Collaborate Disseminate
Many students of guitar begin their journey on an acoustic. But rocking out can be a challenge. Back in 2017, France’s HyVibe launched an Indiegogo to fund a hybrid with built-in digital smarts. This was followed by a kit to give such superpowers to an… Continue reading Self-install Essential kit turns any ol’ acoustic into a smart guitar
Whether you’re after a hand in home renovating, a quick path to tinnitus or a surefire way to sour your marriage and estrange your neighbors, this Fender guitar pedal designed by My Bloody Valentine’s sonic mastermind Kevin Shields may be able to help…. Continue reading The guitar pedal that threatens to bring the house down, literally
Like Fender’s Parallel Universe guitars, the Squier Paranormal series explores bizarre model combinations and “what if?” oddities, but at more budget-friendly price points. The latest release includes a 12-string Jazzmaster, a Strat with Gibson appoint… Continue reading Fender goes oddball on a budget with Squier Paranormal guitars
Learning to play guitar is tough, and though there’s no replacement for hard work and practice, technology can lend a helping hand. The mu6label is the latest gadget in the space, a bendy AI-powered device that attaches to a guitar’s upper edge and inc… Continue reading Smart learning device sticks a personal teacher to your guitar
Eddie Van Halen was more than just a keyboard player. He was also pretty good at guitar, and throughout his long career, he proved himself an extraordinary technical innovator. Frequently, these innovations were extremely violent. He’d attack a guitar … Continue reading Review: EVH Wolfgang Special is a catalogue of Eddie’s brilliant ideas
The pickups assigned to the different positions on an electric guitar’s toggle switch are preset by the maker, and tweaking them involves breaking out the soldering iron and lots of experimenting. The HyperSwitch uses the power of a smartphone and a Bl… Continue reading HyperSwitch allows players to reconfigure guitar pickups using a mobile app
Back at NAMM 2019, Nashville’s Ciari Guitars launched an interesting travel guitar called the Ascender that featured a beautifully engineered folding mechanism which allowed players to transport the instrument in a backpack-sized case. Now the company … Continue reading Ascender folding travel guitar embraces sought-after P90 tones
There are numerous devices available to connect a guitar to a computer or smartphone for recording in music production software, and many allow access to digital effects. The Jam X includes an analog compressor for built-in tone shaping.Continue Readin… Continue reading Apogee builds tone shaping into latest USB guitar interface
For most of us, vacuum tubes haven’t appeared in any of our schematics or BOMs in — well, ever. Once mass-manufacturing made reliable transistors cheap enough for hobbyists, vacuum tubes …read more Continue reading Reshoring Vacuum Tube Manufacturing, One Tube at a Time
While the history of these things gets pretty murky, most folk seem to agree on a few things about gold foils: firstly, they hit the market around the middle of the 20th century, embedded in cheap guitars from Harmony and Teisco. Secondly, they’ve got … Continue reading Foiled again: We’ve been playing Fender’s new gold-foil Telecaster