Take a walk down New York’s 8th Street in modern times and you’ll find barely a sniff of the 60s counterculture that once pulsed in this neighbourhood. There is just one last holdout against the gentrification of Greenwich Village. Blink and you’ll m

From its sonic heritage to its sumptuous styling, the new Gibson Falcon promises a journey back to the 1960s. Not so much a direct replica of the original 1961 GA-19RVT Falcon, this amp is more of an ‘influenced by’, re-engineered update with a conte

It can’t have been an easy decision. In a brief statement about the forthcoming auction of Jeff Beck’s guitars in London, his widow, Sandra Beck, wrote movingly that: “These guitars were his great love and after almost two years of his passing it’s t

Back in issue 518 I kicked off a collaborative domestic build with Jason Snelling at Maybury Guitars. To be fair, ‘collaboration’ is used in its loosest sense as Jason did the hard work, creating a cool body from recycled timbers, turning a paddle he

Album: Psych Ward (Flip Flop Records) Cardiff-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Steve Logan makes intricate music that blends folk, Americana, blues and rock, sometimes with an acoustic edge and sometimes in an all-out rock style. Psych Ward lea

Virgin (available now) Guitarist CHOICE Deluxe boxset and remix of Queen’s first album For many, the first introduction to Queen’s music was on BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973 when the track Keep Yourself Alive was aired with a promotional film

On the first occasion that Bill Puplett returned an instrument to me (a Guild F-50 jumbo acoustic), my reaction was one of astonishment. There seemed to be only two possible explanations: either he’d purloined the unplayable, pudding-sounding origina

When I tell my lutherie students that building an acoustic guitar from start to finish can take around 200 hours, I’m never quite sure whether they will perceive if that’s a long time or not. Given that the raw state of my materials resembles a tree

Electro-Harmonix seemed to hit the ground running in 2005 when it released the first version of its Polyphonic Octave Generator, which offered several octave voices with solid tracking. Since then, there have been plenty of different POG versions and

Album: Woodland (Acony Records) The long-awaited new album of original material from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings comes 13 years after they worked together in a co-writing capacity on The Harrow & the Harvest and four years since cover album All

Tutor Richard Barrett | Gear used Lewis Pequeno Bastardo & Vox AC15 C1 Difficulty | 10 mins per example MELODY AND RHYTHM are almost inextricably linked. I say ‘almost’ because you can have melody or harmony without a distinguishable rhythm, and rhyt

There are few bands that combine roots rock, classic rock, Americana and bluegrass with the blissful ease of Larkin Poe. As far as the guitars go, sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell were born to do it. They’re dyed-in-the-wool lovers of all things time

CONTACT Gibson PHONE 00800 44427661 WEB www.gibson.com 1 Gibson Hummingbirds are hardly new, are they? Indeed. The model first appeared in Gibson’s catalogue in 1960 and there have been plenty of variations over the past 65 years. This new series has

Vic Flick – who died on 14 November, aged 87 – was not a widely known name. Yet as one of the UK’s most prolific session men of the 60s, and beyond, every single one of us will have heard his work. From Dusty Springfield’s I Only Want To Be With You

CONTACT G66 PHONE 07392 395520 WEB www.fractalaudio.com 1 Fractal? Doesn’t it specialise in amp emulations? Well, yes, the Axe-Fx III is the company’s flagship unit, but it also has loads of effects onboard – and the VP4 provides those effects for us

CONTACT Fender Musical Instruments EMEA PHONE 01342 331700 WEB www.fender.com 1 These don’t look very different from the current Ultra models… This Ultra II series is more of a smart spring clean. The key elements are retained, but the neck-wood swit

For vintage guitar enthusiasts, a shopping trip to the US is surely a fixture on the bucket list. Nashville, LA and Chicago may seem like the obvious destinations, but don’t discount New York – you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I recently travelled the

Walrus Audio started up back in 2011 with its first pedal, the Voyager Overdrive, a three-knob Klon-style stompbox that found favour with the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Ed O’Brien and Nels Cline. Now, for 2025, the company has brought out an updated ver