• Zac Schulze gets straight to it!

    Classic Instruments

    Zac Schulze gets straight to it!

    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…

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Gibson’s Crest Models

Gibson has produced two guitars bearing the “Crest” name. While both designs date to the 1960s, they’re very different instruments. The first incarnation was a single-cutaway with design ties to…

Kid Ramos’ Revelation!

West Coast legend melds blues with gospel Check out Kid Ramos using a ’56 Harmony H62 running through a vintage Fender reverb tank and a Pro Junior to play an…

The Voxmobile

Too Fast to Live, Too Cool to Die

Free love, slick guitars, hot cars! Few pieces of late-’60s pop culture were anywhere near as hip and groovy as this marketing stroke of genius.

The Fender “Korinacaster”

Double-Cut Kuriosity

There’s irony in the fact that Leo Fender, creator of the first solidbody electric guitar to be mass-produced, wasn’t the adventurous sort. Rather, history tells us he was a pragmatic,…

Roger Mayer

Straight-shooting Effects Builder to the Stars

In the early 1960s, a young Research Laboratory engineer named Roger Mayer filled his “spare time” hanging out with a jaw-dropping collection of up-and-comers on the fledgling London blues-rock scene,…

KayKraft Style A

Almost any guitar can be viewed in terms of a confluence of influences that produced it, from the company history to the history of guitar evolution to the kind of…

Manuel Ram

Classic Fakery: Manuel Ram

Audiovox and Serenader Amps

An Interview with Bud Tutmarc

We dedicate this month’s column to the “legendary” Seattle line. Having never had the opportunity to play through one or take one apart, we’ll have to let catalog descriptions suffice…

Ray Cummins – I’ll See You In My Dreams

Ray Cummins Plays the 1956 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 prototype “Dark Eyes” VG ace online tutor Ray Cummins uses the famed ’56 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 prototype to play “I’ll…

1000 Years of the Guitar Part 2

History of the Guitar

A hand-colored postcard photo of a woman in a Spanish costume, ca. 1910. Well, we’re on the cusp of the new Millennium. Excited? Last month we began our look at…

Epiphone by Gibson Firebird 500

Race on

Gibson will forever be celebrated for its heritage of innovation, including guitars that didn’t look like the common perception of guitars. And for all the influence some of its unusual…

Gibson Mastertone GB-3

While five-string banjos are far more popular today than any other style, during the height of the Dixieland Era of the 1920s, when Gibson introduced its famous Mastertone banjos, four-string…

Stella Concert

Circa 1932 Stella Concert. Photo: Michael Wright. Had blues legend Huddie William Ledbetter (a.k.a. Leadbelly) not played a Stella 12-string, the brand might only have been remembered as the name…

Parsons-White String Bender

On September 20, 1983, Jimmy Page re-emerged into the public eye after the death of John Bonham and the breakup of Led Zeppelin with a thundering ovation at the Royal…

David Hidalgo Plays Joe Walsh’s ’59 Les Paul

 David Hidalgo Plays Joe Walsh’s ’59 Les Paul The video that helped convince Joe Walsh to reunite with his (now favorite!) ’59 Gibson Les Paul. Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo…

The Marshall Major

Force Commander

Any player who shows up these days with a 200-watt guitar amp will elicit a hearty, “Are you out of your mind?” But when the Marshall Major came along 50…

Carvin DN640K

Doubleneck instruments have always been a unique niche in the guitar market, for good reason. They’ve also carried an air of superiority or the insinuation that they were intended for…

Fender’s 1957 Precision Bass

Fender’s 1957 Precision Bass

When an instrument maintains the same basic design and profile for more than a half-century, it’s safe to say that in terms of design and execution, it was “done right.”…

Ibanez Destroyer II

1985 Ibanez Destroyer II DT-250. Photo: Michael Wright. Back in 1958, when Gibson unleashed its now legendary trio – the Explorer, Flying V, and Moderne – its designers probably had…

The G&L El Toro

At the beginning of 1983, Leo Fender was just more than three years into his last guitar-manufacturing venture when he decided to diversify the company’s bass lineup. Until that point,…

National Res-O-Glas

Map-Shaped Mayhem

Anyone who thinks ’60s Valco/National Res-O-Glas electrics look weird now ought to reflect on what the reaction might have been back then. The bodies of this bizarre lineup were molded…

The Gibson EB-3

When it came to electric basses, Michigan-based Gibson spent the ’50s playing follow the leader to California’s Fender. So it’s a touch ironic that while Fender made only one model…

Steve Evans’ Guitars & Cars Passion Project

Pretty Pairs

Steve Evans was just 12 years old in 1968, when he began to appreciate the sleek bodies of electric guitars in the brochures he collected through the mail – gazing…

Gibson Mark 53

1978 Gibson Mark 53. Photo: Michael Wright. Part of the fallout from the guitar boom of the 1960s was an increased academic interest in guitars that manifested itself in the…

The (Way) Back Beat: A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody

Fretted cheesecake advertising through the years, Part 3: The 1960s

Fretted-instrument advertising in the 20th century relied heavily on “glamor” or “cheesecake.” Electric instruments and accessories, in particular, are still marketed to a primarily male audience, and with that testosterone…

1952 Bigsby Doubleneck

Few instruments combine excellent craftsmanship, historical significance in the development and evolution of the guitar, and memorabilia appeal as much as this Bigsby guitar, custom made in 1952 for the…

Last ’Burst?

Single-Cut Saga From the End of an Era

Certain instruments are nearly as famous as the heroes who play them – we know them as Blackie, Lucille, Greeny, Number One. And don’t forget E.C.’s colorful Crash Strats. But…

The Gittler Guitar

A Talk With Builder Avraham Bar Rashi

One of the most intriguing instruments to appear on the amplified-music landscape was the starkly-minimalist Gittler. An electric guitar constructed with as few parts as needed to render it fully…

National-Dobro Model C

We’ve seen some pristine vintage pieces in these pages over the years, but as far as time-capsule amps go, when you consider age-to-condition ratio, this National-Dobro Model C might very…

Christopher Thorn

Alt-Rocker/Studio Guru

Best known as half of the guitar tandem in the ’90s alternative-rock band Blind Melon (that’s his rhythm on “No Rain,” using his Gibson J-30), Christopher Thorn has since recorded…