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Sweetwater’s Guitar Month is always a great time if you’re looking for a new electric, acoustic, amplifier or effects pedal, with exciting discounts and a whole new range of exclusive special editions. Let’s dive into some of the most eye-catching savings and exclusives Sweetwater is offering this Guitar Month!

Big Discounts

Designed after the drive sounds of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s cranked dumble, the Lenny boost/drive pedal gives you impeccable bluesy, crunchy drive sounds, and for Guitar Month you can save $120 on it – well over 50%!

This rather gorgeous D’Angelico has a big discount of $800 – almost half off. If you’re enamoured by D’Angelico’s curly, art-deco aesthetics but don’t want to lose the power and simplicity of a rock-ready single-cut, the Deluxe Atlantic is a great choice.

Who says tube amps need to break the bank – or your back? The Blackstar St James 50-watt tube head is a specially-designed amp with a unique power supply that drastically cuts down on the weight. For Guitar Month it’s not just lost the weight, as it’s been discounted by a tidy $450!

We cannot help you learn Bleed – but an eight-string Boden might get you closer tonally, with great ergonomics that make sustained prog-metal riffs easier on the mind and body. And for Guitar Month, it’s seen a great discount of $540 dollars.

Yamaha’s excellent effect-laden acoustic guitars are brilliant options for people who want all-in-one solutions for reverb and chorus in situations where pedalboards aren’t an option – while still being great acoustic guitars in themselves. This particular instrument has been discounted by a very pleasing $200!

New Exclusives

Sweetwater Exclusives are always pretty cool, and there are some particularly enticing ones at the moment. Last month I reviewed the Gretsch CVT Baritone and absolutely loved it, giving it a 10/10 – and exclusive to Sweetwater are two cool new finish options – Satin Black and Shell Pink.

The Shell Pink continues with a set of exclusive Player II Modified Strats and Telecasters – also available in eye-catching Fiesta Eed. The guitars themselves are true to their names, with classic Fender designed updated for the needs of modern players.

Need to stand out on stage, more so than an Acoustasonic makes you stand out by itself? This Sweetwater-exclusive Arctic Gold finish lends some extra panache to Fender’s unique hybrid design

Far from an early draft of a Prince song, Purple Doghair is actually a very cool finish option available for PRS’ well-regarded NF 53 guitar. Loaded with some unique pickups and with a distinct take on the T-type design, this extremely eye-catching variant is only available at Sweetwater.

This mini reissue of EQD’s excellent Bellows Fuzz Driver brings the same JFET-based saturation to a pedalboard-friendly mini pedal format, and Sweetwater carries this rather fetching black-on-teal variant (with fiery red knobs) to stoke some extra inspiration.

Explore Sweetwater’s Guitar Month here.

The post Sweetwater’s Guitar Month is here – with new exclusives, and big discounts appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

IK Multimedia has launched the TONEX Board, its “most advanced” hardware platform and “the centrepiece” of its TONEX ecosystem.

Combining IK’s AI Machine Modeling technology with AmpliTube effects, dual signal paths, and touchscreen control, the TONEX Board puts a complete rig into a compact pedalboard in a first for the brand.

So far, IK’s TONEX range has landed glowing reviews from Guitar.com, with its TONEX Plug rated 8/10 and its small TONEX One pedal landing a 9/10 for its “excellent tones”.

• READ MORE: Headrush brings real amp looks to the powered cab game with new FRFR Cab Series

With the all-new Board, users can run up to four Tone Models simultaneously (2,000 Premium Tone Models are included at launch) across two independent signal paths. Players can then combine these with 76 effects from AmpliTube and TONEX, plus all-new processors, using up to 12 effect slots.

The Board hosts a five-inch high-resolution colour touchscreen and six controls for building and editing your rigs, while a range of performance modes, independent stereo outputs, an assignable stereo effects loop, MIDI, and expression control provide the connectivity and control needed for recording, rehearsal, and stage use.

New content, effects, and capabilities are planned for release through future updates for the Board, but at release it includes the following software:

• TONEX Modeler to capture amps, pedals, cabinets, and full rigs
• TONEX software to import, download, and play Tone Models as a standalone or plugin version
• TONEX Board Editor to transfer existing Tone Models and presets

TONEX Board users will also have exclusive access to TONEX Player 2.0 Beta, which offers dual-rig editing with all 76 included effects, TONEX Board preset saving, and full bidirectional transfer of Tone Models and presets between Mac or PC and TONEX Board using the TONEX Board Editor.

Learn more and hear how it sounds in the videos below:

The TONEX Board is available now for $/€999.99 from the IK Multimedia website and IK dealers worldwide.

The post IK Multimedia’s new TONEX Board is its  “most advanced” hardware platform yet: here is everything you need to know appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Keith Richards has shared how he came to fall in love with the Fender Telecaster, and why it suited his work in The Rolling Stones.

The Telecaster celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. In honour of the milestone, Fender has launched a number of celebratory Anniversary Collection Teles that integrate archival finishes and modern touches, as well as the revival of more obscure takes on the Tele shape, including the nameless Nocaster. A collection of P-Bass 75th Anniversary models also landed in May.

• READ MORE: “He was so proud of himself”: Paul McCartney’s wholesome reaction after playing with the Rolling Stones on Hackney Diamonds

Among a number of artist interviews for Fender’s “love letter to the Telecaster” on YouTube, Richards shares how his love for the Tele began: “So for a lot of the ’60s, my main work was with Gibsons. I wanted that bottom full end, and really I got into the Fender – especially the Telecaster – when I was hanging around with Ry Cooder for a while. We were playing around with tunings. He was showing me this five string open tuning on G.

“I just got interested in it and I found that the only guitar that could really sustain the chords and give you a beautiful, I don’t know… There’s no words for it. Every note is in place. And then I started to really discover what Leo [Fender] had invented. This is where I feel at home,” he says.

“And of course, the Stones is a two guitar band; you try and match your guitar to what the other guy’s playing, you know? In this case it was Brian Jones for most of the ’60s. He loved [to say], ‘You play that and in that case I’ll play this.’

“I mean it’s a piece of wood with some electronics on it, but these things can take on a soul of their own. You get affectionate about [these] things.”

Watch the full video below:

You can shop Fender’s 75th anniversary models for the Telecaster and P-Bass over at the Fender website.

The post Keith Richards explains the guitar magic of The Rolling Stones, and why the Tele became the number one choice for him: “You try and match your guitar to what the other guy’s playing” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

$1,499.99/£1,499, martinguitar.com

There’s a certain prestige that comes with Martin acoustic guitars, and for good reason. The near-200-year history of America’s oldest surviving guitar brand means that regardless of price point – and the brand caters from sub-$1k budgets all the way up to high-end Nazareth-PA-made instruments – there’s a faith and confidence that many of us guitarists have in Martin instruments before we pick them up.

• READ MORE: Martin 000-10E Retro review: “it authentically distils everything that’s great about 000 guitars”

There’s no escaping that a Nazareth-made Martin will cost you a pretty penny these days however, but there are also plenty of guitarists that want things that the affordable X series doesn’t offer – such as all-solid construction.

The Road Series has been bridging the gap between the base Mexico-made Martin line and the Standard Series for three decades now, and the newly refreshed range aims to make that more diverse and interesting than ever.

Perhaps inevitably, much of the attention the Road Series refresh has got has focused on the Retro guitars – with their classic looks and aging-toner’d tops – but Martin is a guitar company that isn’t just about the past.

The Modern side of the Road Series is where you’ll find specs and features that tailor to people whose acoustic needs evolved beyond the 1940s. It’s here you’ll find progressive body shapes such as the GPC and Inception for example, but also where you can indulge in that most controversial of Martin dreadnoughts – the cutaway. And that’s exactly what we’ve got here.

What is it?

While the Retro side of the series recreates the time-honoured Nazareth designs that have been fan favourites for decades – with traditional non-cutaway silhouettes, solid-wood builds and vintage-style hardware and appointments – the Modern side offers more contemporary ergonomics and wood pairings.

The DC-13E Modern features cutaway dreadnought body, with a solid Spruce top, though gloss-finished compared to the matte of the Retro, paired with a Koa Fine Veneer back and sides. You’ve also got a scalloped spruce X-bracing, high-performance taper neck which joins the body at the 14th fret, and an ebony fingerboard with 20 frets.

You’ll notice with a bit of digging that the newly revamped-for-2026 Road Series that each guitar in the lineup – on both the Retro and Modern sides – are labelled with either a 10, 12 or 13. This essentially relates to their degree of aesthetic luxury, if you will. Style 10 is the more basic end of the proposition, while Style 13 is the most visually decked out.

With that, with the DC-13E Modern, you get slightly more eye-catching – yet still understated – mother-of-pearl Diamonds and Squares inlays, white binding, and rather fancy looking skeletonized open-gear tuners.

All of this is paired with versatile Martin-designed E1 electronics, with controls and an onboard tuner placed conveniently and discreetly inside the soundhole. A well-spec’d Road Series Martin guitar for $1,500 is a strong proposition, but how does it measure up?

Build quality and usability

Pulling the guitar out of its semi-rigid gigbag, the first impression is probably not the best one. This is a Martin aimed at modern players after all, with a cutaway to enable easier upper fret access – so why is the action so high?

It’s pretty good at the lower strings for cowboy chords, but things get pretty tiring when you venture above the 10th fret for chords and single-note runs. A quick eyeballing down the neck reveals that the culprit is predictable but annoying – a bow in the neck.

Given that the Northern Hemisphere has been on fire for most of the last few months, I’m prepared to chalk this one down to temperature-induced warping – I’ve not come across any other Road Series guitars with similar issues – and a quick quarter turn on the truss rod makes things much more flat and even throughout.

It’s a timely reminder that acoustic guitars are temperamental beasts and if you’re buying a guitar sight unseen from the internet, you may have to do a bit of basic set-up work when it arrives.

Following the neck adjustment, the DC-13E offers an otherwise stellar playing experience that you’d expect of a Martin acoustic. It’s a big boy, of course, but the cutaway helps to make this a more manageable playing experience, especially when seated. This is further helped by the Performing Artist neck with a High Performance Taper – which offers a wider fretboard the further up the neck you go – is well suited to modern players partial to both complex chord voicings and lead lines in the higher registers.

In terms of build quality, it might be a Style 13 model and therefore one of the more aesthetically fancy guitars in the Road Series lineup, but the extra visual appointments are subtle. This is a Martin guitar, after all; it can speak for itself without being too visually ‘loud’. The Diamonds and Squares inlays make for a beautifully sophisticated look, completed by the headstock’s skeletonised open-gear tuners. As with other guitars in the Road Series range, these can be a bit sticky, but they do a good job of holding their tuning and allowing precise adjustment.

While this might be a Modern guitar, the DC-13E doesn’t want you to feel like you’re fully piloting a piece of technology, so it’s a nice and welcome touch that the controls and tuner for the E1 system are hidden inside the soundhole for easy access.

Sounds

The DC-13E boasts a wonderful tonal profile that you’d expect from a Martin Dreadnought, with terrific projection, sparkly highs and a strong midrange, although lacking ever so slightly on the low end front. The guitar otherwise passes the open G chord test with flying colours, and offers a superbly dynamic profile, with heavy chord strums as satisfying as subtler, more articulate fingerstyle playing.

Indeed, a good acoustic guitar feels like it’s alive alongside you, reacting in real time to the subtle dynamic changes in your playing. And on this front, the DC-13E quickly becomes an extension of yourself as you play it.

The Modern models in the newly updated Road Series are said to deliver stage-ready performance. And a large part of this is down to the onboard Martin-designed E1 electronics, which do brilliantly in retaining the timbre and character of the unplugged DC-13E, while allowing amplification in stage and other performance scenarios. I notice very little tweaking is required to nail down a stellar amplified tone – it’s pretty much plug and play, which is very welcome.

Should I buy one?

If you’re a player who loves that unmistakable Martin look and sound, but also dabbles in more contemporary-style playing further up the neck, the DC-13E Modern could be just the ticket. A Mexican-made Martin for $1,499 would be a solid addition to any serious acoustic guitarist’s collection – or even the perfect forever instrument – and save for a slightly high action out the box which I felt needed adjusting, the DC-13E Modern is a solid all-rounder with pretty much all pros and very few cons.

Martin Road Series DC-13E Modern – alternatives

If you want your Martin a bit more traditional then the Road Series has you covered with the D-12E Retro ($1,349), or if you want something that really does offer the most modern playability and feel imaginable, then the SC-13E Modern ($1,799) is your offset-bodied Martin of the future. Of course, when people talk about ‘modern’ acoustic guitars, they’re often alluding to Taylor, and the brand’s similarly Mexico-made 210ce Plus ($1,399) offers all-solid build and a cutaway.

The post Martin Road Series DC-13E Modern review: a stunning cutaway Dreadnought aimed at contemporary players appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Pop on a Queens Of The Stone Age track, and Josh Homme’s riffs are instantly recognisable. Years of experimentation went into his thick, distinctively dark and downtuned guitar tone – but Homme didn’t follow the conventional playbook of a hard rock guitarist. In fact, his first introduction to the guitar was through polka music.

Speaking on the Queer the Music podcast, Homme reflects on the limitations of growing up in California’s the Palm Desert. In particular, when he was keen to learn guitar, it was slim pickings in terms of who could teach him. “In the desert, there wasn’t a lot of guitar teachers, apparently,” he laughs. Instead of asking what style a teacher taught, if you found a teacher “it was like ‘You teach guitar? Good.’”

• READ MORE: “This was a divine intervention for me. It was everything that I was looking for”: Jake Kiszka on finding his “Beloved” Gibson SG

The one teacher available happened to be Tom Polanski, a polka guitar teacher. Polanski ended up teaching Homme guitar for two years. “So polka was my original style,” Homme explains. “And I’m actually really thankful for that, too. Because, if you listen to No One Knows, [it has] that sort of polka thing – [the beat] goes one – down, two – up… which is also what reggae does as well.”

In the past, Homme has explored how his unconventional guitar education helped carve out his unique tone. On Noisey’s Guitar Moves series in 2013, Homme explained that he has since developed his own ‘Josh Homme scale’, refined over years of melding polka, Jimi Hendrix techniques and altered blues scales.

While the desert didn’t have much going on, Homme also tells Queer the Music that “boredom” lead him to music. Being from a “very empty, very idyllic small town”, he had to entertain himself. “The gift of nothing is a very real thing,” he explains. “In the boredom… you’re allowed to practice playing guitar, piano, or drums.”

Homme also notes that his first musical obsession wasn’t even the guitar – it was the drums. “I used to play with chopsticks on wicker dirty clothes hampers… beats were always important to me,” he recalls. However, his dad was hesitant to splash out on a drum kit for a nine-year-old. Instead, he gave Homme a challenge: “if you play guitar for five years and you’re accomplished, then I’ll buy you a drumkit.”

Of course, Homme’s dad’s challenge ended up making Homme obsessed with the guitar. And that’s what he does best to this day with Queens Of The Stone Age. The band’s latest record, Perfecth, is due to drop October 30, and a pair of teasing singles, Insignificant Other and Easy Street, are already out.

Queens Of The Stone Age’s Perfecth drops on October 30. You can pre-order it now.

The post Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme on why his first guitar experience was playing polka: “In the desert there wasn’t a lot of guitar teachers” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Ever since their debut single topped Billboard’s Rock Chart in 2017, Greta Van Fleet have been scrutinised by the press. While Highway Tune and every subsequent release has been a hit, listeners and critics have branded them as “derivative” rock ‘n’ roll, with many citing their similarities to Led Zeppelin. However, guitarist Jake Kiszka argues that Greta Van Fleet’s sound is more “nuanced” than the press might have you believe.

In a new conversation with Guitar World, Kiszka argues that there is a “lineation between innovation and imitation”, and Greta Van Fleet fall on the side of innovation. “People perceive our sound to be one way, but, in reality, it’s far more complex and nuanced than that,” he says.

• READ MORE: “This was a divine intervention for me. It was everything that I was looking for”: Jake Kiszka on finding his “Beloved” Gibson SG

He believes that a lot of the heat Greta Van Fleet have faced was exacerbated and fuelled by online forums and trolls. “There’s a lot of negative commentary that perhaps comes from the evolution of Greta Van Fleet, and how quickly it exploded and how polarising it has become… and there’s a lot of controversy on the internet, which has expedited and proliferated it,” he explains. “It was just a fire in the corner, and now it’s a conflagration.”

Kiszka also admits that people labelling his band as “saviours of rock ‘n’ roll” certainly didn’t help. “I think that’s a misconception as well… [it’s] an inaccurate representation of us…” he says. “We’re a bunch of young guys who grew up in mid-Michigan, in a little town somewhere. And in a garage, we fell in love with American blues and music of all cultures from all places.”

And anyway – is rock ‘n’ roll dead or in need of saving? “I don’t think so,” Kiszka says. “It just lays in wait, you know? And then it’s there for the next generation to pick up.”

Back in May, Greta Van Fleet sparked breakup rumours after releasing a cryptic social media video. However, they’ve recently confirmed that they’re still together, and their fourth album, Palace For The People, is dropping on 9 October. The release will be their first record since 2023’s Starcatcher.

The group have already shared a pair of new singles: Saw You Stand and Play Your Games. They also pulled off an intimate $20 show in New York City at the end of May.

Palace For The People from Greta Van Fleet is available to pre-order now.

The post Greta Van Fleet’s Jake Kiszka says people who dismiss them as being imitators are ignoring the “far more complex and nuanced” reality of their music appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The world of digital guitar amps and effects has got dramatically better in recent years, leading even sceptics like Joe Bonamassa to come around to them but not Phil X.

In a new interview, the Bon Jovi band member stated his belief that there are still ways that you can tell the difference between a real amp and a digital one – and even listed three ways that he thinks you can tell if a guitar player is running through a tube amp or a model. 

• READ MORE: What’s more important, your guitar or amp? Phil X reckons he has the answer

He told Guitar World: “Playing with, you know, tube amps and stuff like it really dictates how you can approach getting all those dynamics where modellers, you know, you’re kind of stuck with that sound and it’s a little more nuanced where you where you have a lot more there. There’s three characteristics that scream fake to me.

“One is the squeal. It just sounds when guys squeal, it just it sounds like the old like kidney pod or something, right? And then, the chunkiness that you get from an amp like Unchained… that violence is hard to replicate with the modeller. 

“It’s not an EQ thing. It’s violence. It should be a violence knock. And then chords. Sometimes you hear a chord and it’s just mush. You don’t hear the note separation. Those are the three things for me that scream fake.” 

Phil X has been a member of Bon Jovi since 2013, playing lead guitar with the Livin’ On a Prayer hitmakers for 13 years. He uses Friedman amplification and became a Gibson artist in 2019. 

He’s previously been outspoken about the quality of his playing. For years the guitarist would refuse to play Gibson products, and explained why in an interview two years ago. 

“I got used to playing with the hardtail piece, and then I wanted an SG, but I have a thing for quality control,” Phil X tells Guitar Summit [via Ultimate Guitar]. “So for the longest time, Gibson wasn’t so good with the quality control. And that’s a long time ago.” 

The guitarist elaborates, “And it’s not me — I could walk in and I could pick up a beautiful Les Paul that looks amazing, but it doesn’t sound very good and it doesn’t feel very good because it wasn’t set up right, because of the quality control, or the lack thereof.” 

“And for me, it’s like, ‘I don’t care.’ I put it back. But you got a kid who saves all their money to go buy it, and Gibson Les Paul because Jimmy Page uses it, and they get a non-good version of it for, like, $4,000 that they saved. And that kind of bugged me.”

The post Phil X explains the things that “scream fake” when he hears someone using a digital guitar amp: “Violence is hard to replicate with the modeller” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Every guitarist, in time, will develop guitar specs that they prefer, one of those specs, regarding playability, is the fretboard radius. Radius has more to do with how a guitar feels under your fretting hand than almost any other spec on the sheet, and it decides how low your action can go before your bends start dying.

So what is fretboard radius? Well, first of all, I’ll bet that some of you reading this didn’t even realise that the wood of your guitar’s fretboard probably isn’t perfectly flat, but actually has a very subtle curve running across its width.

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

And that’s what fretboard radius is talking about – it’s a measurement of the way in which the wood of your fretboard is curved. Still not following me? Picture a circle, and then slice a thin strip out of its edge and lay it across the neck.

That arc is your fretboard surface, and in order to measure this surface, we use the radius of the circle that you took that thin slice out of.

The bigger the radius number – and the bigger the circle you’re pulling from – the flatter your fretboard will be. So, for example, a vintage Fender guitar would have a radius of 7.25 inches, meaning that the slice comes from a relatively small circle.

Modern Fenders run to a flatter 9.5 inches, while Gibsons are generally flatter again at 12 inches. PRS sits in the middle at 10 inches. Ibanez’s Wizard necks are very flat in the 15.75-17-inch range, while a classical guitar has no radius at all and is completely flat (sometimes called “infinite radius”).

The Bending Debate

The biggest question you might be having is why are most guitar necks radiused at all? Radius was added to the guitar design long ago to adapt to the fact that your hand isn’t flat.

Wrap your fingers around a barre chord and they form a natural curve. A rounder board matches that curve, which is why cowboy chords and barre work feel so easy on old Fenders.

Flat boards make chording feel like pressing strings against a table. It’s fine for a classical player with proper left-hand position and the neck up at 45 degrees. Less fine for someone playing an open G with their thumb hooked over the top.

But there is a potential trade-off there, and that’s to do with bending strings further up the neck.

When you bend a string, you push it sideways across the board. On a curved board, sideways means uphill. Bend the high E at the 15th fret and the string travels toward the crown of the arc, where the frets sit higher relative to the string’s straight path from your fingertip to the saddle. If your action is low, the string loses clearance over the frets ahead of your finger and the note chokes out.

This is a famous issue that many players have found with Fender’s preferred vintage 7.25-inch radius. These guitars feel wonderful for chording, when you attempt a full-step bend above the 12th fret dies on the fret in front of it.

The fix is raising the action, which trades one problem for another. Flatter boards suffer less from this because the crown is lower. A 12-inch Gibson board will take noticeably lower action than a 7.25-inch Fender board before bends choke.

Now, there are plenty of eminent guitar experts who will tell you that a properly set up 7.25-inch radius guitar will take whatever you can throw at it. There are few men more obsessive about the minutiae of electric guitar design than Paul Reed Smith, and he dismissed the idea that you can’t bend on a vintage Fender as “new internet lore”.

He’s joined in his fight by John Mayer who dismissed the idea that his PRS Silver Sky was somehow problematic for having a vintage Fender radius, claiming that, “The difference between 7.25” and 9.5” is less significant than your strap being an inch higher or lower. I’ll fight anybody on that.”

As with most other things in guitar, the debate never stops!

What About The Compound Radius?

In 1978, a luthier named Denny Rauen was refretting a Stratocaster for a customer who wanted his Strat set up with the same low action as his Les Paul. Rauen got the action down, tried a bend, and hit the choke problem head on. His solution was a fretboard with more than one radius – one that’s round at the nut, where you generally chord, and flat at the heel, where you’re generally adding bends to a solo.

He called it the multi-radius fingerboard and published the idea in American Lutherie and String Instrument Craftsman in the mid/late 80s rather than patenting it. Warmoth picked it up, renamed it the compound radius, and the term stuck. Today Jackson and Charvel run 12 to 16-inch compounds as standard, Fender’s American Ultra line goes 10 to 14, and Warmoth still cuts its classic 10 to 16.

Now the part that gets muddled in forum threads. A properly made compound radius board is a section of a cone. Your strings aren’t parallel. They splay outward from a narrow nut to a wider bridge, and each one needs to travel in a straight line at a consistent height over the frets. A cone is the one surface that lets every string in that fan lie flat along it. Rauen understood this from the start, which is why he also called his invention a conical fingerboard.

The distinction worth knowing is between a true conical board and a blended one. CNC-cut boards from good makers are genuine cone sections, with the radius opening up continuously from the first fret to the last. Some cheaper boards and plenty of hand-modified ones are really two or three cylindrical sections sanded together at the transitions. This requires some careful fret leveling to get right. I’ve done it myself and admittedly, I’ve screwed it up a time or two before I got proper jigs.

So Which Is Best For You?

The obvious answer is that if you are playing chords, get a rounder radius, if you want to do bigger bends, get a flatter radius. For shred, flat or near-flat is what you’ll want. Wide legato stretches, tapping, and sweep picking all reward a board where every string sits at an identical, minimal height. That’s why Ibanez has kept the Wizard neck up around 17 inches for decades and why so many extended-range and metal builds push flatter still. The cost is that first-position chording feels slightly alien, which is a price most shredders happily pay – nobody pays to see Yngwie Malmsteen play cowboy chords, after all.

Two practical notes before you go shopping. First, your saddle radius should follow your board. Set a flat saddle arc over a 9.5-inch board and your middle strings sit too low. On a compound board, set the saddles slightly flatter than the last fret’s radius. Second, if you love your vintage-radius guitar but hate the choking, a good tech can level the frets with progressively more fall-away above the 12th fret, effectively cutting a compound into your existing fretwire. It’s a $100 fret dress instead of a new neck, and on a 7.25-inch board, it’s the single best playability upgrade money can buy.

Regarding radius, my advice, as always, is to play as many guitars as you can. Radius is one spec, but it is not a spec that exists in a vacuum – there’s also neck contour (the shape of the back of the neck), neck width, string spacing, etc – all of which can have a subtle effect on a guitar’s playability and feel. So play on, and when you find something you like, figure out what that is and stick with it.

The post Why your guitar’s fretboard radius matters more than you think appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Blackstar has confirmed their Beam Solo app will receive a huge, free overhaul on iOS and Android. While the update is available on iOS from August 28, Android users will need to wait until September 30 to get their hands on the new tools. 

We were hugely impressed with the Beam Mini when we reviewed it earlier this year, and as part of that review we got a sneak peek at how impressive the Moises tech can be. Said tools offer stem separation technology, meaning app users can separate the guitars from the rest of the mix for almost any song streamed or played from your device in real time. 

READ MORE: Blackstar Beam Mini review: “a new benchmark for practice amps”

Those using the app can now instantly mute the guitar and isolate the guitar parts for easier fret learning. You can also turn down the vocals and perform the song yourself with this new app update. 

All those using the app need to do is connect to your Beam Mini or Beam Solo, start playing their music and adjust the mix with the slider options available in real time. 

Several features are included as part of the Mosies Integration update. This includes premium stem separation free for all Beam users, as well as the ability to turn down other instruments and vocals by 25% in order to better hear the guitar part you’re trying to nail. 

The really impressive thing is that this is compatible not just with the Beam Mini practise amp, but also with the tiny Beam Solo headphone amp, and the update has already rolled out on iOS devices, with Android following at the end of the month.

Find out more about the new update from Blackstar. 

The post Blackstar’s BEAM just became an even more useful practise tool with this major free update appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Long before he was in Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was a young upstart session guitarist in London, mixing with an all-star cast of future guitar legends. And in a new documentary about the Fender Telecaster, Page reveals the time he received an incredible gift from Jeff Beck that would alter his entire guitar trajectory.

• READ MORE: Fender Telecaster: 75 Years Of History

In the Fender-produced documentary, The Fender Telecaster: The One That Started It All, Page reveals that as a very young man making his way in the London session scene, Eric Clapton had recommended Page his guitar replacement in The Yardbirds in 1965, when Slowhand left to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. 

Page, who was barely 21 at the time, decided to turn the offer down, instead suggesting his friend at the time, Beck, as an alternative. The rest as they say, is history. The Yardbirds would be transformed with Beck on guitar, pushing them into groundbreaking new musical territory, and enjoying major label success and multiple chart hits over the following year.

The Yardbirds made Beck a star, and he wouldn’t soon forget the part Page had played in his success, and on the back of The Yardbirds signing their major label record deal, he paid his friend a visit.

According to Page, the guitar legend rolled up in a newly bought 1963 Corvette Stingray with the guitar in hand. He recalled: “I was still living with my parents at the time in Epsom. And I heard this car come roaring up. 

“I looked out the window and I saw this blue Stingray outside… and Jeff’s coming out and he’s holding this guitar. [I thought] ‘Oh, he’s come to have a play.’

“He knocked on the door and explained that [the Yardbirds] had just done a new deal and he bought the Stingray with it. Then he said, ‘Here, this is yours’ and gave me his 1959 Telecaster. He said, ‘This is yours for getting me in the Yardbirds.’ Well, obviously, I was really moved, you know, because there was a lot of love in that gesture of giving it to me.”

Beck had used the Telecaster in his early days as guitarist in the Deltones – he borrowed it from bandmate John Owen, who soon asked for it back, and Beck moved on to find his legendary 1954 Esquire as his number one. It’s unclear exactly how the guitar ended up back in Beck’s possession full-time, but by the time he joined The Yardbirds it would be a regular backup and alternative to the Esquire.

Before long however, Beck’s guitar preferences evolved and he moved on to his Les Paul, leaving the ’59 Tele in need of a good home, and given how hard it was to get Fender guitars in the UK in the 50s and 60s it was obviously the perfect gift for a young guitar player.

Page would use the guitar throughout his stint in The Yardbirds, before the guitar would have an even more important part to play in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. When Page formed The New Yardbirds with John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plant in the wake of the original band dissolving in 1968.

By that point, the guitar had changed dramatically from its original form, with Page stripping and painting it with an artwork all of its own. “I painted it in one go over the course of an evening, finishing it the next day,” Page later explained. “The pattern took on the imagery of a dragon. I was quite happy with the way it ended up. Now it was the ‘Dragoncaster.’ 

The guitar would become a staple of the early recordings of his new band, who quickly changed their name from The New Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin. “I played it on the last Yardbirds recordings at the Anderson Theater in New York and on Led Zeppelin,” Page explains. “Once it was created and painted it became like the legendary Excalibur as it traveled from the Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin.”

And without Beck’s bit of generosity, things could have turned out very differently.

Watch The Fender Telecaster: The One That Started It All now on Fender’s YouTube channel.

The post Jimmy Page recalls the life-changing guitar gift Jeff Beck gave him: “This is for yours for getting me in the Yardbirds” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The impact of Eric Clapton‘s Unplugged is hard to overstate. The recording of Slowhand’s legendary MTV set has sold over 25 million copies, and over 30 years after its release in 1992 remains the best-selling live album of all time. Quite asides from the sheer numbers, Unplugged is credited with revitalising mainstream interest in acoustic guitar music, and no less than Chris Martin IV himself once claimed the album “saved the Martin guitar” – and revitalised interest in 000-style instruments. However, the most remarkable thing of all might be that Clapton himself never even wanted to release it.

In a new interview with Guitar Center, Clapton admits that he outright “didn’t want” Unplugged to be released. He was so certain that it would flop that he even bet on its downfall. “There’s 100-dollar bill on the wall of [ex-Warner Brothers president] Lenny Waronker’s office that he won from me, because I said ‘I bet you $100 it won’t even go into the top 50,’” he reveals.

• READ MORE: Joe Bonamassa’s second collaboration with Martin is a stunningly accurate recreation of his prized pre-war 1937 00-18

Thankfully, Waronker put his foot down, because he believed that Unplugged had the makings of a “hit album”. Of course, he was right; the former president of Warner Brothers had an ear for a hit. But Clapton had tried his hardest to resist a formal release. “I wanted to do a deal with them… to put it out as a limited edition,” he says. “Just 500 copies or something. I just didn’t want to hear it anymore… I had a real aversion to it for a long time.”

Despite his initial “aversion”, Clapton’s Unplugged has become a key part of his history. “That’s the Clapton that people know,” he admits. “People didn’t really a lot of what I was doing before that – the music was either far too underground or too poppy. I [recently] thought, ‘Okay, I have to listen to [Unplugged] again.’”

When Chris Martin IV’s praise for Clapton’s Unplugged is revealed, Doyle explains that the CEO has crowned Clapton as a saviour of the Martin Guitar. Clapton is unwilling to accept the praise outright, instead focusing on how wild it is to go from admiring Martin guitars through shop windows to having his own signature axes with them.

“When I was a kid… I saw a Martin Dreadnought [in Kingston Market],” he remembers. “There was a crowd gathered round this guitar case, and they opened the lid, and there was a Dreadnought in there… I thought, ‘Wow! One one day, I’m going to have one of those… that’s the most beautiful shape… Picasso could have done that!’”

Now, Clapton’s latest signatures in the Crossroads 2026 Marin Collection will surely be admired by budding guitarists through shop windows. Alongside some John Mayer models, Clapton has the Martin 000-42 EC and Martin 000-13E EC, with both six-string acoustic-electrics wearing Clapton’s favoured 000 shape.

The Crossroads 2026 Collection also recreates Clapton’s Blind Faith Telecaster. With just 130 in existence, the Tele has the unique Frankensteinian mish-mash of a sunburst single-cut body and a Stratocaster neck.

For more information on the Crossroads 2026 Martin Collection, head to Guitar Center.

The post Why Eric Clapton never wanted his Unplugged album to be released, and bet his label boss $100 it was going to be a flop appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

TONE3000 has spent the last few years building what it claims is the world’s largest library of guitar tones. And we’ve been hugely impressed when we’ve used it. Now, instead of making you hunt them down one by one, it’s putting the whole thing inside a plugin.

The company has launched the free, open-source TONE3000 plugin, giving guitarists and bassists direct access to more than 700,000 Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) captures and Impulse Responses (IRs) from within their DAW – or through a standalone app.

• READ MORE: New firmware update lets HeadRush users tap into a world of open-source guitar tone captures

Until now, using a tone from TONE3000 involved a little more work than you might expect: find the capture online, download it, unzip it, organise the file and load it into a separate NAM plugin. Want to try another? You’ll have to do it all again.

The new plugin cuts out that faff. Musicians can now browse TONE3000’s library from inside the plugin, with captures covering amps, pedals, speaker cabinets, full rigs, outboard gear, acoustic spaces and even some weird experimental setups.

Log into your TONE3000 account and you can also access your saved favourites, recently used tones, your own creations and private tones without leaving the plugin.

And because the library is constantly growing, you don’t have to wait for a plugin update to get your hands on new sounds. Every new tone added to TONE3000 becomes available through the plugin immediately, with no additional purchase required.

Unlike the traditional amp-sim model, where you buy a plugin and get a fixed collection of sounds, here, the TONE3000 plugin acts more like a gateway to a library that keeps expanding as the community adds to it.

Under the hood, everything is powered by NAM A2, the latest generation of Neural Amp Modeler technology developed by TONE3000 with NAM creator Steve Atkinson. For the uninitiated, NAM is free, open-source technology that uses AI to model analogue gear by learning from recordings of physical amps, pedals and other equipment.

“Because the TONE3000 Plugin is open source, right now is the worst it will ever be,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO Stanley Vergilis. “We’re excited to see what the community does with it.”

“With A2 we made captures dramatically more accurate, but accuracy doesn’t matter if loading a tone is a chore,” adds TONE3000 co-founder and CTO Woodbury Shortridge. “The plugin is where the architecture, the community library, and players finally meet in one place. Every layer is open source by design. We’re betting the future of tone belongs to the people creating it, not to whoever owns the technology.”

The plugin also goes considerably further than simply being a tone browser. You can stack unlimited NAM A2 captures and IRs to build signal chains, run dual chains with branching and panning, create stereo images and apply EQ at different points in the chain.

The TONE3000 plugin is available now for macOS, Windows and Linux, with VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP and LV2 support, as well as a standalone version. It works with major DAWs including Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cubase, Reaper and Bitwig Studio.

And, importantly, it’s free. Of course, if you want to take these tones into the real world, there are myriad options, from Blackstar’s impressive BEAM practice amp, to the more gig-ready situation of Headrush’s full stable of amp modelling pedals – NAM is truly taking over the world of guitar modelling in 2026.

Download the plugin today at TONE3000.

The post TONE3000’s new free plugin gives you access to over 700,000 guitar tone captures appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

If you’ve wanted to use your digital guitar unit of choice in a live context, but still want the authentic experience of moving real air, Headrush has pretty much been the standard-setter for some time now.

The company pretty much invented the market for FRFR (Full Range, Flat Response) guitar cabs that has exploded as the likes of Neural DSP, Fractal, Kemper and Helix have offered us a wealth of new ways to sound good in the digital sphere. But as the market has grown, so the competition has increased for your powered cab dollar – and it’s perhaps no surprise that the king of the sector has come back firing on all cylinders.

• READ MORE: New firmware update lets HeadRush users tap into a world of open-source guitar tone captures

The most striking thing about the new FRFR Cab series is their look and form factor. When the original FRFR-108 launched back in 2019, it made sense that the brand would envision it primarily as monitors for guitarists going direct into a PA, and as such they were shaped like classic speaker wedges.

Of course, a LOT has changed in the world of digital guitar acceptance in the seven years since, and it was notable how many guitarists had their interests piqued by Fender’s Tone Master FR-12, with its traditional amp aesthetics, when it launched alongside the Tone Master Pro back in 2023. In fact, the FR-12 has been such a hit with guitarists who want the look of a real amp while still running their Quad or their Helix, they even made a tweed one.

The new FRFR Cabs lean heavily into this, with both an 8-inch and 12-inch versions that have the classic closed-back look of a combo amp, complete with a vintage Marshall-style split grille cloth, black tolex, and a top-mounted control panel with classic gold amp knobs. The cab’s wooden now too, as opposed to the plastic of old. If you want to retain the aesthetic of a classic guitar amp on stage while still having the full-on Headrush experience, this is the cab for you. And if you do still need to tilt them back in the manner of old, each cab has a pair of tilt back legs so you can set them up at the angle of your choosing.

Of course, it’s not just about the looks here – the sound is why people love Headrush FRFR cabs, and they’re not messing around. Joining the single eight- or 12-inch speaker in your chosen cab, you’ll find a custom-designed low-frequency woofer with a 1-inch high-frequency compression driver and a wide 90° conical horn. All that means you’ll get a full, rich frequency response across the spectrum, and if you want to use your cab to run backing tracks or other non-guitar sounds, it’ll do it with aplomb.

And did we mention these suckers are loud? Headrush never spare the wattage when it comes to their FRFR cabs, and these are no exception, the FRFR-8 will deliver a monster 480W Peak/240W RMS (200W LF/40W HF) of pure power, while the FRFR-12 gets even more ridiculous with 750W Peak/325W RMS (285W LF/40W HF).

You also get the quality of life stuff like bluetooth 5.3 connectivity, a XLR/TRS combo input for easy hooking up to any modelling pedal, a 3-band Baxandall EQ with high-cut filter to adapt your sound on the fly to the room you’re in, and rugged, road ready build quality.

“Guitarists and bassists building their sound in a modeling pedal deserve a cabinet that gets out of the way and lets that tone come through, on stage, in the studio, wherever they play,” said John Boudreau, HeadRush Director of Product Development. “The FRFR CAB Series pairs that accuracy with the feel of a real amp cabinet, so the rig sounds and feels like home no matter where you’re plugging in.”

The FRFR-8 CAB is $399/£279 while the FRFR-12 CAB is $499/£359 – both are available now.

Head to headrushfx.com for more. 

The post Headrush brings real amp looks to the powered cab game with new FRFR Cab Series appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Fender Telecaster: 75 Years Of History

[shorthand url=”https://nme-networks.shorthandstories.com/fender-telecaster-75-years-of-history/index.html”]

The post Fender Telecaster: 75 Years Of History appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

$549/£519, gretschguitars.com

By the end of this year, I’ll most likely have reviewed more baritone guitars than regular-scale instruments. There are a bunch of reasons that guitar culture is thoroughly embracing the whole baritone thing these days, but enough wrangling on about Loathe and Sleep Token has been done in these reviews alone to fill a nine-volume encyclopaedia. So, let’s take the fervent appetite for baritones as a given, and look at another of this year’s new heavy-focused Gretsch instruments: the Jet Baritone.

• READ MORE: Do you really need a baritone? A complete guide to guitar scale length

What is it?

The Jet Baritone is the sibling instrument to the CVT Baritone, which I reviewed a short while ago, and also absolutely bloody loved. That guitar was treading some new ground for Gretsch, in that it was utilising the niche, recently-revived Corvette body shape, and working with a 27” scale length. The Jet, on the other hand, is much more within Gretsch’s established wheelhouse of baritones – it follows the G5260 from a little while ago, the thing that arguably kicked off this whole accidental association between Gretsch and modern metal. Like that guitar, we’ve got the more vintage 29.75” scale here – just a quarter-inch short of a Bass VI.

So what’s different this time? Well, like with the CVT, Gretsch has abandoned its more vintage, restrained sonic palette – lest we forget that the Loathe-featuring demo video featured more pummelling downtuned riffs than you could shake a long-scale stick at, calling to attention a spec-sheet that’s more metal than a Slayer gig in an industrial blast furnace.

Both of the 2026 Gretsch baritones have launched with the new Twin Six humbuckers, full-bodied things that will handle heavy sounds a lot better than the vintage-output pickups more commonly found in Gretsches. There’s also a more neutral, flat stop-bar tailpiece, rather than the vintage-style V stop-bar, and we’ve got coil-splitting push-pulls controls for both pickups if that’s your thing.

The Jet shape is still quite classically Gretsch – dating back all the way to 1953 when the brand went “oh crap, everyone seems to be buying a hell of a lot of solidbody guitars these days” – but the aesthetic touches here bring it into a classy modern metal mould fairly seamlessly. It’s all nickel hardware and dark wood (I much prefer the Imperial Stain here to the Bristol Fog of the CVT) with nice cream binding that has the secondary effect of keeping the outline of the guitar present and readable when you invariably play it wearing a black t-shirt.

The only headscratcher is that the pickup rings are made of a slightly tinted clear plastic. It’s subtle and by no means ruins the look, but it smacks of “we had a few extra boxes of translucent magenta pickup rings lying about” more so than “this will be a cohesive addition to this guitar’s aesthetic”.

Build quality and usability

The Jet, like its sibling guitar, is built in a way that belies its mid-level price tag – this thing feels very premium for something that costs £549. The electronics are high quality, with all-metal knobs and push-pull posts that give a reassuring clunk upon operation. The tuners are fairly prosaic sealed ones, but they’re more than functional and even with some silly tuning experiments, I never have the guitar drift out of tune.

Ergonomically, it’s an interesting thing – it takes, as you’d imagine, some getting used to, even for me, who plays a baritone basically every day. The 29.75” scale is well into Bass VI territory, which means quite a hefty span. The benefit is that a set of Bass VI strings and the right setup could absolutely see this thing stay stable down to double drop C# (IE, with the lowest string a casual 15 semitones lower than regular E standard).

As it stands, I stay between B standard and drop F, and have a perfectly pleasant time in doing so – tunings around B and A feel very taught indeed, while Drop F is obviously a bit slacker, the extra scale means the guitar handles it very well.

The body is relatively heavy, but what it loses in lightweight chuckability, it gains in feeling solid and well-balanced. The neck, which feels hilariously long (and makes standard-scale guitars feel like ukuleles after a week or so of testing) , always presents properly, and even if your arms and shoulders have to get used to a slightly wider stance. Not absurdly so, though – in converting the guitar to a baritone, the bridge has thankfully been moved quite far down the body, which means the string length isn’t totally off-centre.

The neck profile is a very middle-of-the-road thing, and while middle-of-the-road is seldom a ringing endorsement, it’s no bad thing here. Despite the metal focus, this is not a shred machine; it’s a riff machine. So there’s enough meat that it feels substantial and meaningful in your hands as you shift around power-chords, but it’s not thick enough that you’re just fighting it the whole time. It’s a little sticky and glossy, sure, but that’s really just its one concession to its price point – given that it’s in the £550 range, I’d have no bones about taking some Scotch-Brite to it too if you wanted a more satin feel.

Sounds

The Twin Sixes are, in my view, pretty damn good pickups. However, while the extra scale length here brings out a bit more punch in higher tunings like B and A standard, that extra punch highlights that the pickups are a little on the sludgy side, particularly if you venture down towards the Bass VI range. This is great for playing, well, sludge metal, but their meatier output is pretty full-spectrum, and compared to their performance in the CVT they get just a touch less controlled in the low end if you want tighter chugs.

While it’s perhaps unfair to compare this guitar to something almost ten times its price, I’m reminded of the LSL Baribone I recently looked at – specifically the Bareknuckle Impulse that was chosen for its bridge position. That was a pickup voiced for heavy-focused baritones, and you could really hear it – here, the limitations of a slightly more broadly-voiced thing become a little bit more apparent.

The good news is that you can split the Twin Sixes, and while that brings some extra noise, setups that seek that chuggier, brighter sound will invariably be using a gate anyway. The split-coil sounds here through high-gain are actually really engaging, with a super twangy, djenty feel that brings back some extra articulation – although this may be a little too far the other way for some.

Of course, these split-coil sounds are well-suited to clean and ambient sounds as well. They won’t win any awards for outstanding depth and clarity, but they do the job well enough. As with the CVT, they remain pretty full-sounding and loud even in split-coil mode, so they won’t do a true impression of something like a Fender Bass VI – but that’s likely not your use-case for a guitar like this. For ambient textures and clean intros, they’ll get you there.

Should I buy one?

There’s clearly an audience for this kind of guitar, and I think Gretsch has absolutely delivered for them – the longer scale means it’s flexible from tight standard-baritone things all the way down to truly extreme tunings, with electronics that are more than ready to handle heavier sounds.

The build quality and general togetherness of the instrument would make it an easy recommendation anyway, but it helps that it’s also pretty unique in its space. Realistically, if you’re enamoured with the vibe and aesthetics and are looking for an instrument of this scale length, I’d heartily recommend – the sounds are great at the moment, and as the pickups are easily-swapped humbuckers, they could get even greater down the line.

Alternatives

An obvious alternative is of course the CVT equivalent ($/£599.99) with much the same specs but a shorter scale of 27” and a double-cut body. For a more offset vibe but staying in the HH mode, Squier has just released the Paranormal Jazzmaster HH baritone ($/£479.99), and the Fender Player Fusion Jaguar Baritone ($1,299.99/£1,049).

If you’d rather a more vintage set of sounds but want the same long scale, there’s both the Fender Vintera III Early ‘60s and Classic Vibe Bass VIs ($1,499/£1,229 and $569.99/£509 respectively), or the Danelectro ‘56 Baritone ($599).

If you’ve dry-heaved every time you’ve read the word ‘vintage’ in this review, and you play in the kind of band that has a separate budget for sacrificial goats, there are plenty of more explicitly metal baritone options out there with a more minimal, sharper aesthetic – such as the ESP LTD M-201HT ($599).

The post Gretsch G5260 Electromatic Jet Baritone review: more long-scale chaos from Gretsch appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

TONE3000 has spent the last few years building what it claims is the world’s largest library of guitar tones. Now, instead of making you hunt them down one by one, it’s putting the whole thing inside a plugin.

The company has launched the free, open-source TONE3000 plugin, giving guitarists and bassists direct access to more than 700,000 Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) captures and Impulse Responses (IRs) from within their DAW – or through a standalone app.

• READ MORE: New firmware update lets HeadRush users tap into a world of open-source guitar tone captures

Until now, using a tone from TONE3000 involved a little more work than you might expect: find the capture online, download it, unzip it, organise the file and load it into a separate NAM plugin. Want to try another? You’ll have to do it all again.

The new plugin cuts out that faff. Musicians can now browse TONE3000’s library from inside the plugin, with captures covering amps, pedals, speaker cabinets, full rigs, outboard gear, acoustic spaces and even some weird experimental setups.

Log into your TONE3000 account and you can also access your saved favourites, recently used tones, your own creations and private tones without leaving the plugin.

And because the library is constantly growing, you don’t have to wait for a plugin update to get your hands on new sounds. Every new tone added to TONE3000 becomes available through the plugin immediately, with no additional purchase required.

Unlike the traditional amp-sim model, where you buy a plugin and get a fixed collection of sounds, here, the TONE3000 plugin acts more like a gateway to a library that keeps expanding as the community adds to it.

Under the hood, everything is powered by NAM A2, the latest generation of Neural Amp Modeler technology developed by TONE3000 with NAM creator Steve Atkinson. For the uninitiated, NAM is free, open-source technology that uses AI to model analogue gear by learning from recordings of physical amps, pedals and other equipment.

“Because the TONE3000 Plugin is open source, right now is the worst it will ever be,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO Stanley Vergilis. “We’re excited to see what the community does with it.”

“With A2 we made captures dramatically more accurate, but accuracy doesn’t matter if loading a tone is a chore,” adds TONE3000 co-founder and CTO Woodbury Shortridge. “The plugin is where the architecture, the community library, and players finally meet in one place. Every layer is open source by design. We’re betting the future of tone belongs to the people creating it, not to whoever owns the technology.”

The plugin also goes considerably further than simply being a tone browser. You can stack unlimited NAM A2 captures and IRs to build signal chains, run dual chains with branching and panning, create stereo images and apply EQ at different points in the chain.

The TONE3000 plugin is available now for macOS, Windows and Linux, with VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP and LV2 support, as well as a standalone version. It works with major DAWs including Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cubase, Reaper and Bitwig Studio.

And, importantly, it’s free.

Download the plugin today at TONE3000.

The post TONE3000’s new free plugin gives you access to over 700,000 guitar tone captures appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

When King Crimson first disbanded in 1974, it seemed like Robert Fripp was ready to settle down in the Sherbourne countryside and withdraw from the limelight. However, David Bowie’s request for Fripp to feature on 1977’s Heroes put a halt to his temporary retirement – because, when Ziggy Stardust comes a-knocking, you can hardly turn him down.

While Fripp’s feedback-heavy, multi-layered guitar performance on Heroes is now iconic, Fripp thought that Bowie “took a chance” when he first enlisted him to feature on the track. “I didn’t view myself as a working player at that time, having just been in retreat for 10 months with no intention of going back to anything like that,” he admits in a new interview with Guitar World.

• READ MORE: Alex Lifeson reveals the Rush song he “really struggled with” learning to play again for the band’s reunion: “My hands are not operating like they once did”

Although the King Crimson frontman wasn’t too optimistic, Bowie was adamant that he wanted Fripp. “When David asked me to provide guitar, I just said, ‘Well, I don’t know… but if you’re prepared to take a chance, so am I,’” the guitarist recalls.

The recording session saw Fripp flying out to Berlin’s Hansa Studios with his Les Paul, no amplifier, and a small selection of pedals (a volume pedal, a wah and a fuzz box). Despite his stripped back arsenal, Fripp still impressed Bowie and his producer, Tony Visconti; in a January interview with Guitar Player, Visconti recalled Fripp’s innovative ability to utilise studio monitor feedback as an instrument in and of itself.

That’s right – the EBow-like effect on Heroes is Fripp utilising monitor feedback. “Fripp had a technique in those days where he measured the distance between the guitar and the speaker where each note would feed back,” the producer explained. “For instance, an A would feed back maybe at about four feet from the speaker… He had a strip that they would place on the floor, and when he was playing the note F sharp he would stand on the strip’s F sharp point. and F sharp would feed back…”

Needless to say, Fripp nailed the job. Bowie loved his work so much that he even tried to bag Fripp as his full-time live guitarist – but Fripp kindly turned him down. He had ran away to a country home to escape touring, and even Bowie couldn’t tempt him to return to the stage just yet: “I just said, ‘No… I’ve just come off the road after six years of touring!’”

Despite his rejection, Bowie was keen to work with him again, asking Fripp to perform lead guitar parts across his 1980 record, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). On their second collaboration, Bowie knew he could ask anything of the talented Fripp – even if that meant asking him to embody the energy of another player.

“I remember I asked David, ‘Any suggestions?’ because there’s any number of ways you can go,” Fripp recalls in conversation with Guitar World. “He said, ‘Think Ritchie Blackmore’. I didn’t expect that, but I understood what he meant.”

Rather than outright copying Blackmore’s tone, Fripp captured the same aura and swagger of the Deep Purple legend. “Did I sound like Ritchie Blackmore? No,” he admits. “But I’d seen Ritchie in the Outlaws in Poole when I was 17, and his playing was phenomenal! He had all the moves. So I’d seen Ritchie, I’d heard Ritchie, and I wasn’t going to play like Ritchie would… but I knew what David meant!”

The post “If you’re prepared to take a chance, so am I”: how working with David Bowie helped lure Robert Fripp out of an early retirement appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

After more than a decade away from the stage, even Alex Lifeson wasn’t sure he was ready to step back into Rush. The guitarist says the pressure of preparing for the band’s Fifty Something reunion tour became so intense that, at times, he found himself questioning whether he had made the right decision.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Lifeson opens up about the nerves and “self-doubt” that crept in during the final weeks of the band’s 14-month rehearsal period.

• READ MORE: Alex Lifeson reveals the Rush song he “really struggled with” learning to play again for the band’s reunion: “My hands are not operating like they once did”

“14 months of rehearsal, it was difficult,” says Lifeson. “In the last month of rehearsals, there were times I was sitting on the edge of my bed at two o’clock in the morning thinking, ‘Did I make the right decision? Can I do this? Can I play? Am I good enough?’”

As Lifeson explains, getting back to Rush wasn’t just about relearning the songs. After so long away from the stage, there was the physical challenge of playing a full show again, along with the pressure of meeting the standard he had set throughout his career.

Geddy Lee felt much the same pressure. The singer and bassist says the band’s return demanded more preparation than anything he had done before, with the full show being rehearsed 24 times in 27 days during the final month and a half.

“In my history as a musician, I don’t think I’ve ever rehearsed quite as much as an individual, and also as a band,” Lee says. “Of course, we needed to, because it was a monumental task.”

“Coming back at this age, your fear is that you can’t do it anymore, and you’re going to be a compromised version of yourself. And I don’t want that,” Lee continues.

Thankfully for Lifeson, those nerves finally gave way once the band actually stepped onstage.

“It wasn’t really until Sunday, when we played that gig, that it all kind of came down this funnel and spilled out,” he says. “It was at that moment that I thought, ‘Yeah, this has all been worth it. This is where I really am happy to be.’ I’m tired this week. But I’m really, seriously happy.”

Watch the full interview below.

The post Alex Lifeson on the self-doubt that crept in before Rush’s reunion tour: “There were times I was sitting on the edge of my bed at two o’clock in the morning thinking, ‘Can I do this?’” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

With decades of session work under his belt, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter is no stranger to unusual requests in the studio. The guitarist, best known for his work with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, recently recalled one particularly colourful brief from country legend Dolly Parton, who passed away last week at the age of 80.

Speaking to Guitar Player, Baxter looks back on the session for Parton’s 1978 song Baby, I’m Burnin’, where she asked him for “fireworks” on a guitar solo.

• READ MORE: Jeff “Skunk” Baxter on surviving the excess of the ’70s: “There was always something in the back of my mind that scared me. I didn’t want to lose my chops”

“Dolly Parton asked me to make fireworks one time,” he says. “I was working with my Roland guitar synthesizer, and she said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’”

“So I thought about it for a second, and then with one hand I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the Roland’s [pitch] transposer, slapping it back up and down,” Baxter recalls. “She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’”

As unusual as the request might sound, Baxter says this is simply part of being a session player. Artists don’t always explain what they want in technical terms, so it’s often up to him to work out what an abstract or non-musical description actually means in guitar terms – and turn it into something that works on the record.

“Sometimes you get requests like, ‘Can you make it more green?’ or, ‘I need it to ooomph more,’” he says. “So you say, ‘Okay,’ and think about all the times you’ve ever done sessions and people have said to you, ‘Boy, that really ooomphs,’ or ‘That sounds really green,’ and you start from there.”

“There have been a couple of dates like that. I enjoy it,” Baxter continues. “I get a lot of calls for steel guitar where they say, ‘Can you make it not sound like a steel guitar?’ That’s always a request. They want something different. They want a sound that has the fluidity of the steel guitar but doesn’t sound like Six Days on the Road.”

The post Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter recalls the time Dolly Parton asked for “fireworks” on a guitar solo: “She said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Mike Campbell may not be a fan of the Telecaster’s looks, but he’s got plenty of good things to say about playing one, calling it a guitar that “always works”.

In a recent chat with Guitar World, the former Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist explains why the Fender classic has become one of his go-to guitars, particularly when he’s stuck trying to find the right part in the studio.

• READ MORE: Fender continues 75th anniversary celebrations for its Telecaster and Precision Bass – including a “meticulous tribute” to the Nocaster

“The Telecaster always works. It always seems to find a spot in the band that works, and it just sounds right,” says Campbell, who currently fronts his own band, The Dirty Knobs. “If I’m stuck in the studio, I can grab the Tele and I know it’s going to work – I’ll find something that’ll fit the track.”

He also likes the fact that the Tele is straightforward to play, comfortable to hold and tough enough to take a beating.

“They’re easy to play, and they’re not heavy. You pick it up, it sits on your lap and feels balanced. Then, when you stand up with it, it still feels balanced!” Campbell says.

“You can hit it hard, and it won’t go out of tune. And between the two pickups, it’s got a range of tones where you can get a really clear sound or you can get really nasty.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Campbell describes the Tele as a “workhorse”.

“It’ll do anything you want it to do,” he says.

His connection with the guitar also goes back to his earliest days as a player. Campbell’s first Telecaster was actually a Broadcaster, the name Fender used for the model before it was renamed the Telecaster.

“Actually, my first Telecaster was my Broadcaster, which is from a few years before they changed the name. That’s an irreplaceable guitar,” he says.

These days, Campbell has a couple more in his collection, including a ’59 and a ’56 fitted with a string bender. But his appreciation for the Telecaster wasn’t always quite so strong.

“Now I have a couple; I’ve got a ’59 and a ’56 that’s got a string bender on it. But to be honest, back in the day, I always thought Telecasters were kind of ugly,” he says.

“Strats had that great shape, and Les Pauls have those beautiful curves, but the Telecaster always looked like it was thrown together with leftover parts! [Laughs] Now, I think that’s kind of the beauty of it.”

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