Category Archives: News

Even some of the nicest guitars are not above the fray of guitar upgrades. In most cases a guitar, right out of the box, isn’t going to be perfectly suited to your own preferences and playing style. Like an archer tweaks and adjusts his bow, so a guitarist will customize and upgrade their instrument until…

One of the earliest and most popular effects for cleaner styles is reverb. When Fender started making amps with a reverb unit built inside the amp case, we had the birth of surf music, and instrumental rock. This was a huge influence on guitars sounds for decades. and fueled the British Invasion bands that swept over…

I read online forums a lot and I always have to laugh to myself when I read that someone wants a chime-filled single coil sound from their hot humbucker, or when someone wonders why their Les Paul sounds nothing like their Strat. True, I didn’t know these answers when I first started, and there were no…

Few pickups are so amazingly well designed that they take on almost any magnet you throw at it as the SH-5 Custom. There are three totally unique pickups available in the Custom family, all of which share the same basic ‘DNA’ – the coils and baseplate – but differ in its type of magnet.

KISS’s Tommy Thayer has one of the coolest jobs in the world: he gets to hop up on stage every night and occupy the persona of the Spaceman, one of KISS’s four classic characters. Although the role was originally inhabited by Ace Frehley, and Thayer is mindful of paying tribute to the classic guitar parts…

It’s fairy common to read about sustain in guitar reviews. Some guitars have lots of it, some have less. We sometimes perceive that a guitar is better if it has lots of sustain compared to if it doesn’t. Let’s pull on a thread to unravel the tapestry of what ‘sustain’ means in a technical and musical sense.

Seymour Duncan and Queensryche have had a long and fruitful partnership over the years: our pickups have been a part of the Queensrÿche sound for decades, and the band met vocalist Todd La Torre at our NAMM party a few years back.

Seymour Duncan takes all the guesswork and stress out of finding the best pickup for your acoustic guitar.  Let’s face it, chances are if you own an acoustic guitar, are it’s special to you. It feels like a part of you. When you decide to amplify it, you want to capture its tone as best you…

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. The guitar above has not been left out in the sun and is not melting. What you are seeing is the ergonomic design of Greg Opatik and the flagship instrument of his new company Sinuous Guitars from Grand Rapids, Michigan. While focusing on the inherent shortfalls of traditional designs, Greg’s…

Virtually every guitarist alive has a go-to sound that they enjoy jamming with on a daily basis. While there are no limits to the sounds we guitarists can come up with, there are some basic guidelines to keep in mind when we cross the line from jamming to recording. Before we go any further, this…