• Jon Butcher’s psychedelia mastery

    Classic Instruments

    Jon Butcher’s psychedelia mastery

    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…

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Familiar Names Create Music as J&B Brothers

Austin-Powered

The J&B Brothers make a sound equal parts Texas country, blues, folkie, rock, jazz, and soul – the spices that make music from the region so damn tasty. They’re also…

Mark Erlewine’s 40 Years with Willie Nelson’s Trigger

Wooden Wonder

For a decade, Willie Nelson chased fame as a performer in the Nashville mold of the ’60s – hair coifed, striding to center stage at the Grand Ole Opry in…

Hanburt Electric Guitars

Rarities From the Pacific Northwest

As a brand of American electric instruments, the name “Hanburt” is about the furthest thing from being a household term. Nevertheless, the recently documented saga behind this obscure line of…

Danelectro Viscount

1961 Danelectro Viscount Preamp tubes: two 12AX7, one 6AU6 Output tubes: two 6V6GT Rectifier: 6X5 Controls: Volume, Tone, Vibrato Strength, Vibrato Speed Output: 12 watts RMS Amp nuts of yesteryear…

Valco ‘Thunder stick’

Put your gut money on a dark horse every so often, and you might find the rest of the regurgitating bandwagon world awash in your taillights. Every sublime guitar collection…

Maestro GA-45T

AMP-O-RAMA

Until just a couple years ago, Fender really was the only major name in collectible vintage American-made tube guitar amplifiers. Sure, Magnatone, Standel, Danelectro/Silvertone, Supro and the other Valco-made amps…

Pieces of a Prototype

Secrets of a Socal "Parts" Guitar

  If you were a guitar – particularly one with a natural or translucent finish – your “fingerprint” would be the grain of the wood used to make your body. …

Supro Thunderbolt

Supro Thunderbolt

Designed “…exclusively for the electric Bass guitar,” it was simplicity itself, with no “fancy extra circuits.” But much like with Fender’s Bassman, guitarists had other ideas!

Hangin’ with Kid and Lisa “Little Baby” Andersen

Smooth, Funky Blues With Soul Kid Andersen worked with Charlie Musselwhite and Elvin Bishop before scoring his current gig with Rick Estrin & the Nightcats. One of the best blues…

Quest for Volume

Django Reinhardt's Selmer #503

Revolutionary jazz demanded a revolutionary jazz guitar. In the summer of 1935, just as his Quintette du Hot Club de France was starting to make waves, Django first began using…

A Hero’s Gretsch 6117

In the 1960s, the astronauts were bigger cultural icons than the Beatles. And no, that’s not the Colorado-based surf band that hit with songs like “Baja.” We’re talking real astronauts,…

The Komet Constellation

Amid the general run of vintage amps we have explored in this space, the occasional “modern classic” has proved itself worthy through sheer quality of design, uniqueness of tone and/or…

Ampeg Dan Armstrong Bass

1969 Revisited and Improved

I remember the first time I saw a ‘1969 Dan Armstrong lucite bass. I was in awe of the materials and its cool shape and sound. Over the years I…

SCOTTY MOORE's GIBSON ES-295 Vinatge guitar Magazine

Scotty Moore’s Gibson ES-295

First Guitar of Rock and Roll

Like a hound dog hit by lightning, the first notes of rock and roll blasted out of radios across the country in July of 1954, courtesy of Elvis Presley’s supercharged-hillbilly…

Fender’s Mid-’50s Precision Bass

The "In-Between" Version

In the world of electric basses, the 1952 Fender Precision is the one that started it all. While it’s true that Gibson, Rickenbacker, and Audiovox all built electric basses some…

Classics: Harold “Sonny” Wright’s 1965 Gibson J-45

Growing up 10 miles from Earl Scruggs’ birthplace in North Carolina with a music-loving father and two older sisters who could impress on the piano, it makes sense that Harold…

Schecter Yngwie Malmsteen

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…

GIBSON F-7 1934

1934 Gibson F-7

Prior to Gibson’s innovations, mandolins were bowl-back instruments with a lute-like back usually constructed with rosewood or maple back ribs and a bent spruce top with an oval sound hole.…

1962 Premier E-727

One of the least un-derstood aspects of American guitar history is the role of musical instrument distributors. It’s one thing to be able to manufacture guitars, but quite another to…

The Martin 3K

The continuing appeal of Hawaiian music through the past 100 years is based in part on the music itself, which evokes exotic images of life on a Pacific island, and…

Dickerson Melody King

Few who love vintage amps can resist its art-deco appeal, let alone its luscious hand-wiring and edgy, touch-sensitive 6V6 tone. A tweed Champ doesn’t stand a chance in a cage…

National Style O

Industrial Art

National. The name is patriotic! And what else but American inventiveness could have brought about a metal-bodied guitar? The answer lies in the state of the guitar as a musical…

Universal Audio’s OX Amp Top Box

The Tube Abides

Since the mid ’60s, electrical engineers have been trying to drive a stake into the heart of the vacuum tube, first with transistors, then with zeros and ones. Yet the…

Star Board: Carl Verheyen

In each issue of “Signal Chain,” we’ll take a guided tour of pro players’ pedalboards. We’re calling the feature “Star Board,” and we kick it off in this issue with…

Matching Mojo

During the “guitar boom” of the 1960s, one method of getting a band noticed was to equip it with matching instruments and maybe matching amplifiers. Better still, add matching stage…

Gibson Humbucker

Crunchy, Clean Dirt

Gibson and Fender may be the longstanding heavyweight rivals of the electric guitar game, but they have one very important thing in common: they revolutionized the guitar industry. Fender took…

Star Stomps

Famous Sounds Abound in New Book

Stompboxes inspire their own special mania. While the allure of guitars is obvious with their colorful, curvaceous looks, effects are (usually) basic boxes covered in a toad’s load of warty…

Vox AC-30

The First AC-30?

Introduction That the Vox AC-30 Twin is a great-sounding amplifier goes without saying, since it spent the past 40 years creating music for countless artists of varying stature and styles.…

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…

Park 45

Masked Marshall

When is a Marshall not a Marshall? When it’s a Park, of course! Though it might not scream “classic rock tone” for the guitarist masses, in the eyes and ears…