Author Archives: Phil Feser

Since Danelectro started reissuing guitars and basses in the mid 1990s, the company has, for the most part, stuck to what it knows works; that means we’ve seen new versions of the trusty U1, U2, DC59, and the Longhorn bass to go with updated models like the U3 and Hodad. At last January’s NAMM show, [...]

The demand for vintage and retro-style axes has become so prevalent in today’s guitar-crazy culture that there’s hardly a brand, style, or color of guitar from the ’50s to the ’70s that hasn’t been resurrected in one form or another. From Danelectro to Hallmark to Univox, oddball guitars were the first instruments for many an [...]

Xaviere XV 700 Thinline. The Massachusetts-based guitarfetish.com is an instrument/parts importer that carries a complete line of goods, from pickups and vibratos to knobs and pots. Its guitar line, dubbed “Xaviere,” consists of 11 single-cutaway solidbody guitars (the XV 500/700 line) and three thinline semi-hollowbodies. The solidbodies range in price from $300 to about $1,150, [...]

Martin D-18 1937 Authentic – Solid Adirondack red spruce top, solid mahogany back and sides, solid mahogany neck, ebony fretboard, ca. 1937 abalone fret markers, 5/16″ Adirondack spruce braces, period-correct bracing placement, hide-glue construction throughout, Gotoh SD-770 nickel-finished open-back tuners. The first thing that catches your eye as you open the case of Martin’s D-18 [...]

Electro-Harmonix Nano Series LPB-1 Renowned guitar-effects builder Electro-Harmonix recently introduced a handful of its most popular pedals, along with a couple of more modern options in its new Nano Series of effects. The point of the effort is to offer the same vintage and classic E-H effects loved by so many players in boxes that [...]

Carvin CT6M In a way, it’s like those clothing catalogs that fill your mailbox (especially this time of year). It’s regular, it’s reliable. But instead of sweaters and shoes, the quarterly Carvin booklet is filled with all varieties of fun stuff. And if you’re like me, when it arrives, you immerse yourself in the guitar [...]

Eastwood’s EEB-1 and the EUB-1 Eastwood’s EEB-1 and the EUB-1 take their design inspiration from Ampeg’s quirky mid-’60s Horizontal Bass series, the brainchild of Dennis Kager, an amp technician and guitar specialist who worked for the company at the time. The Ampegs (the fretted AEB-1 and fretless AUB-1) had non-symmetrical double-cutaway laminate bodies with f-hole [...]

Teye Guitars Electric Gypsy. Netherlands-born Teye has been a professional guitarist for more than two decades, and like a lot of gigging guitarists spent his share of time searching for a guitar that could cover a variety of tones. Drawing on his experience, and time spent building and modifying guitars with his father, Teye decided [...]

Ontario-based Empress Effects’ Tremolo pedal is housed in a 45/8″ x 35/8″ x 13/8″ die-cast box and boasts a ton of features that separate it from virtually every other outboard tremolo pedal. Along with chassis-mounted 1/4″ input/output jacks and a 9-volt DC power jack (it does not operate on battery power) the unit’s layout includes [...]

Sommatone Roaring 40 There’s an inherent dichotomy when it comes to guitar amplifiers; the more TLC that goes into their construction, the tougher they are. Think about your average mass-produced amp… Then consider the Sommatone Roaring 40. Built with heaping helpings of TLC by James Somma and Dan Arango, the Roaring 40 employs a heavy-gauge [...]