Author Archives: Phil Feser

Maryland-based amplifier builder Vintage Vacuum Tube Amplifiers (you may know it as VVT) recently fielded a request from renowned pickup winder Lindy Fralin. He wasn’t looking for advice on wire or how hot to wind a pickup for best interaction with a particular VVT; rather, Fralin wanted an amp built to his specs and taste. [...]

Eastwood Joey Leone signature RBC If you’ve paid attention to these pages in recent years, you’re familiar with Mike Robinson’s Eastwood retro-styled electric guitars, which, along with the company’s proprietary instruments, have become ever-more popular with professional players (and collectors), not only because they’re cool and funky, but well-made and reasonably priced. The Canadian shop’s [...]

Visual Sound founder and president Bob Weil and chief engineer R.G. Keen have given their flagship combo pedals a face lift and introduced a new line of single pedals. These new V2 series effects are built on heavy duty die-cast aluminum chassis, replacing the steel housings on the old line, their in/out/power jacks are still [...]

Kustom ’36 Coupe In the mid 1960s, Kustom amps were popular for their cool tuck-and-roll vinyl covering, and their solid tones. Today, most of the company’s new amplifiers are solidstate and devoid of tuck and roll covering. The exception is its line of tube combos, the ’36 Coupe and the ’72 Coupe, with all-tube circuits [...]

Gomez Amplificiation “G” Reverb As amp builders go, Dario G. Gomez is about as fresh as they come. Though he has been repairing tube amps for many years, he started offering his own amp designs only about a year ago. His is a modest one-man shop, and though he has yet to build amp #100, [...]

Seymour Duncan’s new P-Rails pickup is a P-90 with a slim rail-style coil tucked in next to it, designed to fit into a standard humbucker ring. Coupled with a standard three-way mini on/off toggle switch, the P-Rails are designed to produce tones including traditional P-90, rail, single-coil, or humbucker – all in a single pickup. [...]

PRS 513. The latest addition to the model line at PRS Guitars is the discretely-named 513, an axe that carries all the family traits, like a carved figured-maple top, double-cutaway mahogany body, set mahogany neck, 10″-radius fretboard, vibrato, and low-mass locking tuners. In fact, at first glance the 513 could be mistaken for a Custom [...]

Martin D-18 1937 Authentic The first thing that catches your eye as you open the case of Martin’s D-18 1937 Authentic is the guitar’s unmistakable vintage vibe. Whether you’re drawn to the nickel-finished open-back Gotoh tuners, the tinted Adirondack red spruce top, or the cellulose tortoiseshell pickguard, you kind of feel like you just discovered [...]

Legendary pedal builder MXR/Dunlop recently introduced a sweet trio of effects; something new from its Custom Shop in the form of the Carbon Copy analog delay, something old in the form of a nuts-on reissue of the ’74 script-logo Phase 90, and something with a legendary-artist twist in the form of the Buddy Guy signature [...]

If you were at the 1969 NAMM show in Chicago, perhaps you saw what was most regarded as that year’s show-stopping piece of gear – the Ampeg Dan Armstrong “see-through” guitar. While “see-through” guitars have never been commonplace, today they are offered by several manufacturers, including BC Rich, Dillon, and Ampeg. But when they were [...]