If you’re a fan of Cream, Zeppelin, and Rory Gallagher (who isn’t?), you’ll dig Zac Schulze Gang, a British power trio that’s carrying the torch with both hands; they’ve played Clapton’s Crossroads and the Rory Gallagher Tribute Fest. Here, Zac flies solo on “High Roller,” tearin’ it up on his ’54 Guild Aristocrat M75 through…
1986 Schecter Yngwie Malmsteen For most of the 1970s I didn’t listen to or play electric guitar music of any kind, only acoustic music. I did, on occasion, read about…

Definitive Flat-tops
Martin’s pre-WWII dreadnought guitars set the standard for the modern flat-top, and thus both have been inducted into the VG Hall of Fame.

Brown Sound
Gibson landing Les Paul’s name on the headstock of its debut solidbody electric in 1952 was the biggest guitar-star endorsement of its time. And, as was the way, an amp…
Jon Butcher tales his Olympic White ’63 Strat for a rip on “Jam,” a track from his new album, “Nuthin’ but Soul.” The disc is an homage to sounds of Motown, Stax, James Brown, and Sly Stone highlighted by Butcher’s mastery of Hendrix-style psychedelia. It was recorded using a ’63 Princeton, a Vibrolux, and a…
Flame-top guitars were fairly common during the 1970s “copy era,” but few reached the levels of figure we often see on modern high-end guitars. Then came the Electra Endorser X935CS, which set new standards for psychedelic woodgrain. “But it’s not a ’70s guitar,” you object. No, but arguably, the Endorser CS – which was only…
“Hillbilly Speedball” sample Since the mid ’80s, Webb Wilder has cranked out consistently fine roots-rock. His latest is “Hillbilly Speedball,” and here he grabs his ’61 Gibson ES-330TD plugged into a narrow-panel Fender Vibrolux to play a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah.” He’s joined by George Bradfute (on a ’50s Epiphone upright) and Bob…

Special Addition
It’s routine for Vince Gill, as one of Nashville’s true connoisseurs of electric and acoustic gear, to receive tips about rare guitars for sale. In 2012, one such call shined…

The Art of Home Recording
VG will equip readers with the knowledge and skill to achieve professional-sounding home recordings. We guide you through the setup of a home studio – a starting point to this…

Blues Switch-Up in Trabants Eric Penna’s main gig is playing bass for the garage/surf band Insect Surfers, but he side-hustles playing guitar in the blues-instrumental band Trabants. After corralling bassist…

Fuzz Bonk
In 1965, fuzz was the “it” sound. Guitarists had recorded with fuzz before, of course, but after Keith Richards plugged into a Maestro Fuzz-Tone on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,”…

Big Bend
Longtime musician and professional tool-and-die maker Don Thompson recently introduced the Tremor Bender, a retrofit stringbending device for most Fender- and Gibson-style instruments. Thompson’s goal was to make a stringbender…

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…
Fresh takes on revered classics Joge Garcia’s “Still Crossing” is a collection of stellar instrumental performances of familiar tunes like “Kashmir,” “Little Wing,” and a classical spin through Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Here, though, he shows us the title track, which is the only original tune. His ’87 Fender D’Aquisto is plugged into a…
In the November issue, we started to refurbish a doubleneck mandolin/guitar I made for Jerry Schafer in 1977. It needed a new wiring harness, tuners, binding repair, new frets, and a good setup. With teammates Ceil Thompson and Gene Imbody sharing the load, we continued the work. 1) Gene – our go-to guy for tough…
When the time came for Gary Rossington’s family to decide what to do with his guitars and amps after his passing in March of 2023, daughters Mary and Annie along with his wife, Dale, looked for advice from his lifelong friend and bandmate, Rickey Medlocke. The stash was considerable – 71 guitars including his famous…
From the moment he met Rod Swenson and Wendy O. Williams, things for Wes Beech were never really “normal.” Walking into the basement of their loft for an audition, Beech didn’t know he was about to become part of a stage-storming, car-smashing, guitar-chainsawing artistic statement called the Plasmatics. The product of Swenson’s high-functioning mind (if…
Mike Semrad’s musical roots run deep in his hometown of Fremont, Nebraska – at least as far back as his great-grandmother, who sang at the city’s opera house. But his first glimpse into the true power of music happened in high school, when one night in 1962, overachieving pep-band director Bob Olson stirred things up…
1966 Heathkit TA-16 Starmaker Combo The days when a kid would break out the soldering iron and take on a serious electronics project just for fun are largely behind us. Back in the ’60s, though, that’s how many an aspiring musician acquired his own precious guitar amplifier, as was the case with this Heathkit TA-16…

When you consider their status as a last-gasp instrument made by Gibson in its waning days as a property of Norlin Industries, the ironically dubbed “Victory” series of guitars and…
Rare Miss Proves Leo Was Ahead of His Time
Fender broke new musical ground in late 1951 with the introduction of the Precision Bass. This archetype of amplified music’s bottom-end set the stage for rock and roll, and transformed…
Fiberglass. In 1961, it was a space-age material; lightweight, easy to mold, and super strong, it could be used for just about anything. Back then, neighborhood kids who liked guitars…

Preamp tubes: 56, 57 Output tubes: two 2A3 Rectifier: 5Z3 Controls: Volume Output: 6 watts RMS +/- Speaker: one 10″ Lansing Model 112 Why doesn’t this ever happen to us?…
Indiana Wright
The steel jaws of the trap had snapped shut. But events had spun so wildly out of control. And now, as Indiana Wright slipped from consciousness, he was not quite…

What good was selling a newfangled electric guitar back at the dawn of the revolution if you didn’t have an electric guitar amplifier to go along with it? Any significant…

Five Amps That Set the Tone – Or Hoped To
Groundbreaking and undeniably collectible guitar amplifiers have made frequent appearances in this space over the years, but so have prototypes, limited runs, rare, or unusual examples that hold a fascination…

Mod Squad
We celebrate devices that have altered the pitch, intensity, frequency, phase, and other characteristics in the sound, feel, and influence of our favorite heroes and songs.

Swamp Guide
Marcus King is a guitar slingin’ powerhouse barnstormer. Unlike most contemporary pop music – heavy on production, low on everything else – King’s new album, Young Blood, propels music fans…

While the most commonly played and collected Martin guitars have a six-string neck, the company has also made a number of historically noteworthy four-strings. Beginning in the 1920s and carrying…

From 1932 to 1964, independent builder John D’Angelico produced some of the finest jazz guitars. After apprenticing and working in the violin trade, D’Angelico transitioned to building archtop guitars with…

Gibson was a late entry into the flat-top guitar market, offering its first model in 1926, but Gibson was a pioneer in developing a dreadnought-sized flat-top, as illustrated by this…

Rob Harrelson’s first guitar – a Kay 1160 – entered his life as a 14th-birthday gift from his grandmother. At $25, it was the cheapest guitar at Forbes Music, in…

Rolling on a Post-Pandemic Project
Five years ago, I started making a Tele-style guitar inspired by the Gretsch Roundup. When Covid hit, I was up to my ears in repair work and lost my shop…

Full House: Transcendent Jazz Masterpiece
In the November issue, we started to refurbish a doubleneck mandolin/guitar I made for Jerry Schafer in 1977. It needed a new wiring harness, tuners, binding repair, new frets, and…

Although popular music of the 1920s featured the tenor banjo as the preferred rhythm instrument, the guitar’s popularity rose steadily through the decade, and by the ’30s, it had overtaken…

In the mid 1970s, Kosmo and Kathy Cominos collected knives, jukeboxes, wristwatches, etc… But their favorite finds were celebrity-associated musical instruments like this unique Mosrite mandolin, built for Nudie Cohn,…
Crude Beginnings
Alvino Rey and the prototype lapsteel he has kept for more than 61 years. Photos: Lynn Wheelwright Talk about skeletons in your closet!! Believe it or not, this is the…

United They Stood…. A Jersey City Tale
The history of the United Guitar Corporation, which unfolded in Jersey City, just over the river from the glitter of New York, is one of the great obscure stories in…
In June of 1984 trucks came to take most of the machines out of Gibson’s historic Kalamazoo, Michigan factory and move them down to Nashville, Tennessee. The End of an…

A maker at the forefront of the “boutique amp” movement, Matchless is known for its Class-A designs – that is, cathode-biased amps with no negative feedback, which take the Vox…