Blame it on a guitar. For Low’s Alan Sparhawk, the inspiration behind the band’s latest album, Ones and Sixes, came in part thanks to a new six-string. He had been playing a series of Les Pauls, but recently found a ’60s Danelectro Convertible with one of the famed lipstick-tube pickups mounted in the sound hole. …

Jon Herington, best known for his current work as Steely Dan’s lead guitarist, put out one of the decades’ great records with his last effort, Time On My Hands, back in 2012. This studio follow-up is also a fine record with the same eclectic mix of music and clever wordplay. His guitar playing is always …

Nels Cline has quite the musical resumé, and yet has always been hard to pin down. Whether doing some form of fusion, manning the lead-guitar chair in Wilco, or serving up dissonance and sound in various solo projects, he never can be pigeonholed. Now, there’s this latest – a very ambitious project that, according to …

Railhammer Hyper Vintage Humbucker Price: $139 list / $89 direct Contact: railhammer.com Developed by Joe Naylor of Reverend Guitars, Railhammers are passive humbuckers that use a combination of pole pieces on the treble side and rails on the bass side. It’s an interesting motif with an effective purpose. The Railhammers’s six oversize poles under the …

Nashville Pussy is fronted by the husband-and-wife team of Blaine Cartwright and Ruyter Suys. Its new album, Up The Dosage, is the band’s first in five years, and it’s jammed with Ted Nugent and AC/DC influences juxtaposed with redneck/trailer-park satire. Employing the tried-and-true Les Paul/Marshall recipe, Suys serves up unadulterated piss-and-vinegar rock, delivering riveting performances …

The lastest from the godfather of fusion guitar harkens back to his ’71 album Barefoot Boy, revisiting the energy, philosophy, and spirit of that period. “Sanpaku” opens the set with Coryell’s take on modal funkiness as a gateway to more harmonically expansive compositions. “Back To Russia” and “If Miles Were Here” showcase seasoned musicianship, authority, …

Readers of Vintage Guitar occasionally stumble on unique, prototype, or otherwise fascinatingly non-standard amps, and it’s a pleasure to share when they’re made available to us. In an upcoming issue, we’ll feature an Ampeg prototype, but this month, we’re looking at the “opposite” of a prototype – an amp made well after the model was …

Loar LH-309 VS Archtop Price: $569.99 (street) Contact: theloar.com As the retro craze delves deeper into six-string history, a spate of non-cutaway archtops have hit the market, celebrating an era when giants like Eddie Lang, Lonnie Johnson, Charlie Christian, George Barnes, Eddie Durham, Carl Kress, and Oscar Moore laid down cool chords, sultry bends, and …

Recording an acoustic guitar is very different from recording an electric, employing different microphones, placement, and technique. Here are a few essential steps.

Surf’s up – again! Thanks to the prodding of guitarist/impresario Deke Dickerson, The Trashmen recently recorded their first album in 25 years. “I was an obsessed fan,” Dickerson says of the band, whose 1963 hit “Surfin’ Bird” vaulted it to near-legendary status. “They were doing rockabilly mixed with surf, and it was unique in that …

First off, who the heck is this Messner guy? Well, in 1978, mountaineer Reinhold Messner became the first person to scale Mount Everest without the help of oxygen tanks. Cool, but why name a stompbox after him? In crafting this namesake pedal, Walrus Audio is striving to capture the pure, crystal-clear air atop the world’s …

Michael Angelo Batio is one of the most prodigious guitarists on Earth. Since his stint with the rock band Holland in the ’80s, Batio has written his ticket with a combination of freakish talent and hard work. His current album, Intermezzo, is a note-intensive prog-metal rollercoaster that includes some similarly gifted guests like George Lynch, …

It’s an elite class – rock guitarists who crossed the Atlantic to achieve their rock-star dreams. Somewhere between the mid-’60s sojourn of Jimi Hendrix and that of Brian Setzer in the late ’70s came Pat Travers, who in 1975 left his home in Ottawa to find fame abroad. Born of emigres – his mother British, …

Click Here to view Donald “Duck” Dunn Obit. In the history of popular music, the story of Memphis-based Stax Records stands as a unique, enduring legacy. Memphis was the focal point of the gritty, greasy southern soul music in the 1960s, and Stax was the label. And two bands – the Mar-Keys, and Booker T. …

Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady have been playing music together for 53 years – 40 of them as Hot Tuna. What started as an acoustic splinter group from their gig with Jefferson Airplane morphed into both acoustic and electric variations and myriad combinations.Released on the heels of Tuna’s successful “blues tour” with Charlie …

The 1960s – that halcyon decade which Americans today are most inclined to reconsider with dewy eyes – is in the midst of a retrospective heyday. Assuming the Stones’ ill-fated NorCal bacchanalia in December ’69 represents the final nail in the coffin for this parade of 50th-anniversary observations, we have another three years of Aquarian …