Category Archives: Newswire

Ian Siegal has an unprecedented five nominations in the 2013 British Blues Awards, announced earlier this week. Siegal is nominated for Male Vocalist, Band, Acoustic Artist, Album, and Song. This is the first time one act has received five nominations, and it caps a year in which Siegal gained a second nomination in the American [...]

Carl Verheyen has teamed with LsL Instruments to create the CV Studio guitar. It has a lightweight alder body, 9.5”-radius rosewood fingerboard with LsL’s Lowered Apex edge, and a hand-carved C-shaped neck based on Verheyen’s personal ’61 Fender Stratocaster. It’s strung with DMS Balanced Bridge strings and uses with the company’s Carl-Verheyen-designed floating bridge setup, [...]

European Musical Imports has added the Virtuoso Phase Shifter to its Heptode line of guitar effects. A re-creation of the ’70s Maestro PS-1A Phase Shifter, its footswitches are accompanied by LED to indicate the unit’s phase speed. The effect ramps up or down when changing from one speed to another and like the original, works [...]

Jeff Hanneman, a founding member and co-guitarist in Slayer, died May 2 at a hospital in California. He was 49 and suffered liver failure. Hanneman was born in Oakland in 1964, and grew up in Long Beach. As a teen, he was influenced by punk music and later adapted the genre’s sound and aggressive style in [...]

Fender has announced that “pickup artist” Abigail Ybarra, one of its most revered employees, is retiring after more than 50 years with the company. Ybarra came to Fender in 1956 and in ’58 began winding and building pickups. Her hand-wound creations have been installed on the company most popular instruments since the late ’50s and were [...]

Electra Guitars is celebrating its comeback with the the new Omega, a single-cutaway solidbody. It boasts the iconic Electra Guitar “Wave” headstock and has a mahogany body with sculpted heel, and a belly cut. Its C-shaped neck sports has an ebony fretboard with jumbo nickel/silver frets, mother-of-pearl block inlays, and a GraphTech Tusq nut. Hardware [...]

The hand-wired/hand-built Majik Box Filthy Lucre distortion pedals offers distortion tones the company says are inspired by the modification work of amp mod gurus from the 1970s and early ’80s. It is designed to be used in front of the clean setting of any amp, where the company says it will produce articulate, modified-amp distortion [...]

Mike Powers, a veteran designer for Peavey stringed instruments, passed away April 29. A longtime Peavey employee, he was involved in the creation of the T-20 bass. He spent several years in China, setting up Peavey’s manufacturing system in that country. Powers was profiled in VG’s December ’11 issue.

Jon Kammerer’s Pegasus series guitars have an elongated sound hole that isolates the top plate of the instrument and does not bind it to the edges of the guitar. The builder says this allows it to freely resonate while stopping the bellows action that causes feedback, especially in lower frequencies. It also better transfers sound [...]

Warner Brothers Records is set to release a CD boxed set that includes the original mixes for the band’s first 10 albums. ZZ Top: The Complete Studio Albums (1970-1990) will be available on June 10. The set includes the albums initially released on the London label, and each album is presented in a wallet sleeve [...]