The Dean Ween Group’s debut showcases all the genre-hopping shenanigans that became the stock in trade of Ween’s first band – the prolific and eponymously named indie weirdos Ween. While it’s busy serving up Dean Ween’s eclectic songwriting, The Deaner Album is also pushing his guitar chops to the fore. After all, there’s a pair …

More and more, guitar designers are digging deep, thinking out of the box, and using their imaginations to conjure hip, nontraditional designs. Strat, Tele, and Les Paul shapes are no longer the go-to templates. Among younger consumers, particularly, retailers see a move away from standard shapes to more futuristic profiles, early-’60s oddball, artsy flourishes, and …

Call it twang with attitude. Ruby Dee and the Snakehandlers’ new album, Little Black Heart, is a heady mix of rockabilly, country, swing, and jump blues – all propelled by the stellar guitar picking of Jorge Harada. The Austin-based four-piece launched in 2002, but its latest may also be their masterpiece – at least so …

“A spectacular model in real he-man outdoor Western finish with powerful appeal for Hill-billy and Cowboy bands.” This is how Gretsch first introduced the Rancher Jumbo – offspring of the 1940s Synchromatic models – in its 1955 catalog. The triangular (or “French”) sound hole has been seen on most Gretsch flat-top guitars from wartime to the …

Resonator guitars appear to inspire a particular kind of affliction among players. And it’s a difficult addiction to maintain, given the paucity of vintage National and Dobro instruments, their much-cursed playability, and their ever-climbing prices. Frank Helsley, Jr. is wise to all that. As a teen in Texas, he first heard Johnny Winter play the …

Hot dog! Gretsch has long dreamed of issuing a Cliff Gallup signature guitar, but the stars never quite aligned – until now. Gallup, of course, was the fleet-fingered guitar man who hot-rodded Vincent’s first two LPs. He added stunning intros, dazzling riffs, and virtuosic solos to cuts like “Race With The Devil,” “Crazy Legs,” and …

At the beginning of amplified music, one of the first instruments to get a magnetic pickup was the Rickenbacker “frying pan” lap steel – the first of many electrified lap steels made at one time or another by guitar companies including Gibson, Fender, and, of course, Silvertone. Attend a guitar show today, and you’re likely …

Rickenbacker guitars have a look, feel, and sound that is remarkably distinct from those made by any other manufacturers. In fact, artists often find that nothing else works as well for certain applications. While not as versatile as models made by Gibson and Fender, the sound of a Rickenbacker is so different that it’s difficult …

Among experienced (and often jaded) veteran guitar collectors, precious few things create an adrenaline rush – strange one-offs, oddball brands that never quite blossomed, guitars with non-standard parts/materials from the factory, or those once owned by an icon. Even better, those personally built by an icon. And every so often, there emerges a guitar like this – a true classic that simply …

“Hard Rock.” That’s the name used by Mississippi blues man Booker White to christen his 1933 National Duolian. And Hard Rock was a hard-traveled guitar – much like White himself. Booker Talifiero Washington White had many a nickname too, a testament to his years as a cotton picker, mule driver, hobo, Negro League shortstop/pitcher, boxer, …

Hard as it seems to imagine, there are U.K. bands of the ’60s who’ve remained obscure and unsung despite increasingly enthusiastic digging into that era. Case in point: the Creation. Contemporaries of the Who and Kinks, during their heyday of 1965-’68, the Creation shared a producer with both bands: Shel Talmy. Despite that, their greatest …

The Danelectro name first surfaced on amplifiers in the late 1940s, then later on guitars made with Masonite bodies and lipstick-tube pickups, along with electric sitars, baritone guitars, and “Longhorn” basses. In 2006, the Evets Corporation bought the name and began to offer a fetching line of retro-styled guitars and basses. Its most-recent, the Danelectro …

Since ditching his spot backing alternative-metal singer Marilyn Manson 10 years ago, superhuman guitarist John 5 has used his skills to spread the gospel of guitar far and wide while artfully dodging the pigeonhole of “rock shredder.” At just 17 years of age, John Lowery moved to Los Angeles from his Michigan home. There, he …

It’s an extraordinarily rare event to find a high-grade, historically significant mid-1800s guitar in a pawn shop, but that is indeed where this Martin was discovered. When found in Nashville in the mid 1970s, it was recognized as an exceptional instrument with ornamentation far in excess of any typical Martin of that time, but only …

In the story of the Fender amp – after the tweedy pre-Army Elvis and before the black-face Deluxe British blues invasion – there appeared the blond, as Leo Fender transitioned his line cosmetically and sonically from righteous crunch to a sophisticated high-fidelity tone suitable for Camelot after midnight – warm and aggressive but in a …

Remember your first fuzz pedal? Maybe, like a certain reviewer, you literally worked up a sweat trying to strike a deal between the body resonance of an ES-175D and the snarl of a third-hand Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone. Alas, some things are not meant to be, though the tone known as “fuzz” became a signature sound …

When he emerged in the late ’80s, rock guitarist Joe Satriani stood apart from the hair-band crowd for several reasons. Like most of his contemporaries, his style was a mix of classical and classic rock, heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Also like his peers, he was fully capable of the shred-tastic scalar …