often led to new approaches on the instrument rather than ending playing careers. Tony Iommi reworked his fretting technique after losing the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident, Django Reinhardt developed an influential vocabulary despite severe fretting-hand limitations, and Jerry Garcia adapted his picking approach after losing the middle finger on his right hand in childhood. In each case, physical constraint reshaped technique rather than shutting it down.

For Bridgers, the injury pushed her toward a more exploratory approach to harmony and tuning. “I play guitar in a weird way,” she said. “When I met Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, who produced both my records [2017’s Stranger in the Alps and 2020’s Punisher], I was basically a folk artist. It was sounding a little basic.”

Now, she says, she tends to “fuck up the thing that I just wrote,” adding, “I try to trick myself into writing a song in an open tuning and not even worry about what the chords look like and focus on the melody instead.”

For Joni Mitchell, open tunings became a long-term solution to hand issues stemming from childhood polio, forming the foundation of a highly individualized harmonic system built across dozens of tunings. Bridgers, who encountered Mitchell’s music early on, leaned further into alternate tunings after her own injury.

She often uses open Db, achieved by tuning her Danelectro ’56 baritone guitar to open A and placing a capo on the fourth fret.

The injury ultimately accelerated her use of alternate tunings and nonstandard chord shapes, reshaping aspects of her guitar approach. For many players, hand injuries remain among the most feared outcomes, but in Bridgers’ case it became a constraint that redirected her harmonic language.

Still, everyday accidents remain a risk for any player working with tools at home. Jeff Beck famously injured the tip of his index finger while chopping carrots in 2010, an incident that required surgery and renewed attention to hand protection among professional guitarists.

Bridgers is also an advocate for rubber bridges on her acoustic guitars, which produce a more muted, percussive response suited to her playing style. The concept originated in early DIY modifications before becoming a more widely adopted tonal option among indie and experimental players.

Peter Buck wasn’t looking to become a defining guitar voice of the 1980s. In fact, when R.E.M. were just getting started in Athens, Georgia, he was barely a guitarist at all.

“I was really struggling to get, like, the F chord down,” Buck told Guitar Player. “I knew my five chords, and I just kind of stuck with them.”

His guitar at the time was a Fender Telecaster, “because I liked the way they look — and I still do.”

“Then I got my Telecaster stolen,” he says. “I needed to replace it real fast.”

Buck paid a quick visit to Chick Piano, a small local shop, where he found a blond Rickenbacker 360 with flat-wound strings.

“There was this piano shop in Athens… I went in there to get a used guitar real cheap, and I found a Rickenbacker that was, like, $175. I played it and it felt too good to believe, so I bought it.”

Buck used that impulse buy to help define one of the most recognizable guitar sounds in alternative rock: bright, chiming, percussive — and deliberately anti–guitar hero.

When, like its predecessor, that guitar was stolen in 1981, Buck had become so enamored of its sound that he replaced it with another Rickenbacker: a black 360.

“That's the one that's been on every R.E.M. record except the first single, and I bring it to pretty much every session I do,” he told Reverb. “It's still the guitar I go to every day. It has real clarity of tone."

Even so, he’s never been intent on mythologizing it.

“I can basically get the sound I want with any guitar,” he told Guitar Player. “It’s just a matter of getting the feeling and the comfort.”

Buck admits he had no shred chops or formal training, nor any roadmap for success — just instinct and a band willing to build around it.

Still, anyone who’s heard early R.E.M. albums like Murmur or Reckoning knows he turned that feel into something very specific and ear-catching: rhythmic, interlocking electric guitar work that dodged traditional lead playing entirely.

And he did it at a time when shredding was all the rage. But Buck never saw himself as a shredder and didn’t want to be one.

“I think I’m a good rhythm guitar player in that I’ve got a good sense of where the beat is and how to play against it,” he says. “And I can play kind of pithy lines that are both melodic and rhythmic.”

That philosophy put him on a completely different wavelength from the guitar heroes dominating the era. No endless solos. No technical showboating. Just tight, strange, hypnotic rhythm parts that locked into Mike Mills’ bass lines and Bill Berry’s drums.

Buck’s influences weren’t exactly shred school either. His favorite guitarists include Chuck Berry, Steve Cropper and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Zal Yanovsky, served up with a heavy dose of Velvet Underground attitude.

“I really like Steve Cropper a bunch,” he says. “He’s kind of playing these rhythmic lines. That’s something I tried to adopt.”

And it shows. R.E.M.’s early records — from their earliest releases to 1980s hits like “The One I Love” — don’t sound like traditional rock guitar albums; they sound like a cohesive system in which every part leaves space for the others. But it’s Buck’s guitar that pulls it all together.

Even the recording approach reinforced that philosophy. The band often cut tracks fast — sometimes before they’d fully figured them out.

“We just went in and played,” Buck says. “Songs we’ve never played, we’ve recorded them on the first takes a lot of times.

“When we did “Talk About the Passion” [from Murmur], we’d never played it all the way through before. It was like a rehearsal take, and [producer] Mitch Easter said, “That’s fine.”

In that context, the $175 Rickenbacker was the right weapon at exactly the right time. Cheap, unexpected, and completely unglamorous, it ended up helping shape one of the most influential guitar sounds of the decade.

Buck, however, still rejects the idea that gear or genius is the story.

“I think any person who had my history of listening to music — if they picked up an instrument and got into this band — would probably be playing similarly to what I’m doing,” he says.

Perhaps. But not many of them bought a $175 guitar and unintentionally helped define a genre.

When Tom Bedell sold Breedlove and Bedell last year, it marked the end of an era that began in 2010, when his Two Old Hippies company purchased Breedlove as a sister brand to his namesake acoustic guitars. The brands’ new owners are Nashville-based Pete Mroz and Shannon Pollard, and their first mission is to re-establish Breedlove’s perception as a premier brand, rather than secondary to the Bedell line.

To kick things off, they’ve recast and retooled Breedlove’s entire production line, which is now divided into three series: Roots, Artisan and Collector. They’ve also nixed overseas production — every guitar is now designed and built in the U.S. in Bend, Oregon.

The Roots Series is the core line and features basic appointments. Artisan is the next tier up, while the Collector Series sits on the top shelf. Roots Series pricing is on par with core series from other premier American brands, and it goes up from there for the fancier series. I chose to review the RTC-SRe acoustic-electric because the Roots Series is what most players will be exploring. The Concert is a mid-sized acoustic, and it’s always been Breedlove’s bread-and-butter body style.

“Our Concert body has become iconic because it simply works for everyone,” Pollard says. “It’s comfortable, incredibly versatile, and delivers a balanced voice players love across genres. From fingerstyle to full-band strumming, it’s consistently one of our most popular shapes — and for good reason.”

The Roots Concert SRe on review represents the centerpiece of the Roots Series. It sports the tried-and-true combination of solid East Indian rosewood back and sides with a solid Sitka spruce top. The Honduran mahogany neck features a redesigned soft-C profile. An L.R. Baggs HiFi pickup and preamp system makes it ready to plug in and play onstage or in the studio. I played one at the NAMM Show launch and was intrigued by the new guitar, ownership and business strategy.

I had access to an Oregon Concert made entirely of myrtlewood circa 2018 for comparison, and the differences were plain to see, feel and hear. The most obvious update is the new Wave headstock shape. It’s less idiosyncratic and more balanced than the previous angular asymmetrical shape. In addition, the logo inlay features a script capital B, as on early Breedloves, rather than the full name.

The next thing I noticed was the feel, which is lighter, with apparently less binding and perhaps lighter bracing. The Oregon Concert seems more built like a tank, while the Roots Concert feels more boutique.

The new modern C neck profile feels very comfortable in hand, and is flush from the bottom to the top. I didn’t catch any sharp fret edges or any other distractions, and every note on each string rings true. Fingerpicking is a joy, as is playing with a plectrum, and the factory action is spot on. You can do whatever you want to do, and the notes and chords are right there for you.

In terms of its tone, the Roots RTC-SRe is rich and resonant. Although it’s not nearly as loud as the Oregon, it’s far more refined. There’s a fabulous sense of balance from low to high, with a welcome articulation amid the warmth. The sound is less fundamental and more complex. You hear the basic note, and then it blooms with overtones and nice sustain.

Each Breedlove is voiced by hand and comes with a certificate of authenticity that explains and expounds on the nomenclature: RTC means Roots Concert, SR stands for Sitka spruce top with East Indian rosewood back and sides, and the e indicates it has onboard electronics.

The interesting part is that the top has a frequency 174 Hz, the back is 218 Hz, and the fundamental frequency is 101 Hz. That means the resonant frequency of the top is in the neighborhood of an open G string. The resonant frequency of the back is slightly higher, which is normal since the back reflects the top sound, adding a bit of articulation.

The fundamental frequency — sometimes referred to as “main air” or “main Helmholtz resonance” — is the frequency at which the body of air inside the guitar resonates, primarily produced by the sound hole. 101 Hz is in the neighborhood between the low G and A on the sixth string, indicating a healthy low end, especially for a guitar with a mid-sized body.

Interestingly, the electronics system is an L.R. Baggs HiFi, which uses a pair of transducers that affix under the bridge plate rather than the more typical piezo under-saddle pickup. While the output isn’t as loud or punchy as an undersaddle, there’s no piezo quack and the sound is more akin to what you’d get from a microphone.

I’ve had a lot of experience with the HiFi, and I’d say it’s not ideal for a rock band situation but quite lovely playing solo in a coffee shop. I found the best tone by rolling off a bit of treble. Percussive players will love the HiFi’s responsiveness to slapping the strings and tapping on the guitar top.

The bottom line is that Breedlove is in good hands. This guitar’s appearance isn’t fancy, although the wood is gorgeous, and I appreciate how the pin-less African ebony bridge complements its classic aesthetic. Most importantly, this Roots Concert is the best-playing and -sounding guitar Breedlove has sent my way in more than a decade of acoustic reviews. I look forward to hearing other opinions and seeing what else is in store as all the new goodness rolls out “from seed to song” at Breedlove.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT breedloveguitars.com

PRICE $2,999 with deluxe hardshell case

NUT WIDTH 1.75", bone

NECK Honduran mahogany, bolt-on, soft C profile

FRETBOARD Ebony, small center dot inlays, 25.5" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Nickel

BODY Solid Indian rosewood back & sides, solid Sitka spruce top, natural finish with vintage toner gloss, black binding

BRIDGE Ebony, pinless

ELECTRONICS L.R. Baggs HiFi with volume and tone controls

FACTORY STRINGS Elixir PB Nanoweb Light

WEIGHT 4.6 lbs

BUILT USA

PRO Comfortable neck profile, warm yet articulate tone, fine craftsmanship, gorgeous wood

CON Pickup volume is quiet and perhaps a polarizing choice. Would be awesome to offer options

The Memorial Day sales have only just died down, but Guitar Center has already seen fit to tempt us further with some sweet discounts on acoustic guitars hitting up to 30% off. With big money off acoustic guitars, acoustic electric guitars, classical guitars, as well as some folk favorites like ukuleles and resonators, it’s the ideal place to pick up an acoustic instrument for less.

The sale runs until June 24th, so you’ve got a whole month to cash in on the deals. With pretty much every major acoustic guitar manufacturer represented in the sale, savings on Taylor, Martin, Gibson, Fender, Epiphone, and many more make this one of the best opportunities to save of the year so far.

I’ve had a look through the full sale, and the first thing to catch my eye was $100 off this Recording King RPH-R2-E Dirty 30s Minnie Bucker Resonator. Perfect for slide and delta blues, it features a hand-spun aluminium resonator and a mini humbucker, which makes it ideal for players who want to plug in and play live.

I covered this deal in the Memorial Day sales, and while there’s a little less off it now, I still reckon this Gibson J-45 Studio with $200 off is an excellent deal. If you’re a regularly gigging player, this is a quality acoustic that delivers superb tone with its Sitka spruce top and mahogany back and side tonewood construction, and an LR Baggs electronics system that means it delivers when you plug it in.

Finally, I had to point out this limited edition Taylor 414ce, which is one of our favorite acousti-electric guitars here at Guitar Player. This version is only available at Guitar Center and features a unique sunburst top, Italian acrylic diamonds inlays, and gold Taylor tuning machines for a premium look. With $200 off, it’s superb value for money in my book.

Over the course of his long career, Vince Gill has been a session artist, a member of Pure Prairie League, a solo giant and, today, a member of the Eagles.

And he’s done it largely with a range of Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster electric guitars, as well as a nice selection of Gibson and Martin acoustics.

Given his somewhat infrequent use of a Les Paul, Gill never felt a need to add a vintage ‘Burst to his collection. But a sad and deeply personal twist of events brought one into his life.

“I bought a ’59 Les Paul from my brother-in-law from my first marriage [to country singer Janis Oliver],” Gill told Guitar Aficionado in 2017. “We were great friends, and he owned this great ’59 sunburst since 1959.

“He’d played it his whole life but got sick a couple of years ago. He called me and said, ‘There’s not much they can do for me. I’m probably not gonna make it. You’ve always been my favorite guitar player. Will you buy my Les Paul?’

“I didn’t have a sunburst Les Paul in my collection, and I previously couldn’t justify the expense because I don’t play a Les Paul that much, But this one came along and I said, ‘There you go,’” Gill continued. “I got the one I was supposed to have. My friend played it for 40 years, and now it gets to live on and still make music.”

The 'Burst occupies pride of place in Gill's collection, which is largely housed in his home studio. Of his collecting habit, Gill, with a chuckle, told Guitar Player in 2022, “I’m sure I’ve got a couple of hundred guitars, but I don’t have a boat or multiple houses or cars. I wouldn’t say it’s out of control, but it’s borderline.”

Gill — who has earned more CMA Awards than any other artist — will take home a once-in-a-lifetime honor on November 19 when the CMA presents him with the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award. The country legend will join past recipients like Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, in recognition of having “attained the highest degree of recognition in Country Music,” as well as for his humanitarian efforts and philanthropy.

"Vince embodies the very best of what country music stands for," Sarah Trahern, CMA's chief executive officer, said in a statement. "He’s a true trailblazer, one who gives back to the community, honors the roots of our genre, and even now, continues to share his talent with fans across the globe."

Gill is currently casting a long glance over his 50-year music career by curating a series of EPS, titled 50 Years From Home. The first disc, I Gave You Everything I Had, was issued October 17, with others scheduled for release over the coming year.

The fun part about writing this column is learning a guitar’s back story — where and when it was made, who played it — and assessing its playability and sound.

But sometimes you get a surprise, as I did with this 1961 Watkins Rapier 3 electric. Its creator was Sid Watkins, whose company — Watkins Electric Music, or WEM — played a fascinating role in British musical-instrument engineering. Sid was not just a luthier and woodworker but something of an electronics genius as well. He designed the electronics for the Vox Phantom Synth guitar as well as the echo units used by Hank Marvin and the Shadows.

As the company grew and its product lines expanded, WEM became nearly ubiquitous in the U.K. In addition to guitars, WEM made amps and PAs used by groups like the Who, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The company even made Vox guitars to help the brand keep up with manufacturing demand during the guitar boom of the ’60s.

Watkins launched the Rapier line in 1959, and it continued until 1970. As for the surprise I mentioned earlier: There are photos of George Harrison playing a highly modified Rapier 33 that belonged to his friend Del Mandel at the Beatles’ Apple Studios in 1971, while he was producing the Radha Krishna Temple album. That’s right — a Beatle touched it!

WEM also became known beyond the U.K. through exports. At one point the company was shipping 500 guitars a month overseas, most of them to the United States.

At the risk of sounding snarky, the Rapier 3’s weirdo factor is that it’s an early British guitar that actually sounds and plays great. If you’ve ever played any of Vox’s clunky guitars, you’ll know what I mean.

The Rapier 3 originally sold at the bargain price of 29 guineas, or $85, about a third of what a Fender Stratocaster cost at the time. But don’t let that fool you. These are well-made instruments.

At first look, this is an inviting glossy fiesta-red guitar not unlike a Strat, with three pickups, a vibrato bar, offset cutaways, a toggle switch and three knobs. As it turns out, there actually is something weird here, and it’s hiding in those knobs. Their functions aren’t as straight ahead as you might think.

The first knob is a rotary pickup selector with four detented stops. The next two are global volume and tone controls. As for the toggle, used in conjunction with the rotary knob it allows you to employ only the middle pickup. But depending on what setting you’re using, it also can act as a tone bypass and/or a kill switch. It only took me about an hour to figure that out.

But my patience was rewarded when I discovered a bunch of cool sounds and switch combinations along the way. This guitar is deep! It goes from rich-sounding jazz tones to really cool phasey rhythm guitar sounds and the thinnest banjo-like setting I’ve ever heard on a guitar without active EQ or processing. I’m not sure what you’d use that for, but I couldn’t stop playing the Status Quo song “Pictures of Matchstick Men” with it. The middle two pickup settings are where this guitar really comes to life, with usable clean tones that sound great with overdrive or distortion.

The maple neck is skinny and fast, and has a rosewood fingerboard with 22 frets, plus a zero fret. The neck is relatively straight, but the truss rod seems to have plenty play left on it. In addition, there’s a Hi/Lo vibrato that works cleanly and offers little resistance. But while it’s great for playing surf rock, there will be no dive-bombing on this guitar.

Note that the sticker on the pickguard is right in the strum path. The original one disappeared years ago, but I replaced it with an aftermarket sticker that I’ve already managed to scratch up.

In sum, this guitar is light, easy to play and sounds great.

Despite its features and history, the Watkins Rapier 3 never really achieved cult status. They can still be found online for well under a thousand bucks.

I bought the guitar shown here from its original owner, Francisco, whom I met on Facebook Marketplace. He and his brothers played in bands all through the ’60s and ’70s and this was the guitar he used.

When I showed up at his house to pick up the guitar, he and his brothers were in their garage amid drums, keyboards, guitars, amps, mixers, exercise equipment and a man-fridge. Classic. The guys were so friendly, and Francisco gave me a great deal on the guitar. My thanks to Paul Connet for getting the stickers off (sorry Francisco) without harming the finish.

Contact me with questions or pics of your whack jobs. I may even write about them.

Based on high-dollar Gretsch models in the Falcon, Nashville and Synchromatic lines, the new Streamliner Hollow Body electric is designed to capture “that great Gretsch sound” at an eminently affordable price. It features a fully hollow arched body constructed of laminated maple with a width of 16 inches and a depth of 2 3/4 inches.

My review guitar arrived in a glossy Fairlane Blue sparkle finish that looks fantastic with the aged white binding, thick single-ply pickguard, matching cream pickup surrounds and quartet of cream “radio” knobs with inset gold tops.

True to form, the f-holes are smaller than the ones on many other Gretsch archtops, and the hardware consists of a Bigsby B60 vibrato tailpiece and a nickel-plated Adjusto-Matic bridge that sits atop a pinned laurel-wood base. Pickups are Gretsch’s own BT3S humbuckers with Alnico 2 magnets in the neck position and Alnico 5 magnets in the bridge position, both featuring 12 adjustable pole screws.

Carved to a Soft C shape that feels great in the hand, the Streamliner’s nato neck attaches at the 14th fret via a glued-in joint and sports white binding and a matching heel cap. The laurel fingerboard has a scale length of 24 3/4 inches and a radius of 12 inches and carries 22 lightly polished medium-jumbo frets and a set of pearloid “thumbprint” position markers.

Strings ride over a bone nut to a set of nickel-plated die-cast tuners on a bound headstock with a gloss black facing and gold Gretsch logo. This well-made guitar exudes classy coolness that immediately attracts attention and proved a lot of fun to play.

The Streamliner has a robust acoustic sound and good natural sustain, and it’s great that someone at the factory took the time to get the intonation right and the strings comfortably low with no fret buzz. The guitar tuned up easily and stayed in tune quite well once the strings and the Bigsby settled in enough to allow spirited whammy workouts.

Played through a selection of amps that included a PRS DGT 15, ’65 Deluxe Reverb reissue (hand-wired by Alessandro) and a reissue Vox AC10, the Streamliner delivered cool tones across the board. The use of Alnico 2 and 5 in these pickups optimizes them for their respective positions, overall providing great string-to-string clarity and plenty of bottom-end to facilitate everything from burnished jazz textures to rockabilly snarl to crushing rock grind.

The lower output neck unit sounded great for blues and roots rock, delivering warm, clear tones that didn’t become murky when the volume and/or tone controls were rolled down. Switching to the middle position which combines the brighter, louder bridge pickup, elicited more twang and bite—nice for country and rockabilly — and the bridge pickup by itself when pumped though a pedal or high-gain amp was perfect for bluesy metal in the Billy Duffy camp, delivering ripping archtop-electric muscle that can make a solidbody guitar sound thin by comparison.

That said, if you want skinnier, funkier tones for channeling Nile Rogers or Leo Nocentelli, just pull the master-volume knob and the guitar delivers single-coil sounds that sit beautifully in a track or with a band that has horns, keys, singers, percussion and other instrumentation.

The Streamliner Hollow Body is an inspiring guitar that plays well, is lightweight for its size and has the sonic flexibility to handle just about any style. It’s an impressive performer for the money and well worth a test drive if you’re looking to bring some Gretsch love into your life.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT gretschguitars.com

PRICE $649

NUT Bone, 1.6875" wide

NECK Nato, glued-in, Soft C profile, gloss finish

FINGERBOARD Laurel with aged white binding and black side dots, 24.75" scale, 12" radius, pearloid “thumbnail” inlays and bound headstock with gold Gretsch logo

FRETS 22 medium jumbo

TUNERS Nickel-plated die-cast

BODY Fully hollow arched maple construction with aged white binding, three-ply purfling and gloss finish

BRIDGE Nickel-plated Adjusto-Matic with pinned laurel wood base

TAILPIECE Bigsby B60

PICKUPS Broad’Tron BT3S humbuckers with Alnico 2 magnets (neck position) and Alnico 5 magnets (bridge position)

CONTROLS Master volume (with push-pull coil split), master tone and individually adjustable pickup volume controls. Vintage radio-style knobs and 3-way toggle switch

EXTRAS Single-ply cream pickguard (as tested) or three-ply tortoise color with gold “Gretsch” logo. Available in Fairlane Blue, Brandywine, Robusto Burst, Midnight Sapphire and Havana Burst

FACTORY STRINGS Nickel Plated Steel, .010-.046

WEIGHT 7.2 lbs (tested)

BUILT Indonesia

PRO Cool retro-style look. Classic big-body resonance and tone.

CON Gig bag not included. Corners on the nut are sharp.

Back in 2006, Phil Manzanera was three years removed from Roxy Music’s latest reunion and back in the mix as a hired gun, working for the likes of Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Chrissie Hynde, among others, as well as recording his own albums. But a stint as David Gilmour’s right-hand man was a welcome addition to the regimen.

“I met David when I was 15, the week he joined Pink Floyd,” Manzanera tells us via phone from his home in Sussex in the English countryside — next door to Gilmour’s, in fact. “Pink Floyd was the coolest band in the world back then, them and the Soft Machine.”

The two guitarists maintained their friendship, and Manzanera co-wrote the single “One Slip” with Gilmour for Pink Floyd’s 1987 comeback album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Fast forward 19 years and Gilmour was preparing for his own comeback with On an Island, his first solo outing in 22 years and his first album since Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell in 1994. He recruited Manzanera to co-produce with himself and Chris Thomas, as well as play guitar on three of the album’s 10 tracks — joining a corps that included Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright and latter-day bassist Guy Pratt, along with David Crosby, Graham Nash, Robert Wyatt, Jools Holland, Georgie Fame and others.

“David doesn’t need a producer,” Manzanera says, “but he likes to have company to bounce his ideas off of, or to say, ‘I’ve got 10 ideas — any of these any good?’”

Manzanera created a chart on which he noted which pieces of music might work well together.

“There were 153 little bits, so I would take it to my studio and go back the following week and say, ‘Bit number 78 with bit number 13, and then a bit of number 121.’ And David would say, ‘What’s that?’ and I’d say, ‘That’s you. You did that!’” He laughs. “He’d either go with it or wouldn’t, but he did go with a lot of the stuff.

“He just had too much stuff accumulated and wanted a bit of help to sort it out. I’m used to doing albums and things.”

Working alongside Gilmour at his houseboat studio Astoria and his studio in Sussex, Manzanera helped him complete the album. Nearby sat Gilmour’s circa-1954 Stratocaster with the serial number 0001, which he purchased in 1978 and reportedly used on “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”

“I’d just sit there and have his number 0001 Strat next to me, looking at it,” Manzanera says. “It was just a lot of fun.”

Manzanera adds that all concerned were well aware that Gilmour “hadn’t done anything in a while… so I was just trying to be supportive of him, as a friend, and wanting him to succeed.”

He’s also an unabashed Gilmour fan.

“I love his voice,” Manzanera notes. “Obviously everyone goes on about the guitar, which is fantastic, but I just love that voice. It’s so unique. He does a lot of stuff so well — still does it so well. It’s amazing.”

After On an Island’s release in March 2006, Gilmour recruited Manzanera to be part of the band for a spring and summer tour supporting the album, along with Wright and Pratt.

“When we did ‘Wish You Were Here,’ I got to play it on the actual acoustic 12-string he played on the original, so that was a lot of fun, too.”

Manzanera also co-produced Gilmour’s next album, 2015’s Rattle That Lock, playing both acoustic guitar and keyboards on the album and again joining Gilmour on tour during 2015 and 2016.

In between, he was part of the production team for 2014’s The Endless River — to date the final Pink Floyd album. Intended as a tribute to Wright, who passed away in 2008, the 18 instrumental tracks were built from recordings made during sessions for Floyd’s 1994 album The Division Bell, with additional material added nearly two decades later.

“We were in David’s kitchen one day — this is after Rick died — and there were all these tapes,” Manzanera recalls. “David asked, ‘Do you fancy having a listen and see if you can make anything out of it?’

“So I went away for six weeks and listened to every scrap. I loved Rick’s Farfisa organ from the early Pink Floyd albums, so I particularly chose bits that had it. That was such a unique aspect of Floyd that hadn’t been spotlighted enough.”

After cutting and pasting clips together, Manzanera felt he could create something cohesive from the recordings. Gilmour liked what he heard, but Manzanera was concerned about playing it for Nick Mason.

“I thought, How am I gonna play this to Nick? I’ve taken a few liberties with his drums — one bit from here, one bit from there. Finally I thought, Right, I’m gonna turn the lights off, put the screen saver on and put the music on and just not look at him.

“He listened to it and said at the end, ‘Yeah, there might be something there.’ Phew!”

After a break of a few months, Gilmour pushed everyone into the studio to finish the recording.

“David said, ‘Look, why don’t we all go into the studio at the same time and try and finish this off together?’”

Gilmour recruited his wife, the English novelist and writer Polly Samson, to compose lyrics for the album’s only non-instrumental track, “Louder Than Words.” With assistance from producer Youth, “we all worked together and got it done,” Manzanera says.

The Endless River hit number one in quite a few countries around the world, including the U.K., and number three on the Billboard 200 in the U.S.

Manzanera — who received an Order of the British Empire honor in 2024 — tells many of his other stories in his 2024 memoir Revolución to Roxy, and has brought his An Evening of Words and Music show to the U.S. Current dates include Space in Chicago on May 18, the Shank in Milwaukee on May 19 and the Quinlan Room in Minneapolis on May 20 (tickets and other details via manzanera.com).

In the studio, the guitarist is also prepping a 51st-anniversary reissue (scheduled for September 11) of Mainstream by his pre-Roxy band Quiet Sun, as well as a brand-new album by the band. There will also be a boxed-set edition of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, remastered by Steven Wilson and due out this fall.

“It’s a really great package, with lots of extra stuff on it,” Manzanera says. “I’ve been waiting for this for years, ’cause it’s one of my favorite albums. I heard the Dolby Atmos mix that Steven did; there’s lots of great things Eno had done that I never heard before… ’cause back then you were constrained by the length of sides on vinyl. If you had extra stuff you couldn’t use it, but now it will have a chance to be heard, which is exciting.”

How many pickups should a guitar have? One? Two? Three?

How about 64?

That’s the total number of active pickups in the PolyMap system, a new experimental electric guitar developed by audio engineer David Wieland of Dark Art Guitars.

“Traditional electric guitars have two or three pickups and you have to decide while playing which ones are active,” Wieland explains in a video demonstration of the system. “This can limit what is possible with the playing, which is why I developed PolyMap.”

Traditional electric guitars rely on just two or three pickups to capture the vibration of the strings. Those pickups shape everything from a Stratocaster’s glassy bite to a Les Paul’s thick growl. PolyMap blows up that model entirely. Instead of a handful of magnets, the experimental instrument uses 64 individual pickups arranged in a grid, allowing software to combine them into virtual pickups placed anywhere along the string.

The project is Wieland’s entry in the AES Student Design Competition 2026, where it also serves as his master’s thesis.

“It’s a polyphonic guitar pickup system that detects each string individually at eight different locations,” he says. “Then in software, you can decide which pickups are active, how they are blended, and apply various effects.”

At the heart of PolyMap is an 8×8 pickup grid that samples each of the guitar’s six strings at eight positions along its length. In total, the instrument houses 64 active pickups, each feeding a carefully designed signal path.

Those digital signals pass through buffered, bandwidth-controlled analog stages before entering eight multichannel analog-to-digital converters. From there, the data is aggregated into a Multichannel Audio Digital Interface (MADI) stream and transmitted over a single coaxial cable, which also delivers 12 volts of DC power to the pickups. The system outputs its stereo signal at 24-bit/48 kHz resolution.

Once recorded into a DAW, a specially designed plugin lets users shape their performance via two modes. Manual mode gives players direct control over each pickup’s level, phase, pan and micro-delay. Virtual mode allows users to position a simulated pickup beneath each string while the software blends signals from the sensor grid in real time.

Because the system captures the strings at multiple points simultaneously, players can also reshape the tone of the “virtual pickup” itself — dialing in sounds that mimic everything from vintage passive pickups to ultra-clean modern designs.

The multi-pickup architecture also opens the door to unusual effects. By introducing timing offsets between sensors, the system can create delay and diffusion effects. Players can even route signals independently — sending the lower strings to a bass guitar rig, for example, while the higher strings feed a traditional guitar amp.

PolyMap isn’t commercially available yet, but Wieland has published the project’s hardware designs, software and documentation on GitHub for anyone interested in exploring the system.

If it eventually reaches the market, he estimates the guitar would cost around $2,000.

“I would say at the very least six months until we can even talk about how the final system looks,” Wieland says. “Realistically, it’s probably going to be next year before it’s possibly available.”

Known for its high-quality Japanese production for more than three decades, Gretsch has also diversified into several other quality-related pricing tiers in the 21st century, and the new Electromatic Premier Jet presents a striking new addition to the sub-$1,000 lineup. Part homage to the classics, part stripped-down redrawing of the blueprint, it’s a guitar likely to appeal to the Gretsch-ogling rockers out there while offering something for a broad range of budget-conscious players.

If the original Duo Jet on which the new model is roughly based was always regarded by some as “Gretsch’s Les Paul,” the Electromatic Premier Jet is arguably even more so. Although it passes for a solidbody visually, it uses a chambered mahogany body much like the company’s ’50s single-cut, albeit with a somewhat heavier, denser construction.

Tap the carved solid-maple top, for example, and there’s less of a clue to the open airspace within — and there’s a little more weight here than you’ll find with most older Duo-Jets, to further amplify the impression of solidity. Other minor changes — such as comfort-enhancing ribcage and thigh contours at the back of the body’s waist — also help to bring it into the modern age.

The glued-in neck is carved from solid mahogany with a bound ebony fingerboard, all laid out to a slight variation of the traditional Gretsch scale that comes in at 24.88 inches, with a width of 1.6875 inches (a.k.a. 1-11/16 inches) across the GraphTech NuBone nut. The 22 medium-jumbo frets are neatly crowned and well polished, and they partner with the medium-C neck profile to yield an easy playability.

Looks-wise, the neoclassical thumbnail fingerboard inlays, Falcon-like split-V headstock and three-ply body binding lend the whole affair an air of class, while the glow-in-the-dark Luminlay side-dot inlays aid visibility on a dark stage. The Onyx Storm finish on my review sample (a gloss black that reveals a fine-grained metalflake on closer inspection) is probably my favorite of the four options for the model and looks archetypally Gretsch, but with a modern twist.

The triangular control layout reflects one of Gretsch’s long-standing design points. Along with the single upper-bout selector switch, it nods to the earlier rendition of the Duo Jet. But the knobs here also conceal the versatile new wiring setup Gretsch has loaded into the Electromatic Premier Jet. They include a single master volume and two individual tone controls, with a push-pull switch on the former potentiometer to tap Gretsch’s Lumen Filter, and no-load pots on the latter.

The Lumen Filter achieves a brighter, spankier, more single-coil–like tone by running both pickups through a small capacitor — not entirely unlike the “strangle switch” on a Fender Jaguar, for example (and in no way related to the creepy mind-altering corporation in the TV series Severance) — rather than actually splitting the humbuckers’ coils. The no-load pots take the tone control and tone cap completely out of the circuit when rolled fully clockwise, where they click into a firm detent that lets you know you’ve hit home.

This setup governs a pair of Gretsch’s new Sphera Twin Six humbuckers, a standard-sized design that presents more chrome than the smaller Filter’Tron humbucker of old. Made with 12 individually adjustable pole pieces (six per coil) and Alnico VI magnets, they employ polysol-coated wire in the neck position and plain-enamel wire in the bridge to best tailor their performance to each.

Whether in the lap or on the strap, the Electromatic Premier Jet reveals ergonomics that are different from those of more traditional Gretsch guitars. I would dare say they’re more Gibson-like, with the adjustable wrap-tail bridge pitching the strings closer to the top of the body than the old-school floating-bridge options. The result is a guitar that you feel you are hugging closer than the Duo Jets of old, and which you perhaps feel confident hitting harder.

Tested through a 1964 Fender Bassman head with a 2x12 cabinet and a Matchless Spitfire 1x12 combo, the Electromatic Premier Jet proved itself a solid and versatile performer that punches well above its class. It delivers more power than the typical Filter’Tron-equipped guitar, certainly, but also a metallic bite and silvery clarity that still screams “Gretsch!” through both clean and overdriven amp settings.

Those who find modern Gibson-style humbuckers dark or muddy are likely to love these Sphera Twin Six units, which definitely push the amp when needed but present an appealing blend of girth and articulation overall, with a signature brightness that rarely sounds too harsh.

All of this enables the new model to excel in the country, Americana, roots-rock and rockabilly arenas, in which the seminal Duo Jet has traditionally performed well. But it also brings a stinging, searing tone to heavier rock genres. This is further enhanced by the added sustain of the solidly anchored wraparound bridge, which induces more ring and resonance than the more lightly strung trapeze-and-floating-bridge arrangements of yore.

Pop the Lumen Filter, though, and there’s even more snap and jangle via faux-single-coil tones that arguably sound more authentic than the usual coil-splitting. The detents for the tone controls’ no-load settings are a little stiff and might feel kind of “locked in” for those who reach for quick and subtle control changes, but the feature does what it should, letting the pickups’ full clarity shine through.

All in all, then, the new Electromatic Premier Jet is very impressive, and even more so when you factor in the price point. At first glance, I was planning to say something like, “…but you can’t expect ‘that great Gretsch sound’ with full-size humbuckers like these,” and yet it’s somehow there, to a degree at least.

From the choice of paint to the inlays to the binding, the guitar is well constructed and beautifully finished. Playability and functionality are great, and the Electromatic Premier Jet is likely to find its way into the hands of guitarists who could otherwise afford to spend significantly more.

Many players who gasped at the thought of picking a Chinese guitar two decades ago have long overcome their reservations, but this one is yet another testament to how far the country’s instrument manufacturers have come, and to Gretsch’s thoughtful design and guidance as well.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT Gretsch.com

PRICE $799 street

NUT GraphTech NuBone, 1 11/16" wide

NECK Mahogany, 24.88" scale length

FRETBOARD Ebony, 10"–14" compound radius

FRETS 22 medium-jumbo

TUNERS Gotoh locking

BODY Chambered mahogany with solid maple top

BRIDGE Locking adjustable wraparound

PICKUPS Two Sphera Twin Six Alnico VI humbuckers

CONTROLS Master volume with push-pull Lumen filter, two no-load Tone controls, three-way switch

FACTORY STRINGS D’Addario .010-.046

WEIGHT 8.4 lbs

BUILT (country of origin) China

PRO Well-built and cleverly designed, offering impressive sonic versatility and playability for the money.

CON The detents in the no-load tone pots take some getting used to for those making frequent control changes.

Revered jazz guitarist Larry Carlton made his name as a hardworking studio musician across the 1970s and ‘80s, through sessions with Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt and Quincy Jones, among many others. Throughout his career, his sunburst 1969 Gibson ES-335 has been his choice of electric guitar, for most of those sessions.

He says finding the semi-hollow model was a stroke of luck that allowed feel and play “more like me” on the countless hits he made it.

“I was starting to get busy in the studio scene in 1970, and so back then the guys would carry a Tele, a jazz box, or a Strat if they had one,” he tells Vertex Effects. “So I had a Tele, and I had a Les Paul, but coming from more of a jazz influence, I wanted something that felt more like a jazz box.”

In his teens, ES-335s were common sights in the hands of the jazz maestros he grew up admiring, so the guitar's natural appeal was evident. Little did he know how perfect a match he and the guitar would be. He picked the guitar from a trio of ES-335s hanging on the wall of Southern California music store.

“They had three 335s hanging on the wall, so I tried each one of them,” he recalls. “I didn't plug them in, I tried them acoustically, and this is the one that caught me.”

The 1969 model was brand new when he bought it for $850. Signs of the original Bigsby bridge it came with are evident on the top. The guitar underwent other modifications as Carlton finessed the instrument to his desires.

A graphite nut and Schaller tuners have been installed. But vitally, the original twin humbuckers, now looking glamorously aged from countless hours spent working away in the studio, remain in place.

As Carlton explains, getting the right instrument in his hands for those sessions was crucial in his role as a gun for hire.

“It’s the crown jewel,” he once told GP of the guitar. “I bought it out of the blue, and it’s been real good to me.”

It was paired with a Fender Princeton combo amp for Joni Mitchell's 1974 hit “Help Me”, and it can also be heard on Steely Dan's “Kid Charlemagne” after it beat a Strat in a shootout.

However, though his reputation grew to warrant a Gibson signature guitar, his relationship with the brand soured over time.

“I liked being with Gibson,” Carlton admits, “but as they started doing their production for retail, the quality wasn't like my 335, which was the whole idea. They got the color right – that's the easy part – but the guitar wasn't like mine.

“But we did it,” he adds. “And they didn’t promote it very well. Guys, especially in Europe, would bring their guitars to my concerts and ask me to sign them. I'd say, ‘Sure,’ and I'd take them out of the case, and the neck was not anything like mine.”

Sire Guitars convinced Carlton to jump ship and make its own attempt at reproducing his majestic 335. His signature model, he says, “sings beautifully.”

Even with this guitar in his hands, not all of Carlton's sessions were a dream. The guitarist famously quit working with John Lennon after one day. Steve Lukather, meanwhile, has recalled the lesson he learned from a Larry Carlton string break.

Steve Lukather had been playing guitar for six or seven years before his parents relented to his begging for a top-quality instrument, and his retelling of the story has brought him to tears.

Like countless other young players who grew up in the 1960s, the Toto and session-playing hitmaker says George Harrison, whom he first saw perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, was “the reason why I play.”

Lukather received his first guitar at age seven, but as he told the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum in 2020, it was a “broken thrift-store guitar, which ironically, people now covet.”

“It was a crappy guitar,” Lukather says with a laugh. “One of my idiot friends knocked it over and broke the neck — not off, but it screwed up the headstock to the point where it wouldn't tune up very well.”

Despite the damage, he was stuck with the instrument.

“I had to play it because my dad would say, ‘You broke it, you're not getting a new one.’”

Lukather devised a way to get his hands on nice guitars.

“Instead of going to the toy store, I'd go down to Guitar Center in Hollywood every couple of weeks,” he says.

Unfortunately, those electrics were beyond his means.

One day, however, things played out a little differently when his dad agreed to drive him down to the store and added, “Maybe we'll buy an amp.”

“I didn't wanna push it, man,” he says, “my dad worked hard. He knew how much I loved it. When I'd get into trouble, they didn't punish me, they'd take music stuff away. A stereo or whatever.

“Anyway, I wanted to try out an Ampeg VT22, the one Keith [Richards] used on Exile on Main St. So they put me in a practice room, and I grabbed a Les Paul Deluxe. I crank the amp, and I'm ripping on it. People are looking, going, ‘Who's that playing?’ and it's just a little kid. I guess I was quite good for my age.”

His dad had left him to his own devices until eventually he came back to collect his son and take him home.

“He goes, ‘All right, let's get out of here. Let's get this stuff in the car.’ And I go, ‘What do you mean?’”

His father’s words stunned him.

“‘The amp and the guitar. It's yours.’”

It's at this point he starts tearing up, calling it a “huge moment” in his life, while revealing that the outlay saw his dad give up on getting the new car he wanted.

“I love my parents so much,” Lukather continues. “My dad sacrificed that for me. I got this great guitar, I man. I woke up in the middle of the night to polish it. And the smell of the case. It changed my life.”

His dad's caveat was that, now that he had pro gear, he needed to take lessons and honor his craft with the weight it deserves. As the five-time Grammy winner continues to work on a new Van Halen album with Alex Van Halen – they're currently searching for a singer after a big-name turned them down – suffice to say the investment paid off.

He’s since clarified his role in the record after the story of their collaboration blew up. Jimmy Page, meanwhile, has explained what sets Lukather apart from his peers, and the Toto man has named his best guitar in a chat with GP.

A luthier has showcased what is set to be 2026’s most heartwarming and simultaneously heartbreaking guitar of 2026, with the Matriach – a one-of-a-kind electric guitar that pays tribute to his late wife in the most beautiful way.

Micah Teruya, who runs Teruya Guitars out of Syracuse, IN, typically documents his guitar-making process every step of the way for his 9,500+ Instagram followers. This time, he kept the build secret until he posted a video of himself playing it. And with good reason.

“I lost my beautiful wife to leukemia in August 2025,” he writes. “To honor her legacy, I built this guitar.”

The centerpiece of the pink offset is its sole fretboard inlay, which forgoes traditional mother-of-pearl in favor of a far more personal touch.

“I embedded her wedding band into the fretboard,” he explains. “Traditionally, it would be placed on the 12th fret to mark the octave. However, we were married for 10 years, 11 months, and 14 days [when she died]. Therefore, I decided to place the ring between the 10th and 11th fret to symbolize how long we had been married.

“If you look closely, you can see almost all of it sits in the 11th fret, since we were so close to our anniversary.”

One key part of the build, however, was documented, as he took her ashes and inlaid them into the signature on the gutiar’s headstock.

“This was the most painful experience I have ever had building an instrument,” he confesses. “But now, she is in every note I play. Having to deal with the technical aspects of building a guitar, while colliding with the emotional weight of who I lost was unbearable.

“Often, I could only work for 10-30 minutes on this before being physically and emotionally drained,” he continues. “This guitar needed to be finished before I could continue on any other projects. It took me over six months to finish.”

Karrah had survived ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia) and a bone marrow transplant for seven years before her passing, which naturally left Micah and his family devastated. But what a legacy he has created for her with his own two hands.

“Karrah was the Matriarch of our family and friends,” he writes in another post. “Nobody tells you that you can continue to love someone more even after they leave this life. I built this guitar to honor her life and her legacy in a way that is personal and sacred to me.”

At the time of writing, the main post has just shy of 35,000 likes, and the comments section is a reminder that not all hope for humanity – despite the problems in the world – is lost. The Teruya Matriarch is a thing of beauty.

And as Ukrainian luthier Tanya Shpachuk showed earlier this year, when she painstakingly restored a Gibson Les Paul left for ruin by a Russian drone strike, guitar building can send a powerful, positive message beaming into a world that can often be excruciatingly dark.

For other unique builds, check out Jack White's Ugly Stick, a garish guitar/half-bass hybrid made by Eddie Van Halen's go-to luthier, and the twin-necked microtonal monster powering the viral sensation Angine de Poitrine.

Venus Guitars arrives with a bold mission statement: electrics made "purpose-built from the ground up" for female players. That kind of pitch tends to trigger skepticism. Too many "designed for women" guitars have leaned on glitter and heart-shaped bodies while cutting corners on hardware, build and tone.

What Venus gets right is that the concept isn't cosmetic — it's physical.

The lighter-weight, 24-inch scale and comfort-carved body translate into something you notice immediately in your hands and on a strap, regardless of your gender. The shorter scale and reduced string tension are a genuine advantage for smaller hands and a real gift for players dealing with physical issues like arthritis who still want to bend freely and express vibrato with authority.

Most importantly, these guitars convert comfort into confidence and control — the kind of command that matters as much to a weekend warrior as it does to a touring pro.

Venus Revolution

The Revolution pairs a White Jabon body with a roasted maple bolt-on neck and Indian rosewood fingerboard. At five and a half pounds, my test guitar was a legitimately featherweight instrument, the kind that makes long rehearsals noticeably easier on the shoulder. It comes in Metallic White, Midnight Black (which is what I received) and Aura Pink Pearl, and ships with a deluxe padded gig bag.

The neck is a slim C with a painted finish that stays fast under the hand, and the compound 12–16-inch radius fingerboard feels natural for open-position work while it supports cleaner bends up the neck. The stainless-steel medium-jumbo frets were neatly executed — no sharp ends, no distracting high spots — and the model’s hardware is gig-friendly throughout. It consists of a fixed bridge, chrome locking tuners, dual humbuckers with coil-splitting, a three-way switch, and a one-volume/one-tone (push/pull) layout.

One genuinely clever feature is Venus’s quick-swap pickguard system. It includes four distinctly shaped pickguards in 18 color options, swappable in under 10 seconds. It's far more useful than the cute gimmick it might seem. The ability to change a guitar's visual identity without buying another instrument is a tangible advantage for 21st-century working players who are building a content library across shoots and live clips. The caveat is that replacement pickguards run $49.99, which feels steep for something designed to encourage frequent swapping.

Venus’s distinctive diagonal position marker layout is also worth noting. It’s easy to read at a glance onstage, and Elite models add Luminlay glow-in-the-dark side dots for impressive low-light visibility.

If you're arriving from full-scale Fenders or a hefty single-cut, the 24-inch scale and slimmer profile may take a few minutes to recalibrate. After about 20 minutes, it stopped feeling different and started feeling right. Position shifts got quicker, wide bends took less effort, and the whole guitar felt easier to command up and down the neck. The lower tension pays immediate dividends for expressive playing — one-and-a-half-step bends that require real effort on a standard-scale guitar feel almost effortless here.

Tonally, the Revolution punches well above its price point. Its core voice is everything you'd want from a dual-humbucker electric: focused, punchy and eager for gain, with coil-split options that add a leaner, more percussive snap for funk rhythms, indie-rock chime, and pop parts. Through a Marshall DSL100HR into a 4x12, the bridge pickup on the Classic Gain channel delivered immediate hot-rodded British drive with unmistakable '80s attitude.

I couldn't resist diving straight into Van Halen's version of "You Really Got Me." Flip to Ultra Gain and it'll move into modern metal territory. On a Fender Super-Sonic combo, the cleans were a genuine standout: full, rich and harmonically pleasing, with the bridge pickup staying clear rather than thinning out. For an $899 instrument, that range is impressive.

The Revolution is a legitimately strong all-around instrument, and an especially compelling one for players with smaller hands or a slighter build, or anyone managing hand fatigue. Its stable hardware, simple controls and wide tonal range cover rock, pop, metal and funk without breaking a sweat. Venus set out to build a guitar that fits more players more naturally, and the Revolution delivers on that promise.

Venus Revolution Elite "Dark Roast"

The Dark Roast takes the same ergonomic silhouette and pushes it upmarket: a USA-made roasted basswood body with a 5A figured maple cap, a figured roasted maple neck and a "Royal Black" torrefied purpleheart fingerboard. At six and a quarter pounds, it's still impressively light for a premium build. The slim, asymmetric C neck — slightly thicker on the bass side — wears a hand-rubbed oil finish that feels broken-in immediately. The compound 10–14-inch radius fingerboard is PLEK'd.

Hardware is appropriately premium: Hipshot locking tuners, a Hipshot U.S. Contour trem, a Switchcraft side jack and CTS pots. Pickups are a DiMarzio PAF 36th Anniversary set paired with a five-way Lead Mode switching arrangement. It’s a vintage-voiced foundation with expanded access to brighter, more focused tones when needed.

The DiMarzio PAF 36ths deliver exactly what you'd hope they would: vintage-inspired warmth and articulation that stays musical under gain, with enough clarity for layered chord work and enough push for lead lines that need to sing. Through the Marshall DSL100HR, clean bridge tones carried a glossy top end — plenty of sparkle — although the low end felt a touch looser and rounder than the Revolution's. That's not inherently a flaw: players who prefer a thicker foundation for big chords may actually gravitate toward it.

On Ultra Gain, the Elite clicked best at a classic hot-rod gain setting — the bridge pickup delivered high-octane sustain that made lead parts feel energized without getting harsh. The Fender Super-Sonic was an especially flattering partner. In the second pickup position via Lead Mode, the Elite produced a crisp, snappy clean that landed far closer to classic Fender-style spank than you'd expect from a dual-humbucker setup.

The Bottom Line

The Elite Dark Roast is the more premium and nuanced instrument, with a great trem, name-brand pickups, expanded switching, and boutique fit and finish, all in a featherweight package. But the real headline here is the Revolution. It's the guitar that kept surprising me. Through both the Marshall and the Fender, it consistently sounded bigger, more inspiring and more complete than anything in its price range has a right to. From convincing '80s rock snarl on Classic Gain to gorgeously usable cleans on the Super-Sonic, the Revolution delivers the goods at every turn. If Venus’s goal is to build guitars that invite you to play more — and play bolder — mission accomplished.

SPECIFICATIONS

Revolution

CONTACT venus-guitars.com

PRICE $899

NUT WIDTH 1.650", bone

NECK Roasted maple, slim C shape

FRETBOARD Indian rosewood, 24" scale, compound 12"–16" radius

FRETS 22 medium jumbo

TUNERS Chrome locking

BODY White Jabon

BRIDGE Fixed

PICKUPS Dual humbuckers with coil split

CONTROLS Volume, tone (push/pull), 3-way switch

FACTORY STRINGS D’Addario EXL 110 .010 - .046

WEIGHT 5.5 lb

BUILT Indonesia

EXTRAS Quick-swap pickguard, padded gig bag

Revolution Elite - Dark Roast

CONTACT venus-guitars.com

PRICE $2,749+

NUT WIDTH 1.650", synthetic bone (Nubone)

NECK Figured roasted maple, slim asymmetric C shape (thicker bass side)

FRETBOARD Royal Black (torrefied purpleheart), 24" scale, compound 10"–14" radius

FRETS 22 medium jumbo

TUNERS Hipshot locking

BODY Roasted basswood with figured maple cap

BRIDGE Hipshot US Contour Trem

PICKUPS DiMarzio PAF 36th Anniversary set

CONTROLS Volume, tone, 5-way Super Switch w/ "Lead Mode"

FACTORY STRINGS D’Addario NYXL .010 - .046

WEIGHT 6.25 lb

BUILT USA

EXTRAS Extra quick-swap pickguard included, Luminlay side dots, deluxe padded gig bag