General Interest

Floyd Rose has introduced a Limited Edition Laser-Etched Paisley USA Series Original Tremolo, an exclusive release that adorns the iconic double-locking tremolo with an eye-catching, timeless design.

Each limited edition Paisley Tremolo begins as a genuine chrome USA Series Original before receiving a precision laser-etched paisley pattern across the hardened steel base plate, saddles, and fine tuners. The result is a strikingly unique interpretation of the classic Floyd Rose look, combining vintage-inspired style with modern manufacturing precision.

More than just a finish, the etching creates a subtle, understated look that catches the light from every angle while revealing incredible detail. Inspired by the classic paisley motifs that have graced iconic guitars for decades, it brings a fresh take to the legendary Floyd Rose Original.

Each unit is built with precision machining and premium materials, so the Etched Paisley Original Tremolo delivers the tuning stability and professional performance musicians expect from a genuine Floyd Rose.

With only 50 pieces available worldwide, the Limited Edition Paisley USA Series Original Tremolo carries a $355 street price. For more information visit FloydRose.com.

In a newly unearthed interview given in 1987, Slash comments on how Guns N’ Roses were outsiders to the LA scene during the early days.

Slash and Izzy Stradlin were being interviewed about the band’s at-the-time upcoming tour with Mötley Crüe. The interviewer asked the pair: “Do you feel that you actually fit in to the Los Angeles scene and are you happy out there?”

Slash replies: “Not anymore. We didn’t fit in when the band first started. We didn’t fit in ever. It was always like, there was LA and then there were the five of us crawling around in the dark. In Los Angeles, Los Angeles is like one of those places that like any other big city but even more so. It’s real trendy and it goes through fads and it goes through other stuff.”

• READ MORE: “It scared the s**t out of you”: Pepper Keenan explains what happened when he played through AC/DC’s “insane” guitar rig
  

The legendary guitarist also adds that they managed to stand out because they did not give into expectations of fad and trend. “And so it was always real hard to say ‘We’re an LA band’ because LA bands always meant this one little band for one particular time that everyone was into because it was a particular fad,” he says.

“We were never like that. We were just us and we really stuck out compared to everything else. I’m really surprised we went to become as big as we did but it’s just because we were really real and people pick up on that no matter how goofy they are.”

He adds that the Axl Rose-fronted group had set a precedent for other bands to “give it a shot and to really go for it. Because maybe at a particular time it wasn’t happening.”

Stradlin adds that music had gotten “into more of a groove” and at one time it was “just a lot of noise going on. It’s 12 million people and 6 million are musicians, it’s every type of music you can imagine.”

The post “We were just us and and we really stuck out”: Lost Slash interview shows how Guns N’ Roses were always outsiders in the LA scene appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Pepper Keenan had the chance to play out of one of the most legendary guitar rigs in the game thanks to a former guitar tech.

The Corrosion of Conformity member says he played through AC/DC legend Malcolm Young’s guitar rig, courtesy of his former guitar tech.

• READ MORE: Joe Bonamassa calls out the guitar community’s “armchair quarterbacks”
  

Keenan tells Chris Garza on the Garza Podcast: “My old guitar tech, Takumi, he worked for White Zombie and then he jumped to COC [Corrosion of Conformity] when COC had the Metallica tour and for all those years needed a real guitar tech.

“Takumi was great, we were on tour with Metallica doing the big, giant shows. Me and Takumi were so tight we roomed together on tour… We were just super buddies and stuff.

“One day he came to me on the Metallica/COC tour and said, ‘Pepper, I’ve been offered another gig.’ I was like, we’re on tour with Metallica. Who could it possibly be? He said ‘Prince.’”

While Keenan understood the offer and Takumi later worked with Prince “for years”, his former touring bunk buddy did later get him the chance to use the Malcolm Young’s AC/DC rig.

Keenan explains: “He did that and then he ended up working for AC/DC. He called me up and I went to a show. Down actually played with AC/DC in Transylvania, but yes, I got to play Malcolm’s rig.

“It’s Marshall’s improper bias that is microphonic, like hot, insane, and they’re all on. It scared the shit out of me. It’s just volume. No overdrive. Just volume. He has no pedals.

“He’s got this big rack for guitars and there’s two of them in there. There’s a glitter one, and then there’s The Beast.”

The post “It scared the s**t out of you”: Pepper Keenan explains what happened when he played through AC/DC’s “insane” guitar rig appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

If you’ve ever pondered trying out PRS’ take on a T-style guitar, then look no further than Sweetwater – right now, you can save $70 the PRS SE NF 53.

Now priced at $979, this quirky model is quite the investment. It has a unique White Doghair finish (visible wood grain), and comes fitted with PRS’ Narrowfield DD pickups, capturing the peak characteristics of a humbucker, a P-90, a traditional single-coil, and a mini humbucker, merging them into a distinctive voice of its own.

• READ MORE: Collectors alert: the stunning Birds of a Feather inlay was previously only available on PRS Private Stock guitars – now you can get it on a Custom 24

The launch of this SE version followed on from the release of the standard NF 53 and its Kennedy signature sibling back in 2023. PRS later revealed that the guitars were the brand’s top two best-selling USA guitars in that same year. We reviewed this SE version of the guitar last year, and noted that despite it being seen as a “T-type” guitar, it is entirely its own thing.

Guitar.com writer Eric Dahl said, “These Deep Dish pickups have a sound that’s very much their own, but that’s no bad thing at all – if pushed I’d say they sit somewhere between P-90s and mini-humbuckers. In practice, it gives you a very full tonality played cleanly, but adding some gain is where this guitar really comes into its own.”

Aside from its unusual looks and peculiar pickups, other key features of the guitar include a swamp ash body, a maple neck and fingerboard, and an NF 53-profile neck for speed and control. Its sculpted contouring allows for access to all 22 frets across its 10” radius fingerboard.

In other PRS news, the company appointed a CEO for the first time in its history just last month: Jack Higginbotham, formerly the guitar giant’s Chief Operating Officer. Higginbotham will oversee day-to-day business operations while its founder and Managing General Partner, Paul Reed Smith, continues to lead guitar development.

To check out this deal and more, head over to Sweetwater.

The post We said this guitar might be the best PRS SE model yet – now it’s discounted at Sweetwater appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Joe Bonamassa has criticised “armchair quarterbacks” for damaging guitar culture.

The blues hero believes those most critical of guitar players ought to pick up an instrument and play rather than put down those who are hard at work.

• READ MORE: “It’s basically a Gibson Les Paul jammed into a Fender Telecaster”: This is one of Joe Bonamassa’s favourite vintage guitars – and why hybrids can be “the best”
  

In a recent interview with Guitar Interactive Magazine [via Guitar World], he explains: “In the US, we have this term called ‘armchair quarterback’, right? I could sit in my chair and say to Tom Brady, ‘I could have thrown that ball better than you.’ No, you can’t.”

Bonamassa, a blues veteran who has opened on numerous occasions for BB King, says there needs to be more empathy – not judgement – when it comes to live performers. He points to a viral incident from the ACM Country Awards in 2016, in which Nick Jonas messed up a guitar solo, only for it to be immortalised on camera. The incident was so traumatic for Jonas that it sent him to therapy.

“That one that caused this guy to go into therapy,” says 49-year-old guitarist Joe Bonamassa. “We’ve all done that. Everybody’s done that.

“You know, like, ‘I didn’t even know what I was thinking!’ But the vitriol. What do you want him to do? Burn his guitar in effigy? Like, jump off a cliff? The guy had to go to therapy! What’s wrong with people?”

“Kenny Wayne Shepherd and I have been on stage a lot together, the last five, six years. It’s not a competition. We don’t look at it like that,” he continues. “Warren Haynes and I, we’re on stage a lot. We’re having fun.

“But what do they expect? A trophy at the end? A cash prize? A judge that goes, ‘I declare the winner!’ like a fucking boxing match.”

Bonamassa is set to tour across North America and Europe this year, with dates scheduled for Radio City Music Hall in New York City on October 1, and at the Uber Arena in Berlin, Germany, on October 30.  He will return to Germany next year for the Tollwood Summer Festival in July.

See his official website for a full list of upcoming dates.

The post Joe Bonamassa calls out the guitar community’s “armchair quarterbacks” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

When Fender launched the Twin Reverb in 1963, the music world was blessed with a high-powered, reverb and vibrato-equipped tube amplifier that would become a staple for performing bands. The tweed Twin amps of the decade prior featured totally different circuitry, with lower output power and more grit than we hear from the crystal-clear Twin Reverbs of the ’60s and ’70s. After 1963, spotting a Fender Twin Reverb in a band’s backline became commonplace.

On the bench today we have a 1965 Fender Twin Reverb. The amp was brought to me by a client who described this one as his “daily driver.” This is the case for many musicians who don’t mind lugging around the 65-pound combo. The Twin Reverb’s power and clarity makes it a perfect pedal platform, and its durability makes it the perfect workhorse amplifier.

The main complaint was noise issues, including very scratchy controls. Once I removed the chassis, I was thrilled to see that the amp was almost totally original! The fact that this amp has been heavily used with its 60-year-old parts is a testament to the quality of the components and the circuit design. The filter capacitors were beginning to bulge and leak, so the owner and I decided it was time to give the amp a solid refurbishing to promote stability for future decades of use.

Each technician has their own method of refurbishing a Fender amplifier. Determining how far to go with a restoration is a delicate dance between reliability and originality. I want to repair the issues at hand, while also addressing the parts of the circuit that are prone to issues. In many cases, the bulk of the restoration focuses on the power supply and power amplifier. These sections of the circuit are handling a lot of power and high voltages, and over time they just wear out. Oftentimes, the tone-shaping components in the preamp are able to stay original.

Once I replaced the filter capacitors with high quality F&Ts, I moved on to the cathode bypass capacitors. These caps were also beginning to show signs of weakness, and I typically find myself replacing these in most of my Fender restorations. The last capacitor that I like to replace is the bias capacitor, which is in charge of filtering the negative bias voltage for the output tubes.

In most amps and many other consumer electronics made before the ’70s, the resistors used are called carbon composition resistors. These are small brown resistors that are made out of finely ground carbon, and mixed with a non-conductive binder. When serving as a preamp plate resistor, these small components have an important job. The plate resistors are connected to the power supply, and feed high voltage to the preamp tube plates. Once the signal is amplified through the preamp tube, that signal exits the tube through the tube’s plate and onto the rest of the circuit. In short, these preamp plate resistors see both high voltage DC and the AC guitar signal. Over time, it is common for the internals of the resistor to break down, which can impart some very noticeable popping and crackling into the signal path.

The last step is to address the vibrato effect. The funny thing is, Fender used the term vibrato but the effect is actually tremolo. In my initial testing of the amp, I noticed that while the effect was functioning, it was a bit weak overall. This is typically due to the oscillator capacitors drifting from spec over time, which can weaken the depth of the volume fluctuation. In this case, replacing the three oscillator capacitors helped get that “vibrato” stronger.

After a deep cleaning of all the pots, jacks, and tube sockets, I ran the amp to listen for any other miscellaneous issues. Many of the tubes in this amp are a variety of vintage tubes, and they passed testing with no noise, excessive microphonics, or overheating issues. Modern tubes are great, and we’re so lucky to have access to them. But I’m always excited to be able to leave in the old tubes, as the quality of manufacturing from decades prior and the mystical “mojo” of the old glass bottles tends to be desired.

The last step in a large refurbish job like this is to play through the amp for a while. I will wiggle the reverb RCA cables to make sure there is no cut-out, test the footswitch, and poke around to make sure I didn’t miss any poor connections or weakened solder points. The Twin Reverb truly lives up to its reputation. It is loud and proud, full-bodied and crystal clear.

£179, buzzingbugsfx.com

If you name a fuzz pedal after an evil scary giant, it’d better be pretty frickin’ fearsome. To that end, the Buzzing Bugs Bolster has been designed with a scorching high-gain circuit on one side… and an even more scorching one on the other.

• READ MORE: Teaching Machines FuzzBillion review: is this the most ambitious and unique dirt pedal ever made?

The giant in question is a figure of Cornish legend – and that’s no coincidence, because the UK’s southernmost county is where this smart-looking pedal is made. But while the original Bolster apparently terrorised villages, ate children and was very inconsiderate to his wife, this one only wants to spook your eardrums.

Image: Richard Purvis

What is it?

I spent a good half-hour noodling away with the Bolster before I realised something quite important: the ‘more’ side isn’t just an extra dose of gain to add to the main business on the right, but a whole separate fuzz circuit in itself. So this is a classic double stomper, offering instant access to two individual sounds plus an apocalyptic ‘both’ option.

The right-hand fuzz is a silicon transistor type, with controls for gain, tone, output level, volts (for bias-tampering effects) and shift (for thinning out the bass at the input stage). The left channel skips all of that and keeps things simple with a single level knob for its extra-feisty op-amp fuzz. This could get brutal.

Image: Richard Purvis

Sounds

“Could get brutal”? It starts brutal! The right-hand channel is up first, and it’s a blast. Keep the volts knob set at noon for normal biasing, and what comes out is the very nicest kind of thick, smooth, aggressive fuzz, with a good balance between body and clarity.

If you want to change that balance, you have two options. Turning down the shift knob brings a leaner, more focused sound – a great match for humbuckers that are at risk of succumbing to flub – while the standard tone control turns out to be… well, not exactly standard. Crank it up and, rather than opening up the very highest frequencies, it gives a boost in the bitey upper-mids zone. Neither of these knobs will dramatically transform the tone of the Bolster, but between the two of them you’ve got an awful lot of tweaking power.

The one-knob fuzz isn’t entirely different in character but feels more open, with a distinctly mids-scooped voicing. On its own it sounds properly gigantic… and when you use both sides together, it somehow gets even bigger in a way that can make it difficult to persuade yourself to stop playing.

What’s really cool about ‘both on’ mode, though, is what it does to the volts knob. Without the left circuit engaged, pushing this in either direction brings familiar results: things become increasingly jerky and spluttery as the signal-killing gate effect gets more and more strict. But with both LEDs ablaze you get a softer, more forgiving kind of gating on the clockwise half of the dial – and, at maximum, a pinched buzzing effect that’s somewhere between a Zvex Fuzz Factory in velcro mode and an analogue synth. It’s fiendishly cool, and Bolster the Cornish giant would surely approve.

Image: Richard Purvis

Should I buy one?

There’s no such thing as a single fuzz pedal that can do it all, but if I had to pick one for an open-ended residency on a desert island then the Buzzing Bugs Bolster might well be it.

As a single pedal, the right half is superb – a classic high-gain dirt machine with elements of Big Muff, Tone Bender and Fuzz Face. When you then add in the smart tone controls and the biasing tricks, and pair all of that with a second circuit that’s even more potent, it becomes something really quite special.

Image: Richard Purvis

Alternatives

Not many people would be daft enough to put two separate high-gain fuzzes in one box, but there are plenty of one-channel options with a second footswitch that unlocks an extra level of rage. These include the Great Eastern FX Co. Focus Fuzz Deluxe (£299/$349), the Silktone Fuzz+ ($269/£279) and the ThorpyFX Field Marshal (£219/$269).

The post Buzzing Bugs Bolster review – is this the ultimate dual fuzz pedal? appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Steadfast Designs has launched the Steadfast Stopbar™, a patented aluminum tailpiece that aims to eliminate string-change stress and keep guitars in tune longer. Designed for any guitar with a traditional Tune-O-Matic/stopbar setup, it reimagines the conventional stringing process by anchoring the ball-ends at the tuner and locking the free ends at the tailpiece with precision set screws.

The goal: faster string changes, improved tuning stability, and better tone from a stronger, lighter material than most factory-equipped stopbars. It's intended for gigging musicians, studio guitarists, guitar techs, and anyone who would like fast and easy string changes with better tuning stability and tone so they can get back to playing sooner and sound better too.

Key features of the Steadfast Stopbar™ include:

• Patented string-locking design aims to remove stress and cut restringing time by up to 75%.
• Innovative double-locking arrangement: created by precision set screws (at the tailpiece) and the string’s ball-ends (at the tuning post). Your guitar’s tuning stays put better than ever.
• CNC-machined in the USA from billet 6061 aluminum: stronger, lighter, and more resonant than the material used in most stock stopbars, with better sustain and clarity.
• Drop-in replacement is fully compatible with US and metric spacing. No drilling, no permanent modifications, zero impact to resale value – and easy upgrade to install.
• Available finishes: Nickel Plated, real 24K Gold Plated, black anodized, and silver anodized.

See the Steadfast Stopbar™ in action: https://www.youtube.com/@SteadfastDesigns

The Foundation Series is available now in five configurations: Faded ($99), Studio ($104), Pro ($109), Standard ($129), and Custom 24K Gold-Plated ($169). For more information on Steadfast Stopbars™ visit www.steadfaststopbar.com.

The chameleonic Connecticut-based band Goose have covered a lot of musical ground during their career, offering a little bit of something for just about everyone. Starting out as a self-described “indie-groove” outfit, they were quickly adopted by the jam-band community thanks to the group’s enthusiastic embrace of improvisation, and utter disregard for musical boundaries. Goose’s collision of genres—both onstage and over the course of five studio albums—has smashed together folk, jazz, funk, R&B, pop, progressive, and psychedelic rock. Thus far, they have yet to fold Swedish death metal into the mix, but give them time and they surely will.

Fans can personalize and interpret a band in a multitude of ways, but what does founding guitarist, singer, and primary songwriter Rick Mitarotonda want listeners to appreciate about Goose?

“I don’t think I have any ideas of what I want people to understand about the band,” he says. “For us, I think the goal is to just follow our instincts and creativity and be authentic to ourselves. And continue to uncover and unravel what that is and what that could be.”

He lets that sink in, then continues, “Everyone’s got their own prism through which they see the world and how they relate to things, and there’s no way to know or understand or try to intellectualize what people seem to be thinking about us or what they think of what we do or anything like that. It’s unknowable. It’s not up to us what people make of what we do. It’s just up to us to try to do the best we can with what we have.”

For the group’s growing and fiercely loyal legion of devotees—an audience now large enough to fill amphitheaters, pavilions, and arenas—Goose are doing just fine with what they’ve got. The band’s three-hour-plus shows are fast becoming the stuff of legend for their “anything goes” ethos in the grand tradition of premier jam bands both past and present.

​Rick Mitarotonda’s Gear

Guitar

• Greg DeLuis Empress custom model

Amps

• 1960s Fender Deluxe
• Vintage Marshall combo

Effects

• Ibanez Tube Screamer
• MXR Carbon Copy
• Strymon El Capistan Tape Delay
• Strymon Deco Tape Saturation & Doubletracker

Strings, Picks, & Cables

• D’Addario NYXL strings (.010 –.046)
• Dawg David Grisman mandolin pick
• Mogami cables

These aren’t just concerts; they’re more like communal experiences. And the group’s marathon improvs, led by Mitarotonda’s breakneck virtuosity, aren’t self-indulgent, murky ragmops. Each extended interlude is packed with fun, discovery, and a bit of high-wire danger, and carries a sharp emotional breakthrough. There isn’t anything calculated or predictable about Goose (the lineup also features guitarist-keyboardist Peter Anspach, bassist Trevor Weekz, and drummer Cotter Ellis); everything they do feels spontaneous and alive. Nowhere is this more evident than in their playful and promiscuous choice of covers, which can sashay from Laura Branigan to Bob Seger one night, Steppenwolf to A-ha the next.

How a band navigates success can be a tricky bit of business, particularly as it transitions from cult darlings to mainstream stars. Mitarotonda admits that Goose’s rocket-like ascent has presented some challenges. “Certain aspects of this are totally overwhelming,” he says. “There’s little junctures where things you do or things you intend get misinterpreted, and you have no control over it. That can be difficult to contend with. Plus, there’s a struggle to find a balance and wanting to have time to breathe and reflect and process and write and do other things in life that feed creativity amidst the constant ability to tour.”

“There’s no way to know or understand what people seem to be thinking about us or what they think of what we do.”—Rick Mitarotonda

Anspach, who joined Goose in 2017 following the departures of several guitarists and keyboardists, isn’t feeling the pressure. “There have been a lot of times where it’s felt like just tour, tour, tour,” he says. “The pace isn’t really locked down, though. Last year, we put out two albums [Everything Must Go and Chain Yer Dragon], but before that we were touring for two years without a new record. I think in general, we definitely want to keep making records. I don’t really see that slowing down just yet.”

Mitarotonda, for his part, isn’t letting fame affect his creative decisions. “We’re not that big where we’re at risk of jumping the shark,” he says with a smile.

For a band that consistently throws left curves to its audience, Goose’s new album, Big Modern!, is one hell of a wild ride. While it’s not a dedicated concept record—there’s no narrative story or stated theme—it does feel, in sometimes jarring ways, like an homage to the glory days of MTV-era 1980s. The sleek, pulsating groove of “Torero” recalls Jan Hammer’s lush, synthetic noir soundscapes in Miami Vice, while “Savenger” is a synth-pop pastiche that evokes the Human League, Howard Jones, and Mr. Mister. “Media” is a dense and chaotic cardio workout that combines Remain in Light-period Talking Heads with the Tubes at their commercial peak. And if you’re too lazy to search for Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” or Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” you can simply cue up “Pop,” a delicious power-pop knockout. It’s all over-caffeinated and overblown, wildly entertaining, and hooky as hell.

​Peter Anspach’s Gear

Guitars

• John Suhr Classic S
• Gibson Firebird (belonging to producer D. James Goodwin)

Amps

• 1960s Fender Princeton
• Vintage 100-watt Hiwatt

Effects

• Boss DD-20 Giga Delay
• Analog Man King of Tone

Strings, Picks, & Cables

• D’Addario NYXL strings (.010 –.046)
• D’Addario picks
• Mogami cables

Mitarotonda reasons that if Goose made an ’80s record, they did so unwittingly. “There’s no denying that’s a pretty consistent thread throughout,” he says. “It’s a very synth-heavy record. The drums and the guitar tones are big. A lot of things just pushed the material in that direction, but not in a contrived way. It’s funny, because obviously I wasn’t alive during the 1980s—I was born in 1990—but when I think about that period in time, it was like there was this big, superficial sense of forward momentum. Everybody was saying, ‘The future is now,’ and there were these extremes in sound and fashion. There was new technology coming very fast, and I think people were just inundated with stimulation. The aesthetic was loud, and I think that loudness is a perfect metaphor for the overstimulation that’s going on with technology right now.”

As has been the case since the early days of Goose, tunes are rarely born from jams. Much of the material on Big Modern! was written by Mitarotonda and his longtime collaborator, Matt Campbell. The two recorded “fairly fleshed out” demos that the guitarist says “really informed the trajectory of where we were going.”

“Usually, we kind of sketch out bare-bones demos and then fly by the seat of our pants hashing it out in a practice room,” he says. “This time, we went deeper with the demos, and it became a really valuable process because there were layers and textures that came out of it. We’d be working on a piece, and I’d say, ‘I want to add some bass on this.’ I would just track some bass, then play something and listen back to it, and I’d feel like it became a part of something. There were lots of weird little segments that stood out to me that just kind of added to the whole thing.”

Anspach listened to the demos and was faced with deciding between vintage ’80s-style keyboard textures or some level of dual-guitar attack. “There was a lot of keyboard stuff to learn and figure out for this record,” he says. “But there were also songs like ‘Torero,’ where I’m playing these keyboard layers, but then I switch to guitar. But we’ve developed the technology so that the synths can continue to play while I’m on guitar.”

Mitarotonda marvels at his bandmate’s multi-purpose capabilities. “Peter’s pretty clutch at all that,” he says. “On this record, we really built the shit out of these tracks to get them to sound really big. Then we had to try to figure out how to recreate it with just the four of us. There was a point when it was like, ‘Shit, do we need another guy to do some of this stuff?’ But Peter was like, ‘I can be three guys, actually.’ He figured out the game plan and the tech, and he’s playing guitar and four keyboards at the same time.”

“Torero” is one of the focus tracks on Big Modern!, but it almost didn’t see the light of day. The band road-tested it live to great effect before hitting the studio, but the song refused to behave once recording was underway. “We spent a whole day on it, and it just wasn’t there,” Mitarotonda recalls. “After dinner, we went back to it and figured out the arrangement and were just ripping takes. The energy that didn’t exist before became explosive. It was so cathartic, and the way Cotter dug into it, it was epic.”

So, too, is the guitarist’s splashy and exuberant solo, which hits like a ton of bricks. “Good 2B” features another turbulent lead break, but one that takes on a surreal quality as the song churns on. “That one presented some challenges because we knew we could really open the song up live,” Mitarotonda says. “Coming out of the drum break, there’s a ton of steam and it just wants to go on forever.”

His solo on the huge rocker “Salt” generates heat in a different way—it’s slow and full of legato lines, calling to mind George Benson’s unhurried manner of phrasing. “That was the biggest improv on the record,” he says. “We did a bunch of takes as a band, just trying out things, and they all went to different places. In the end, there was a long jam and it just seemed right to leave all those spaces between notes.”

“It’s a very synth-heavy record. The drums and the guitar tones are big.”—Rick Mitarotonda

For the most part, Mitarotonda improvised his solos while tracking with the full band. It’s taken him a while to adopt this approach, and he admits that when Anspach joined Goose, he still maintained a perfectionist’s attitude of crafting and nailing solos during the demo phase. “Peter finally said, ‘Dude, let’s just track it already.’ And he was right. Nothing can touch a holistic take when you’ve got everybody together. You just can’t fake that energy.”

Neither guitarist changed much about his guitar and gear setups for Big Modern! Mitarotonda relied on the same Greg DeLuis custom-made Empress model he’s been playing since 2023. “There’s only a couple of times I might pick up something else,” he says, “but I tracked the whole record with the DeLuis.” Likewise, he estimates that he recorded “perhaps 99 percent” of the album with his favorite amp, a 1960s Fender Deluxe, and “one tiny segment” with a vintage Marshall combo. “I’m not sure what kind,” he says with a smile. “I’ve always been a bit of a simpleton when it comes to gear.”

Anspach kept things basic, as well, using a John Suhr Classic S, as well as a Gibson Firebird that belongs to the band’s producer, D. James Goodwin. “That Firebird rips. It’s pretty sick,” Anspach says. Ampwise, he alternated between a 1960s Fender Princeton and a vintage 100-watt Hiwatt.

Controlling guitar sound in the studio is a far easier affair than achieving consistent onstage tone and balance—each venue offers its own variables, particularly for outdoor gigs, where sound waves are at the constant mercy of temperature and humidity.

“We try to deal with that as best we can,” Anspach says. “The fact is, it changes night to night, so you just have to embrace it and be like, ‘This is what we have to work with.’ We do as much as we can to keep things at a certain level, and we have a great guitar tech and audio team. There have been a few times where we’re feeling like something is really off, so you make little adjustments. Ultimately, you have no choice but to just ride the wave. The show goes on.”

Sometimes that show goes on without a soundcheck, as was the case last year at the Newport Folk Festival, when a series of thunderstorms and a shelter-in-place order threatened to nix Goose’s appearance entirely. When the weather cleared, the band took to the stage for a shortened set, which turned into a “you-had-to-be-there” moment when they were joined by Kenny Loggins for a high-octane performance of the singer’s cinematic mega-hit, “Danger Zone.”

“It was totally wild and hilarious,” Mitarotonda says. “We had no soundcheck, so it was pretty rough. Kenny couldn’t hear us, we couldn’t hear him, he couldn’t hear himself—it was crazy. We were literally in the danger zone with Kenny Loggins. It was quite the experience. Kenny’s the man.”

In our 60th issue of the Fretboard Journal (out now), John Drenning sits down with Brian Baker of Bad Religion/Minor Threat fame. The result is an 8,000-word interview that spans some 14 pages of our magazine. As a reader-supported publication, we seldom post stories online, but we thought we’d share a few choice excerpts for all to see. The complete article can be purchased here. -Editor

 What’s the point of asking a guitar player their influences? It’s like asking someone their top five albums; it very quickly becomes an exercise in taste and curation. What does it say about me if I name Tom Verlaine instead of Ace Frehley? It’s more honest to think in terms of musical DNA: the guitarists who, when you come up with a riff, you realize they already wrote it; the ones who were the godparents of your own style because you couldn’t do what they did. This imitation isn’t self-conscious. These are the players who made you want to play, and taught you how. Tastes change; DNA doesn’t.

Have you ever met one of these players? What would you say if you did? I met Brian Baker by chance in 1993, backstage at the Whisky. Brian wasn’t just in one of the bands that was most important to me when I was a teenager just a few years prior, learning to play, write, and gig. He was in two of them. There is no question I’d play guitar differently, and maybe even be a different person, if I’d never heard those bands.

I introduced myself and asked what he was doing musically. The man couldn’t have been nicer. After some chitchat and feigned nonchalance, I told Brian his guitar playing and the songs he wrote were more important to me than I could begin to explain, and I just wanted to thank him for that.

He thanked me, very graciously, and then said: You should hear the other guitar player in my band.

Over 30 years later, Brian describes his own talent the way Fonzie apologizes: hesitantly, and under duress. “It was one of those weird things: I could play guitar in a weirdly good way for a very small baby boy…good enough to where it was like a carnival act.” Early influences—DNA, if you will—were “Angus and Malcolm [Young], Billy Gibbons, Eddie Van Halen…My debt to Angus is immeasurable, but if you truly understand Malcolm — talking about him gets me emotional; he’s that good.”

Brian took lessons as a kid, but wasn’t a serious student — “I was a child, and I wanted to skateboard.” In 1978, when he was 13, Brian went full Frehley and added a third pickup and two toggle switches to his Norlin-era Les Paul Deluxe, because it was 1978, and he was 13. Instead of cranking his first amp, a Princeton, or using a pedal for distortion, Brian plugged the speaker into the extension speaker jack. (Amp guru Andy Marshall told me that when you plug a speaker into the external jack only, the main speaker out becomes a “dead short,” and 95% of the amp’s power goes to ground. Per Andy, don’t try this at home unless you like the smell of smoke.)

Brian told me that by ninth grade, “guitar was already my personality, and my entree into polite society.” Guitar was also his entree to the stage at Detroit’s Cobo Hall, where he jammed onstage with Carlos Santana in March of ’79, the month after he turned 14. Did he think at this age he would play guitar for a living? “No, because that’s not possible…I was going to go to college, because that’s what one does.” But then, “almost accidentally,” Brian became a founding member of the most influential high school band of all time.

Minor Threat was one of the first D.C. hardcore bands, which means it was one of the first hardcore bands. As Michael Azzerad put it in Our Band Could Be Your Life: “Black Flag may have been its godfathers and the Bad Brains may have revved up its tempo to light speed, but hardcore has no more definitive band than Minor Threat.” In 1980, Lyle Preslar asked his classmate Brian to play bass. Then 15, Brian had “gone punk” shortly after moving back to DC from Michigan. “I was just one of the few people around who wasn’t already in a band, and knew how to play an instrument. That’s how I got in. I cut my own hair, and I knew how to play guitar.”

Minor Threat didn’t last long—very few of these bands did—but they developed fast, and by the time I discovered hardcore in 1984, a year after they broke up, they were one of the genre’s defining bands. Their eponymous first 7″, with eight songs, runs a little over nine minutes. As Bad Religion co-founder Brett Gurewitz said, 1981’s Minor Threat “set the rule book. It showed how fast, and how tight, hardcore can be, and what it should be.” It was ground zero for straight edge, which altered the trajectory of a lot of kids’ lives, mine included. Later that year they released their second 7″, In My Eyes, having grown rapidly in the intervening six months. Describing songs like “In My Eyes” and “Look Back And Laugh,” author Ben Merlis jokingly called it “prog-ified hardcore—let’s make a three-minute song with lots of parts, but still have it be really hardcore and still have it be really catchy. Good luck doing that. Look how many lesser bands tried copying that later, and it didn’t work.” As a teenage member of one of those lesser bands, I can testify that while the exact recipe was impossible to recreate, the general approach scaled well.

Minor Threat recorded Out Of Step in January 1983. The nine-song EP, 15 seconds shorter in its entirety than the Yes song “The Gates Of Delirium,” has cast the longest shadow, but by this point the internal pressures in the band had become unsustainable. Their last show was September 1983. How do you know your hardcore band is breaking up? Your guitar player sells his Marshall, and buys a Roland Jazz Chorus.

Brian has always been forthright about his belief that, as he told me, “If I hadn’t been in Minor Threat, I do not believe we’d be having this conversation.” If Preslar had asked a different classmate to play bass in his high school band, it’s not hard to imagine Brian as, say, an American history professor. And Brian is quick to credit singer Ian MacKaye’s focus and foresight as key to Minor Threat’s lasting influence. “I was lucky enough to be close to someone with that vision and skillset… those of us who were lucky enough to make records with him when we were very young go on to have conversations with John who’s in Seattle right now for Fretboard Journal.” I don’t believe this is false modesty. The music industry is bleak.

And yet. Seneca: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity;” Picasso: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” Etc. Brian may be the most influential musician in the genre, and his playing easily passes the Les Paul test: asked about the hyper-technical shredders of the 80s, Paul responded, “but when they’re on the radio, can their mother tell it’s them?” And multiple collaborators described how Brian’s intuitive contributions could improve their material: he occupies that rare shared territory between technical excellence, which usually arises from ego, and an egoless ability to make the song better. If punk has a Mike Campbell (who has played on two Bad Religion tracks), it’s Brian Baker.

I asked Brian if he thought in his teens and twenties that he could be a professional musician. He responded, “I didn’t know I could do it for a living until I was already doing it for a living.” By then he was in his 30s and had been in Bad Religion for a couple years, and would get home from tour and not have to get a day job. He’d been touring half his life by then: longtime friend and current Fake Names bandmate Johnny Temple (Soulside, Girls Against Boys) told me he and Brian were in high school chemistry class together, and he remembered “Brian leaving class to go on tour with fucking Minor Threat.” Brian said, “There are times when I should have just stopped, but I didn’t know, I just kept going.”

Formed in 1985, Dag Nasty was the second legendary band Brian was in, but was the only band where he was the primary writer, sole guitarist, and, for a time, lyricist. (Brian would be equally comfortable having the descriptor “felon” in the same sentence as his name as “legendary.”) Their first album, Can I Say, was recorded and mixed with minimal overdubs (Brian: “Did we all make it through? OK, let’s keep that take”) in about 20 hours the following year. Brian used his regular gigging rig, as anyone would have on a punk record at the time: an early-70s Les Paul Deluxe Goldtop into a 100-watt ’78 Marshall JMP100, along with an MXR M-134 chorus pedal that was lying around the studio.

Can I Say has the visceral punch of Out Of Step. But the songwriting is revelatory, the well-rehearsed band having shaped Brian’s riffs into songs that didn’t conform to the hardcore mold. The rhythm section of Colin Sears and Roger Marbury was seamless, packing more low-end punch than their hardcore contemporaries. Dave Smalley’s vocals were delivered with uncommon conviction, perfectly blending melody and power. And the lyrics are, well, emotional, not what subsequent Dag vocalist Peter Cortner called “made-to-order anthemic lyrics.” Ben Merlis told me, “The songwriting is incredible; just the right balance of melody and aggression. The recording sounds impeccable—it sounds fresh, and it sounds like you’re in the room with them.” Pete Chramiec, guitarist for Verbal Assault, described hearing Dag Nasty and “immediately turning the ship in that direction. It was a necessary course correction, that you could be way more interesting, and way more musical. We were already getting sick of the macho shit.” End on End podcast cohost Jeff Kaplan told me: “There were already traces of melody in hardcore, including Minor Threat. But Can I Say is the point where you could say, this isn’t just hardcore that’s experimenting with some melodic elements; this is the record that invents melodic hardcore. And I feel like hardcore, even with Minor Threat, had to have this toughness to it, even though Minor Threat weren’t your prototypical tough hardcore guys. It wasn’t macho, but there was still this tough edge to it. Whereas with Can I Say, it was okay to be vulnerable. For the first time in hardcore, we don’t need to be so fucking tough.”

Can I Say is where Brian’s distinctive playing style fully emerged. Like another much-“borrowed from” player, Stevie Ray Vaughan, it’s not that his style was unique; instead, like SRV, Brian was able to meld a variety of pre-existing techniques into one cohesive package, and then execute it with feel, technical precision, and originality. And as with SRV, countless pale imitations ensued. (I was a pale imitator of both.) Brian drew from the deep well of Captain Sensible (i.e., the single-note lines), George Harrison (i.e., the riff-based melodicism), and Malcolm Young (well, Malcolm fucking Young), rather than cookie-cutter punk players, but took those influences in an entirely different direction.

No single part of Brian’s style is revolutionary. What made it unique was doing it all, in tune and in time, in service of the song. Brian Gathy, founder of End On End, told me, “It was all about his choices. He didn’t sound superhuman, but he was so laser-focused in his choices…Every guitar part on Can I Say supports the bones of the song.” Jeff Kaplan remarked that “if we had to pick one record in his entire catalog where we said, this is the defining artistic statement made by Brian Baker, I think it has to be Can I Say. Brian was playing at a different level than his peers. He brought a level of tightness, a level of discipline, that was so rare in hardcore in the early-mid 80s. And he was about the song first—you can be this really great guitar player without making it about you, and instead, just make it about the song.”

Dag Nasty, like Minor Threat, had about a three-year run. After two more albums and numerous lineup changes, Dag played their last show in July 1988. The wind had gone out of the sails. And Brian had run into Chris Gates—formerly the bassist of the Big Boys, who Minor Threat played their last show with in DC, not quite five years ago—in the parking lot of an L.A. 7-Eleven. Gates was playing guitar in Junkyard, recently signed to Geffen, and short a guitar player. The switch from melodic hardcore to Skynyrd-meets-Motorhead rock was not a premeditated career move by Brian; he just wanted to keep playing guitar. In their book on the exploding 1980s L.A. hard rock scene, describing the intense competitiveness of the genre, Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock observed that “no one stumbled into this (okay, maybe Brian Baker of Junkyard did).”

As Brian pivoted “mainstream” with Junkyard, and hardcore obstinately stayed put, “alternative,” or “college rock” as we called it back then, was pivoting mainstream, too. This was well underway before the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in September 1991. This arc is best captured by the ur-college rock band, REM. Document, in 1987, sold a million copies, almost doubling the previous year’s Life’s Rich Pageant. 1988’s Green more than doubled the sales of Document, at 2.6 million. Out Of Time, released six months before Nevermind, sold 12 million copies; next year’s Automatic For The People sold 18 million.

When I met Brian backstage at the Whisky in February 1993, a year after Junkyard’s demise, Peter Buck was also backstage. Neither Brian nor I remembered this, though REM bestrode the earth like a colossus at the time. A year later, Brian was REM’s second guitarist.

Except, he wasn’t. Shortly after accepting the gig as REM’s touring guitarist, Brian was offered a job as a card-carrying member of Bad Religion. Brian’s chair in Bad Religion had previously been occupied by Brett Gurewitz, founding member and one of the chief songwriters. This is kind of like being offered John Lennon’s spot in The Beatles. In Jim Ruland’s book on Bad Religion, bassist Jay Bentley explained: “When someone leaves the band and people want to know what happened, my answer is, ‘You’ll have to ask him.’ But when someone like Brett leaves and you’ve lost one of your songwriters, you can’t just go, ‘You’ll have to talk to him’ because that’s not going to fly. So having someone like Brian Baker from Minor Threat helped get us out of that awkward conversation. ‘What happened? Here’s Brian!’ It buffered the situation without completely ignoring that we’d lost a major player in our band by replacing him with another major player.”

Hardcore is as obsessed with lineage as the Old Testament. Greg Graffin, Bad Religion’s singer, wrote in his memoir Punk Paradox that a minority of the band’s fans expected the band to fall apart in Gurewitz’s absence. Brian’s pedigree got him in the door, but doesn’t explain why he’s still there: “Once those naysayers realized ‘That’s Brian Baker up there,’ the credibility portion of their criticism would be canceled immediately. But his sound, which is one of the most signature sounds in all of punk, and his virtuosity would do the rest of the talking. It complemented our songs, and blended perfectly with our style, and the audience would soon be treated to hearing a greatly enhanced live set from Bad Religion.”

Brian joined Bad Religion over 30 years ago; only founding members Graffin and Bentley have been in the band longer. As Graffin said, this longevity comes more from Brian’s lineage; Brian’s later collaborator Alec Bourgeois (Severin, Capital City Dusters) described it as “a stroke of luck for all of them.” When I asked Brian about what he brought to a band, he told me that “whatever personality trait” is required for longevity in a band, “I seem to have it.”

Ian MacKaye described Brian’s musical discernment from the beginning; his musical contributions were a big part of why Minor Threat were, as Michael Hampton (S.O.A., Embrace, Fake Names) explained, “heads, and tails, and shoulders above everybody else.” Bourgeois told me, “You talk about musicianship—he was the ringer in Minor Threat, and the reason they were so fucking tight: Brian was the glue there.” And Chris Gates called Brian “literally the perfect definition of a sideman. Without Brian, Minor Threat’s not Minor Threat. Brian’s playing in Junkyard was integral to the sound and how great the band was.”

MacKaye described Brian’s nascent professionalism simply: “Brian is definitely an ambitious guy. He wanted to play guitar for a living.” In the DC scene in the 1980s, this was abnormal, and, arguably, not punk. Brian Gathy said of Brian, “it was clear he had ambition, which, even talking about it now, seems strange to say it as a negative thing [laughing], but it was obvious he wanted a bigger stage, both literally and figuratively…it was clear that he had his eyes on bigger things than being in a good band in DC and maybe touring a little bit; he wanted a career. To some, and we’re talking people in their teens and early 20s, who were high on their own supply of idealism, this professionalism was suspect.

Regarding Brian’s exacting nature, Bourgeois told me: “That precision—it’s not just his playing. And it really does bring people along.” Seattle amp builder and luthier Jesse Quitslund told me that when he’d been working on guitars for almost a decade, Brian asked him to set up his Les Pauls for his first album with Bad Religion. He “did as good a job as I thought was possible,” and returned them to Brian, who “literally played every note on the guitar neck in, like, five seconds, and found the one dead spot.” Brian told him, “This is a really important rock and roll note; can you do anything about this?” This was the first time anyone had asked Quitslund to improve his work; he’d “never set up a guitar for a guitar player who was that technically proficient before.” At the onset of recording, producer Ric Ocasek played all the guitars, declaring Brian’s the only guitars ready to record. Quitslund described it as “a career high point, to have Ric Ocasek praise my work. And Brian, of course, proceeded to nail everything in one take, as he does, and impress everyone, including Ric Ocasek, who then had Brian play in his solo band.”

Everyone I spoke to characterized Brian as very funny, but acerbic, and not one to suffer fools gladly. At some point in every interview, I thought of John McPhee’s description of physicist Edward Teller as having “a sense of humor that could penetrate bone.” Bourgeois said, “Cynical, funny: he is all those things, right? But I think at the center of it, he’s got a giant fucking heart. He’s got a wit that he’s just too tempted by. Brian’s too fucking smart, and too funny.” The corollary to this is that most of the people I spoke to attained prominence as a musician as a teenager. Bourgeois said, “You can’t overemphasize how young everyone was. People were putting out albums and touring before they were out of high school…All the DIY, all the shit that we built is just based on kids not waiting for life to happen to them.” A former bandmate of mine put it succinctly: “we were all kind of assholes back then.”

It’s worth quoting Bill Barbot (Jawbone, Burning Airlines) at length here. When Bill told Ian MacKaye he was joining Foxhall Stacks with Brian: “Ian told me: ‘That motherfucker’s a changed man.’ I think that was Ian’s way of acknowledging that the Brian that he knew, as a young teenager, and the Brian I was in a band with now were completely different people, as far as he was concerned…. Brian went through a lot of transformations, as a person, and as a musician, between when he was ‘launched into fame’ as bass player and guitarist for Minor Threat—that’s a lot of attention to have, at that age, as a kid, that was ‘celebrity’ in our circles—and so the rumor, and the reason I was so nervous about being in a band with Brian Baker, was not just because I knew him to be an exceptional musician, but also because, like, What’s the ego going to be like in the room? Is he going to be critical of my singing or my guitar playing, or look down on me? And he could not have been more the opposite…You could tell he just loved making music so much. And his suggestions came from an intuitive sense of how a song should go. His way of putting things was really positive, and constructive, and helpful. And it’s rare to find someone in life who has that level of expertise in their genre, who also has a sense of how to deliver feedback and be a constructive critic in a way that doesn’t come off as: I’m better than you, because I’m a godfather of hardcore. It felt genuine, and it felt constructive, and it felt like it was offered in the interest of the songs being better.”

One of those transformations was addiction, and then sobriety. Brian said to me, simply, “I lived a lifestyle that allowed me to get away with a lot of shit for a very long time, and it finally got to the point where I was just not able to function, and something had to give.” MacKaye, not one given to sentimentality, seemed to allude to this when he told me, “I think Brian was able to center himself and his life in the last few years in a way that made him really finally reveal what a glorious human being he is. He’s a really lovely dude.”

Brian’s primary touring guitars with Bad Religion are a pair of ’55 Les Paul Juniors. Brian is incredibly particular about his gear, but he’s not precious about it. But, in keeping with what Temple called, with approbation, his “fastidiousness,” Brian doesn’t like refins. Every friend of Brian’s I spoke to had a different way of describing him as a perfectionist. He is, however, completely unsentimental about gear. (Brian is the only guitarist I’ve ever spoken to for more than fifteen minutes who didn’t rue a guitar they should never have sold.) Given his minimalist/punk approach to gear, I asked why he didn’t just tour with a reissue. He explained that the older ones have more life, more bloom. And they smell better!

It’s rare to just spontaneously get into vintage Juniors. But when someone puts a Junior in your hands, it’s a revelation. Some years ago Tacoma Luthier Joe Riggio handed me his ’55, with divots in the body from when its original owner used it to drive stakes into the ground. It was the loudest unplugged solid body guitar I’d ever played. As Brian said, “there’s the least amount of things in the way of the vibration” on a Junior.

Brian’s LP Junior sherpa was Bad Religion’s other guitarist, Mike Dimkich. Dismissing complaints about tuning and noise, Dimkich described tuning more as a function of the player than the guitar. (It is very punk rock to view tuning as a matter of personal agency.) He acknowledged the noise, but noise management, like tuning, comes down to personal agency; both Bad Religion guitarists ride their volume knobs relentlessly.

Brian explained that previously, “I didn’t like P-90 guitars because they buzzed and I didn’t like wraptail guitars because you couldn’t intonate them.” But Brian thought Mike “sounded so great…and I was attracted to the economy of the guitar.” Regarding noise, Brian credited a combination of volume knob control and “getting over it.” At first, his “inner nerd” was still obsessing over intonation, but he realized—and I can’t tell you how liberating this epiphany is—“it was the idea of the lack of precision that was bothering me; it wasn’t the lack of precision itself.”

Purchase the issue to read the entire feature. 

The post Excerpt: Bad Religion’s Brian Baker in the Fretboard Journal 60 first appeared on Fretboard Journal.

Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage! After working on the neck of our Harley Benton guitar last month, let’s spend some money to spruce it up a bit more, starting with the tuners.

Last month we learned that the stock tuners were pretty heavy, which can lead to neck dive and discomfort. Their stability didn’t impress me, either, so let’s replace them. I wanted to keep our vintage look, so some Kluson originals came to mind. These are also available as locking tuners, which are usually a good choice, but they’re heavier than standard tuners and unnecessary on an Esquire-style electric without a vibrato system. After some research, I decided to use a set of “ClipHAUS” tuners from GÖLDO. This is German vintage at its best: The design goes back to a mechanism made by the ROKO (Robert Kolb) company in the ’60s. What looks like a roof at the top is a clip made of spring steel, pressing the worm shaft against the gear wheel, resulting in backlash-free movement.

However, the old ROKO machine heads, which were used by many guitar manufacturers such as Gretsch, Guild, Höfner, and Framus, were much clunkier and lacked the cool Kluson lining on the clip. Also, these new tuners use a patented “push-through” design: The strings are run through the shaft from the top and can then be clipped off as they sprout out the back—a handy way to avoid scratches and cuts from rogue string ends on your headstock. The housing, including the steel clip, is stamped from sheet steel with extreme precision. As an additional bonus, a set of ClipHAUS tuners is less than half the weight of cast-housing tuners. This particular model is available with different tuner buttons; I went with a set sporting the original oval Kluson shape for a vintage look, which set me back $75 for a full set.

Next, I wanted to give the tuners an “aged” look. First, I broke the shine by giving the tuners, bushings, and buttons a once-over with fine sandpaper or steel wool. If you want to mimic corrosion on the shafts, you’ll want to remove the nickel plating on them completely, a job you can accomplish with steel wool. I placed the tuners and the bushings on some old newspapers, got out my gloves and goggles, and applied some iron oxide (ferric oxide) liquid on them with a Q-tip. Careful not to get any in the tuners—we don’t want any oxidation inside.

Time to decide if you want to mimic the typical oxidation of original non-plated shafts. If you want to do so, apply the liquid only to the case and buttons, leaving out the shaft. Watch the process carefully, and if you like what you see, stop the process by wiping the liquid off the tuner with a wet cloth or paper towel. Afterwards, apply the liquid to the shaft only and watch and stop the process when you’re content. This will take longer on the shaft than on the cover, so I recommend doing it in two individual steps. Personally, I didn’t want oxidation on the tuner shafts, so I simply put on the liquid in only one step. Reminder: This is just one way for aging your hardware, which I chose because its cheap, easy, effective, and safe. There are plenty of others you can try!

Don’t forget to put a drop of oil into the tuners and turn the shaft several times to lubricate them. One drop is plenty, and will last a very long time.

After a quick check, I realized that the new bushings wouldn’t fit the holes in the headstock, and the old screw holes wouldn’t fit for the new tuners. That led to two easy tasks, if you have the right tools.

The headstock’s holes need to be enlarged, which at first might sound like an easy task. Unfortunately, it’s not, and a word of warning: Never try to enlarge a hole in a guitar’s headstock with your hand-held drill and standard drill bit! It will almost certainly end in disaster. Instead, here are three options I recommend:

-The quick and dirty solution: Use a sharp, fine, coarse, rounded file for wood, and enlarge the hole carefully until it’s big enough. If it’s not perfectly round, don’t worry. The bushings on top will mask your dirty little secret.

-The semi-pro solution: Use a very sharp countersunk drill bit in your stationary drill press, and choose a moderate speed. Don’t forget to wear gloves and goggles for this, and drill from the top towards the back of the headstock.

-The professional solution: Use a very sharp handheld tapered reamer. You’ll only need 20 seconds to do each hole.

I decided to use a reamer, so the new bushings will fit tight and snuggly.

For closing the screw holes on the back of the tuner, as well as closing one of the screw holes for the string trees, I decided to use toothpicks and some wood glue. Standard toothpicks are typically made out of any soft wood like birch, which makes them a poor choice for closing holes on a guitar, especially if you need to drill into them later on. Such soft toothpicks can be stabilized by using some super glue, but the better option is to use hard bamboo toothpicks, like you might find in a local Asian restaurant. They’re a bit thicker in diameter and much harder compared to standard toothpicks, so they’re a great match for this task.

After the wood glue has completely dried, you can chop off the toothpicks carefully flush with a sharp chisel, exacto knife, or razor blade. Because the area will be covered with the new tuners, you don’t need to be super careful, but putting a bit of tape to protect the surface won’t hurt.

We spent $75 on our tuners this month, so our budget for future investments is down to $121. We’re not out of the woods yet: Next month, we’ll press in the new bushings the right way and continue working on the neck, so stay tuned.

Until then, keep on modding!

We all know Gear Acquisition Syndrome is real, but it hurts a whole lot less when you’re saving a few hundred bucks. If you’ve been waiting for the right excuse to upgrade your rig, Guitar Center’s latest sale might just be it. From American-made Fenders and affordable Epiphones to gig-ready Yamahas, we’ve rounded up the deals actually worth your attention.

Starting with the electrics…

Fender American Professional II Telecaster (was $1,839.99, now $1,639.99)

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If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to invest in an iconic US-made Fender, Guitar Center has knocked $200 off the American Professional II Telecaster in classic Sunburst, bringing it down to $1,639.99. Packed with V-Mod II single-coils, a smooth Deep C neck profile and a sculpted heel for easy upper-fret access, this is an absolute workhorse for gigging players looking for high-end Fender playability.

• READ MORE: The best audio interfaces for guitarists: mobile, desktop and rack units compared

Epiphone J-45 EC Studio ($399, $359.99)

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If you’re after an affordable acoustic-electric, the Epiphone J-45 EC Studio is now $359.99 (down from $399). With a solid Sitka spruce top, sloped-shoulder cutaway body and onboard Fishman electronics, it’s a solid choice for players looking to move between the sofa, the studio and the stage.

Yamaha APX600 Thinline Acoustic-Electric ($369.99, $329.99)

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Electric players after an acoustic that feels immediately familiar should take a look at the Yamaha APX600 Thinline, now going for just $329.99 (down from $369.99). The guitar’s thin-line cutaway body is designed for comfortable live performance, while the built-in pickup system and onboard tuner make it ready for gigs straight out of the box.

Martin D-12E Road Series ($1,079.99)

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Want classic Martin tone without stepping into the brand’s higher-end price bracket? Guitar Center has knocked nearly $270 off the D-12E Road Series. Built with a solid spruce top and koa fine veneer back and sides, this dreadnought delivers plenty of projection and warmth, while onboard Fishman MX-T electronics make it ready for the stage.

The post These are the best deals at Guitar Center this week appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Rush’s embrace of synthesisers in the ‘80s may have helped redefine the band’s sound, but it also left Alex Lifeson fighting to keep his guitar heard.

Looking back on the recording of Subdivision, the iconic opening track from 1982’s Signals, Lifeson says the song’s mix marked the start of what he jokingly describes as years spent “fighting for my guitar rights”.

In a recent interview with Classic Rock, the guitarist recalls sitting in on the mixing process for Subdivisions and growing increasingly frustrated as his guitar seemed to vanish beneath the synths.

• READ MORE: Epiphone celebrates Rush’s return to the stage with a faithful recreation of Alex Lifeson’s legendary 1976 ES-355

“I was sitting there thinking: ‘I can’t hear guitar,’” he says. “I’m a very easy-going guy, but I thought: ‘This is not right.’ So I pushed that fader up.”

Producer Terry Brown, however, had other ideas.

“I do remember Terry turning to me and smiling, and reaching over and pulling it back down. I could barely hear my guitar on that mix, and that just screams ‘wrong’ to me.”

The mix went on to become a staple of Rush’s catalogue, and while Lifeson never quite made peace with the balance, he never doubted the material itself.

“It’s a strong song, it’s just the mix that I didn’t like,” he says. “I guess I just fought for my guitar rights for years after that.”

The story echoes comments Lifeson made earlier this year during an appearance on Rick Beato’s YouTube channel, where he admitted to feeling resentful as Geddy Lee’s keyboards began taking on a bigger role in Rush’s sound.

“When we got to the mid-’80s, when we were doing those dense keyboard records, it was really a challenge for me. ’Cause, when we recorded those records, the keyboards went before the guitar,” he said.

“I would sit around, waiting, waiting, and waiting to do guitar stuff. And the more keyboard stuff I heard, the more layers, it was almost impossible for me to figure out how am I gonna fit in here. And by the way, I’m the guitar player in this band. What happened?”

For all his frustrations, Lifeson says Rush’s willingness to evolve was fundamental to the band’s identity.

“I guess you could stay where you are and do the same thing over and over and over again, but that’s not the kind of band we are. Progress is important to us. We always need to go somewhere else. We always wanted to evolve.”

The post Alex Lifeson spent years “fighting for guitar rights” after this Rush song: “It’s a strong song, it’s just the mix that I didn’t like” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Joe Bonamassa has looked back on one of the most intimidating moments of his early career, recalling how sharing the stage with blues legend and Telecaster master Albert Collins as a teen taught him some of the “greatest lessons” he’s ever learned as a performer.

Speaking on the No Cover Charge podcast, Bonamassa explains that Collins had a unique way of wielding the guitar not just as an instrument, but as a “weapon” capable of commanding a stage and keeping fellow players on their toes.

“Guitars are great, ‘cos you can use them to coddle people, but you can also use them as a weapon – and I love using guitars as a weapon,” says the guitarist. “You know who’s the best at that? Albert Collins. That was a weapon. They didn’t call him the Iceman for nothing. I mean, I was on the receiving end when I was a kid.”

• READ MORE: “It’s basically a Gibson Les Paul jammed into a Fender Telecaster”: This is one of Joe Bonamassa’s favourite vintage guitars – and why hybrids can be “the best”

That unforgettable lesson came at the Silver Lake New York Blues Festival in Hog Rose, where a 12-year-old Bonamassa was invited to sit in with Collins. A year earlier, the young blues prodigy had shared the festival stage with telecaster virtuoso Danny Gatton, where his performance had earned him another slot twelve months later with the Iceman himself.

“They convinced Albert Collins to let me sit in,” Bonamassa recalls. “And he taught me the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned on stage.”

Needless to say, sharing the stage with Collins in his prime was a daunting prospect.

“At the time, I worshiped all those records – the Showdown! record, Ice Pickin’, Frosty.. All that,” says Bonamassa. “So I got up on stage, and I had my little USA Strat with Lace Sensors, and my Sunn Beta Lead solid state 4×12 amp.”

“Debbie Davies was in the band and it was prime time Albert Collins. He had a Tele, a [Fender] Quad Reverb, and about a 150-foot cable because he would go out into the crowd.”

Bonamassa remembers Collins putting him to the test almost immediately.

“He stung a note… He did all that Albert Collins shit, but he kept stinging the note,” says Bonamassa. “I mean, he pointed the Tele like [he was pointing a gun] at me. I’m like this little kid in the cowboy hat. It was his way of saying, ‘Welcome to the big leagues, kid. I don’t care how old you are, being up here requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude, and I’m testing you to see if you had it.’ So I did my best [plays note] Albert impression.”

Decades on, Bonamassa remains fascinated by the bluesman’s unconventional setup and technique.

“His thing was awesome, because he tuned to open F, and had a really primitive capo. It was kind of gnarly, and I don’t know how he was able to keep the strings from moving. He would bend and not have the strings just move into another position. I don’t know how he did it.”

Watch the full interview below.

The post Joe Bonamassa on the greatest lesson he ever learned from one of his blues heroes: “It was him going, ‘Welcome to the big leagues, kid’” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

$1,349/£1,149, fender.com

It’s strange to think that a few years back, what classed as a bad PR situation for Fender was them shipping the American Vintage II Jazzmaster with a not wholly vintage-correct headstock shape. Simpler times.

Here in 2026, you’d probably forgive Fender taking its eye off the ball a little given everything else that’s going on, but it’s worth remembering that the people actually making and designing these instruments are primarily focused on what they always have been: building the best-sounding, feeling and playing instruments they can at price points that suit pretty much every budget.

• READ MORE: Fender Vintera III Mid ’60s Jaguar review: “this is the guitar Jaguar fans have been asking Fender to make for years”

The aforementioned AVII headstock snafu was just the latest in a series of incidents where Fender was accused of not quite getting the offset thing by its invariably exacting devotees.

The first Player Jazzmasters, for instance, could have been the best-made guitars on the planet – they were never fully embraced by fans because they had slightly naff-looking open-coil humbuckers in them, and no rhythm circuit. And look, the guy in the demo video didn’t even touch the vibrato, nor did he put the thing through two reverse-reverbs and six fuzzes – do you think he’s even heard Loveless?

A lot has changed since then however, and Fender has done much to make up to the Jazzmaster faithful in the years since – things are undoubtedly better now across the board, but especially in Fender’s Mexico-made Vintera range.

In fact, so good has Ensenada got at making Jazzmasters now, that my colleague Josh felt emboldened to declare that the Road Worn Vintera II guitar he reviewed back in January was “the best all-round Jazzmaster proposition in the Fender range.”

What is it?

The Vintera III range is Fender’s latest attempt to do something that a huge cohort of players want and need the brand to do more than anything else – creating guitars with vintage specs, looks and sounds that don’t require you to take out a small business loan to afford.

It’s been just three short years since the Vintera II launched, however, and there was very little wrong with the old guard, so what’s changed? Well, Vintera III promises to give us an even more accurate take on the vintage JM thing – eschewing the loose decade-spanning scope of the old guitars and focusing on a specific inflection point in a guitar’s development, in this case the mid-1960s – aka the moment that Jazzmasters really started to get fun with custom colours, painted headstocks and the like.

The core sell of the Vintera range remains unchanged – this is a guitar with most of the ‘right’ vintage appointments that’s not so cheap you might as well just get a Squier, and not so expensive that it’s totally beyond the scope of many musicians.

That doesn’t mean it’s cheap, however – sticker shock has come for guitars in a big way over the last few years, and ‘mid-priced’ in Fender terms now stands for $1,349. That is no small number for anyone really, but it’s broadly in line with the guitar it replaced at least – there’s no wince-inducing global inflationary crisis gut-punch that saw hundreds of dollars added to the base price between Vinteras I and II.

While the improvement is clearly iterative with Vintera III, the offsets have changed more than most. Crucially, while the Vintera II Jazzmaster recreated a late-1950s instrument, for III we return to the mid-1960s style of guitar – similar to the first 2019 Vintera run.

As mentioned, that means we have more fun finish options than previous editions – Sonic Blue and Candy Apple Red for those who want matching headstocks, and an Olympic White option – our guitar for today – that comes with a plain headstock.

Image: Adam Gasson

The latter is a bit of a shame in my opinion as most real Olympic White Jazzmasters from the mid-60s also sported a painted peghead… at least it’s the right shape? Mid 60s also means that we don’t get the bound board with block inlays that came later in the decade – maybe Fender will save that for Vintera IV?

The company’s product page notes a few differences as to how it’s going about the whole “vintage” thing this time around – no real revolutionary changes, but just an overall upping of the focus and detail – the headstock decals are now being applied over the finish, and we’ve got a period-accurate round-laminated rosewood fretboard rather than a slab board, clay-coloured fretboard dots rather than modern white ones, and a real bone nut instead of a synthetic one.

Hardware, electronics and the neck profile are all now “era-based” rather than “decade-based”, which makes sense, given that a “mid-’60s Jazzmaster” can mean a hell of a lot of different things. Fender doesn’t go as far as to put a year on it, but the specs and finish options add up to something approximating, at the latest, a ‘64 Jazzmaster, as bound necks would be introduced in 1965, and the big block inlays/big headstock combo would follow in 1966.

There’s still one major concession to price, in that the finish is poly rather than nitro – no authentic ageing experience for you here. Maybe, like with Vintera II, Fender will wait a year or so and then roll out a road-worn variant with a lightly-aged nitro finish for a little more cash, but until then, we’re strictly in polyurethane town.

Not that the poly finish looks bad, by any means – the Olympic White example I’ve got here is a lovely deep off-white – the white Squier Classic Vibe Jazzmaster next to it in my guitar rack looks as rich and inviting as a sheet of printer paper in comparison.

As a whole the guitar presents very well, and small as they are, those vintage-correct details do have a cumulative effect. The clay dots, for example, really bring the look of the neck together, especially given the rosewood ‘board. On our review example, this rosewood is a chocolate colour so rich and deep I am more than a little tempted to take a bite out of it. Even the three-dimensional nature of the headstock decal being placed over the finish – a detail that seems comically minor on paper – adds a bit of vintage panache to proceedings.

Image: Adam Gasson

Build quality and playability

I spend a lot of my time playing fairly modern-feeling necks – not quite multi-scale Strandbergs, but at the very least 9.5” boards and jumbo frets. And so getting my mitts around this mid-60s C-profile neck, with its 7.25” radius and vintage-tall frets, is a surprisingly refreshing affair. It is, of course, no slim shredder, but no less comfortable because of this. There’s enough heft to reassure me that I’m actually holding something, but it still allows for some relatively fast movement.

And while it may not be the perfect playground for sweep arpeggios, leads of a less flashy breed are still a hell of a lot of fun – the vintage tall frets are, well, tall, and are therefore great for digging into the side of a string when bending. Down by the headstock, the more curved surface is a lovely affair when fretting big whole-neck chords.

The setup and fretwork in general are great, with no dead spots to speak of and a nice low action. Fender has also continued its trend of gently rolling its fretboard edges, which makes for a supremely comfortable feel, especially when you launch into a big bend that requires hanging onto the neck for dear life, or land on a big open G with less than perfect positioning – the fretboard edges just melt out of your way.

That’s the left hand – at the right hand, the vibrato is the star of the show, as you’d hope from a classic-spec’d Jazzmaster. I find its factory setup pretty dead-on, with a smooth action for some nice woozy pitch-wobbling and just the right amount of tension on things to make it feel responsive and tactile rather than stiff and unwieldy. The rocking bridge also does its job of keeping things in pretty good tune, even after veering into some over-egged wanging on the bar. The push-in arm also stays where I want it, and if I want to move it out of the way, I can do so silently – it does not, as some bars do, creak like the gates of a gothic castle as you move it about.

Image: Adam Gasson

The one big caveat is this: even sticklers for vintage accuracy would be happy to ignore the anachronism if Fender just admitted defeat, and put a Jaguar bridge on this thing. The threaded saddle bridge has its adherents, but let’s be honest, quite a substantial chunk of offset players will replace theirs by default. There’s a reason the aftermarket Jazzmaster bridge world is absolutely chock-full of options. Fender even makes its own relatively decent mid-priced barrel-saddled option.

We’ve already made one concession to modern player comfort over vintage accuracy, in that these guitars come with 0.010s rather than the heavier strings that work best with the Jazzmaster’s rocking bridge/vibrato combo – so why not just take that extra step, save everyone a few quid, and avoid dooming the stock bridge to rot in a drawer somewhere?

Luckily it’s not a total write-off – the threaded sample example found here does at least function with the factory setup… mostly, as I still occasionally push the low E out of its slot. I’ll put it like this – if I was aiming to make this my main gigging guitar, I’d still seek to replace the bridge as soon as I could, but I wouldn’t shy away from playing the guitar live while said replacement was in the post.

One final gripe – the knobs are still set wrong. When I look down, and the guitar’s on full, I see 4, 5, and 6 – seemingly to let the “volume” and “tone” labels be parallel to the neck. I’ve no idea why they ship like this, because unless you’re playing it like a lap steel you’re not going to see those labels. Everyone else seems to agree that when you look down at a guitar, you should see the number 10 to indicate that you’re on 10. Is this splitting hairs? Yes, but it’s hair-splitting that does actually affect your out-of-box playing experience – if we’re caring about headstock decals being under or over the finish, we’re caring about this, too, Fender!

Image: Adam Gasson

Sounds

The pickups and electronics are fairly straightforward – no noiseless pickups or fancy switching here, unless you count the near-70-year-old rhythm circuit as a fancy addition. The lead circuit provides all of the spank and the punch you’d want from a Jazzmaster, with a bridge pickup that’s nice and bright but by no means an aural ice-pick, and a rounded, warmer neck pickup that’s got quite a present upper midrange.

The output here is relatively low – perhaps not as low as you might expect from some true vintage examples, but far from any sort of modern, hot pickup output. This does mean that there’s a good amount of dynamic range to be had on clean to lightly-overdriven sounds, even if you’ll want to up the preamp gain somewhere along the chain to compensate – and, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s a surprising amount of breadth and clarity when throwing stacked fuzzes, reverbs and delays at both lead positions.

And speaking of such an activity, the rhythm circuit does its thing, which you will find either unusably muddy or an excellent combination with the aforementioned wall of fuzz and delay, depending on your Jazzmaster preferences. Divisive it may be, it’s still a Jazzmaster, and for many it wouldn’t be complete without it – even for those who dislike it, masking off the switch can be part of the ritual. At this point, a couple of inches of electrical tape should come in the case alongside the vibrato arm…

Personally I find the rounded character of the neck pickup makes the rhythm circuit a pretty usable proposition for both smooth leads and messy Kevin Shields impressions, but for pretty much everything else the brighter, clearer sounds of the lead circuit are more likely to do the trick.

Image: Adam Gasson

Should I buy one?

If you own a Vintera II Jazzmaster and you like it – I wouldn’t be in a rush to add an extra ‘I’ to the proceedings, unless you’re desperate for a switch to the 60s spec. However, it’d be wrong to expect Vintera III to totally reinvent the Jazzmaster wheel – that’s not really the point of a new range of Vintera guitars. There are only so many ways to skin the particular cat of an 1964-ish Jazzmaster for this price, and with this in mind it’s very nice to see the focus being placed on sharpening the vintage details. These details are packaged up in an extraordinarily well-constructed instrument, one that successfully builds on the successful points of the Vintera II JM.

Even with that upwards shift of the definition of a “mid-priced guitar”, the Vintera range remains a very good bang-for-buck proposition within Fender’s lineup. If you can get over the poly finish, this is as accurate and as playable as you’re going to get if you want a vintage-spec’d Jazzmaster for anywhere this side of £2,000. Or quite a bit more for the real deal. Of course, that accuracy is both better and for worse, perhaps, in the case of the bridge, but hey, what would a Jazzmaster be without a little obtrusiveness?

Vintera III Jazzmaster Alternatives

If you want a similar experience but fancy that nitro finish, some Road Worn Vintera II 50s Jazzmaster models ($1,699/£1,399) are still available in a few places. If you are an offset fan of a slightly different stripe, Vintera III has also arrived with a Jaguar offering ($1,34.99/£1,129). If you want to save a bit of cash, the Player II Jazzmaster offers a relatively authentic but no less enjoyable Jazzmaster experience for very decent price ($879.99/£759), and if you want to go the whole hog and nearabouts double the price tag, you can look at the American Vintage II 1966 Jazzmaster ($2,799/£2,379) now with the right headstock.

The post Fender Vintera III Mid ’60s Jazzmaster review: Mexican-made vintage-style offset bliss appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

IK Multimedia releases TONEX 2.0 Player in Public Beta

Experience aged-in warmth and deep dreadnought projection. PG has partnered with Taylor Guitars to give one lucky winner a Gold Label 517e! Enter now. (US residents, 18+ Only)

Taylor Guitars Gold Label 517e Giveaway

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King Crimson members ADRIAN BELEW and TONY LEVIN, alongside STEVE VAI and TERRY BOZZIO approach the next chapter of BEAT. The quartet has announced a tour of the U.S. that will stage 40 appearances. The general on-sale is set for Friday, August 7 at 10AM local time. Tickets and VIP experiences will be available here: https://beat-official.com/tour. The artist pre-sale goes live on Tuesday, August 4 at Noon Eastern time with the password BEATTOUR. Fans can access the ticketing page and simply enter the code at checkout. All pre-sales will end at 10am local time Thursday, August 6.

Adrian Belew shares, “For those of you who’ve seen BEAT live, it’s important to note we’ll be adding some material from ‘90s Crim to our U.S. tour. Along with the addition of superman drummer Terry Bozzio, we feel this will result in a new experience for our audience. We’re very excited to play for you again. Don’t miss it!”

The global audience has celebrated the existence of BEAT, responding to the music, chemistry, spirit and respect this collective of esteemed musicians has brought to one of the most remarkable catalogs in progressive rock. BEAT continues to evolve whole remaining true to the music and the spirit that inspired it.

As Adrian, Tony and Steve approach the band’s upcoming activity, Terry Bozzio enters the fold behind the kit. Danny Carey remains an important part of the BEAT family, and simply his Tool commitments prevent him from being available for this upcoming run in the Fall. Steve Vai offers, “Terry is one of the truly legendary drummers of our time, whose remarkable career and unique musical voice make him the perfect artist to join us for this tour. He brings his own extraordinary artistry to BEAT, and that's something worth celebrating.” Adrian Belew shares, “Our deepest appreciation goes to our brother Danny Carey—a true BEAT-Poet. His extraordinary musicianship, generosity, humor, and explosive creativity helped establish BEAT as something far beyond a tribute. He helped create its identity. While Tool commitments keep him from joining us this fall, he remains an essential part of our family.

When the ensemble’s existence was first made public on April 2, 2024, the vision was simply to present a creative reinterpretation of the three iconic 80s KING CRIMSON albums - Discipline, Beat, and Three Of A Perfect Pair. Just over forty appearances were announced across the U.S., triggering a majority of those planned appearances reaching sold-out status in days. Additional performances were added, creating an inaugural run which staged 65 concerts across the U.S. Appearances in Mexico, South America and Tokyo’s legendary Budokan followed, most recently staging an extensive run of the U.K. and Europe performing in 31 cities this year.

When the band heads back out in the Fall, fans should anticipate some exciting additions to the repertoire being performed, with several songs rotating out while other classic King Crimson pieces emerging in to the set. Those details will come to light once the tour begins.

The itinerary kicks off on October 9 at the Quarry Amphitheater in Santa Cruz, CA, with a final appearance planned in at Riverside, CA’s Municipal Auditorium on December 3.

In front of the 2024 tour, guitarist Adrian Belew reflected, “The 1981 through 1984 King Crimson created a music all its own. Timeless. Beautiful. Complex. Fierce. For the fans who lived through it then, and the ones who never got to witness it, our aim is to bring it to life again. A monumental task but we're going for it! There are not enough exclamation points to express my excitement!”

Guitarist Steve Vai stated, “Being a part of this ensemble is an extraordinary privilege and opportunity to perform some of the most beloved, timeless, and monumental music of the 80’s (and beyond) with truly inspired musicians. This music resonates deeply with me. Father Robert Fripp is one of our historical geniuses. His highly specific and exceptionally brilliant guitar technique is studied and revered. His contribution to the quality of my musical life, and so many others is supreme.”

Bassist Tony Levin offered, “Revisiting some of my favorite music is a treat in itself. It’s also great that we’re not just playing a few shows, we’re hitting it hard. So, Road Dogs are coming to your area soon.”

Drummer Terry Bozzio shares, “All of these guys are my friends and excellent musicians who l’ve played with before! When l was asked to join this tour, l was honored & very grateful to do it!”

An exclusive meet & greet with Adrian Belew, Steve Vai, Tony Levin and Terry Bozzio will be staged at each appearance planned. There are three tiers available with limited availability. First, the “BEAT On-stage Experience” features one premium reserved ticket, the rare opportunity to watch the show from an exclusive on-stage VIP viewing area, early entry in to the venue, a pre-show meet & greet and a group photo opportunity with all four members of the band, access to a pre-show soundcheck, a limited edition autographed BEAT tour poster, commemorative BEAT ticket magnet, a specially designed BEAT record bag, an exclusive VIP merchandise item, and an official side-stage laminate and lanyard. This top tier has very limited availability. The second tier is the “BEAT Meet & Greet / Soundcheck Experience.” It features one premium reserved ticket located in the first five rows, early entry in to the venue, a pre-show meet & greet and group photo opportunity with all four members of the band, access to a pre-show soundcheck, a limited-edition autographed BEAT tour poster, commemorative BEAT ticket magnet, a specially designed BEAT record bag, an exclusive VIP merchandise item, and a Meet & Greet laminate and lanyard. The final tier is the “BEAT VIP Tour Package.” It features one premium reserved ticket located in the first 15 rows, a limited-edition autographed BEAT tour poster, commemorative BEAT ticket magnet, a specially designed BEAT record bag, an exclusive VIP merchandise item, and a commemorative laminate and lanyard. There is limited availability for each of these packages, which are available for purchase at https://beat-official.com/tour.

Flattley Pedals has introduced the “Centurion 10 AE”, the company’s special 10th Anniversary Edition of the Centurion transparent overdrive.

As it’s our 10th anniversary in 2026 at Flattley Guitar Pedals, we wanted to continue with the celebrations and add some special features to our existing Centurion transparent overdrive product by adding some extra mojo.

The Centurion 10 AE comes with purple laser etched control knobs, metallic black paint with the stunning eye-catching silver paisley skulls hydro graphics along with a purple halo LED light ring to light it all up.

The Centurion 10 AE version also got an internal make over and comes with special vintage germanium tube diodes giving the Centurion 10 AE version a whole different feel and sound than the standard version Centurion pedal. These vintage germanium tube diodes just sound so warm and soft which really suits the Centurion circuit.

The pedal’s purple halo light ring installed diffuses the light when playing live, so you can avoid being blinded by standard LEDs, and a purple laser etched aluminium foot topper gives you more real estate for contact when switching the pedal on and off during quick changes when playing live.

All Flattley "Platinum Range" pedals are hand processed in our Flattley paint shop, with a strikingly unique finish.

The Centurion 10 AE includes this control set:

Centurion 10 AE Controls

• Volume: Controls the overall output level.
• Gain: Controls the amount of gain/overdrive
• Tone: Controls the amount of treble/bass

Other features include:

• 9-volt external power operation (no internal battery option)
• 20mm purple anodised aluminium custom etched control knobs
• Purple halo light rings installed
• The Centurion 10 AE comes with a purple custom etched aluminium foot topper

All Flattley pedals are handmade and hand wired in the UK using high quality components.

The Flattley Centurion 10 AE carries a street price of $319/£259/€319. For more information visit flattleyguitarpedals.com.

Everyone remembers their first guitar – it’s by your side through thick and thin, no matter how ear-splitting your chord progressions may sound to your peers. For some, that first axe can be a gateway to a beloved hobby… or, in the case of Marcus King, learning the ropes on a 1963 Epiphone El Dorado Acoustic essentially kickstarted a Grammy-winning blues career.

Now, King has partnered with Epiphone to reimagine his legendary first guitar. The result is the limited edition Epiphone Marcus King El Dorado, which serves as yet another way King has honoured the most important, formative guitar in his musical history.

• READ MORE: This is why your guitar’s scale length actually matters

Originally, King’s father gifted him the 1963 Epiphone acoustic when he was just four. King was instantly keen to master the instrument, and he’s always speaking about the importance of the El Dorado throughout his journey. Even his 2020 debut, El Dorado, is named in honour of his all-important guitar.

“This guitar means the world to me,” he says in a press release. “My first El Dorado was a gift from my father, and it carried me through some of the earliest and most important moments of my musical journey. It has always represented family, home, and the songs that shaped me.”

While the guitar has shaped King, this comes as his chance to shape the guitar in return, as well as sharing its vintage charms with the next generation of guitarists. While the guitar’s design captures that feel of ‘60s and ‘70s era El Dorado acoustics, King’s signature sits proudly on the headstock. “Partnering with Epiphone to share that feeling with players around the world is an incredible honour, and I hope this guitar inspires people to write their own stories for years to come,” he adds.

Available in Antique Natural, the Epiphone Marcus King El Dorado sits at 25.5” in scale and is built with all-solid tonewoods. The woods in question consist of a square-shoulder dreadnought body, rosewood back and sides, a spruce top and a C-profile mahogany neck, There’s also a custom pickguard modelled after the one on King’s vintage El Dorado guitars.

Credit: Epiphone

In terms of the headstock, alongside King’s autograph, the design draws inspiration from 70s MIJ-era and include a bone nut, Epiphone Deluxe tuners, and a mother-of-pearl Epiphone logo. Further down, the fingerboard is rosewood, with 20 frets and rounded-corner mother-of-pearl block inlays. The acoustic is also kitted out with L.R. Baggs Element Bronze under-saddle pickup and preamp.

King recently released Darling Blue / No Room For Blue back in May, and the blues rocker is also set to embark on a tour across North America this August.

The limited edition Marcus King El Dorado is available now for £949. For more information, head to Epiphone.

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