In the mid 1960s, England’s Vox company was in the right place at the right time. Buoyed by frontline British Invasion endorsers such as the Beatles and American bands such as Paul Revere & the Raiders, the instrument/amplifier maker signed deals with almost every popular band. Even one-hit-wonders such as Music Machine (“Talk Talk”) brandished …

Washburn Paul Stanley PS2012 Time Traveler Price: $8,665.33 (retail) Info: www.washburn.com . Inspired by Kiss co-founder Paul Stanley’s appreciation for vintage instruments – and loosely based on Washburn’s Paul Stanley Starfire model – the PS2012 Time Traveler is hand-built in Washburn’s Custom Shop in Chicago and relic’d by Washburn’s Gord Miller to look and play …

Ray Cummins – Guitar Tutorial #2 Ray Cummins’ latest exclusive tutorial for VG includes a breakdown of double-note harmony playing and backward fingerstyle rolls. Keep up with Ray at raycummins.com. See more lessons, we are adding new lessons monthly! Ray Cummins’ latest exclusive tutorial for VG includes a breakdown of double-note harmony playing and backward …

Demeter Mighty Minnie Pedalboard Amplifier Price: $899.99 Info: www.demeteramps.com Years ago, backstage after a concert, slide-guitar virtuoso Sonny Landreth mentioned to renowned amp designer James Demeter that it would be nice to be able to do fly-in dates without having to rely on an amp backline of unknown quality or bringing along his irreplaceable Dumble, …

’70s culture may have provided a target-rich environment for parodied depictions of giant Afros, bell-bottom jeans, and Saturday Night Fever, but anyone who was alive then remembers Chuck Mangione’s Feels So Good. Huge in 1977, the album remains symbolic of the jazz-pop that was strong at the time. The extended guitar solo on the title …

“I never thought this would happen to us all these years later,” marvels Sonics guitarist Larry Parypa on the reception the band is getting on its current tour. On what should’ve been be a slow Thursday night at the Wonder Bar in Asbury Park, the band played to a packed house of patrons young enough …

The Z.Vex Fuzz Factory pedal unleashed sonic possibilities ranging from a horde of wasps to the (presumed) sound of the end of the world and became a go-to stompbox for extreme-rock and heavy metal guitarists. The company’s latest twist, the Fuzz Probe, takes the Fuzz Factory and adds a Theremin-like proximity control, giving its user …

Her overnight success was decades in the making, but a video gone viral of a jaw-dropping slide guitar performance at the 2014 North Atlantic Blues Festival has helped bring Joanna Connor to the world. With nearly a half a million views, the performance displays scholarly blues virtuosity and crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics. In recent years, she has …

Every so often, a builder gives the art of guitar design a firm shove into the future. The Dean Zelinsky Tagliare Z-Glide Custom certainly fits into that category. On the surface, it’s a high-performance “super Strat” with basic features that should seem familiar, but this solidbody aims to pack the features of two or more …

In deciding who to hit up to play on his new album, Unusual Suspects, Leslie West put a lot of thought into his musical and personal connections. And he’s justifiably proud of the recruits; decades-long friend Steve Lukather, Billy Gibbons, Slash, Zakk Wylde, who affectionately refers to West as “Dad,” and labelmate Joe Bonamassa, who …

BC Audio Amplifier No. 10 Mk. II Price: $2,495 (list) Contact: www.bcaudio.com Bruce Clement is known for his quality amp work, including models housed in military ammo cans. One of his 50-watt heads, the Amplifier No. 10 Mk. II, might not be quite that unique, but it sports fresh features in a crowded “boutique” market. …

The Musicvox MI-5 12-String Price: $899 Info: www.musicvox.com. Since its appearances in the Austin Powers movies, Musicvox guitars have received a cachet for cool ’60s hipness and wicked space-age designs. Their latest axe, the MI-5 12-string, continues that tradition with a double-cutaway body shape that sports an extra-long bottom horn. Let’s explore this groove machine. …

Epiphone’s 1966 SG G-400 PRO Price: $582 (list); $349 (street) Info: www.epiphone.com Gibson’s SG is a classic design with plenty of great players behind it, from Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Jerry Garcia to Tony Iommi, Angus Young, and Mick Box of Uriah Heep, to name a few. The Limited Edition 1966 SG G-400 Pro …

Few things scratch America’s cumulative itch for nostalgia like Route 66 – the famed wagon-trail-cum-highway that offered passage to those migrating west from Chicago in the mid 19th century, then later became known as Main Street America.  For decades, the road provided the means to a living for entrepreneurs who set up shop offering food, …

Looking like a Sputnik-era satellite, the Missing Link from Siegmund Guitars and Amplifiers may be the perfect way to – pardon the pun – round out a pedalboard. Encased in a very attractive polished stainless-steel half dome, the micro-tube clean-powered Missing Link is a unique effect: a transparent signal boost that does not alter the …

Breaking out of the box and kicking down barriers seems the first item on the daily to-do list for many Nobel laureates, but it’s probably fair to say only Bob Dylan was booed and jeered at as a “Judas” for plugging in an electric guitar. You can hear that infamous moment here during the Manchester …

Movies made in the 1950s and ’60s that included rock-and-roll music acts typically showed them performing in segments using their own equipment (Little Richard and others in 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It), or cast them in fictional stories in which they were usually given some inauthentic guitar (for example, Elvis in 1957’s Jailhouse Rock). …