Guitar.com

Paul McCartney has cautioned young bands against over-reliance on music-making “gadgetry”, noting that musicians should instead focus on the fundamentals of playing, learning, and songwriting.

Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe ahead of the release of his new solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, the Beatles star shares how different recording conditions once forced musicians to commit to their ideas in ways that are less common today.

• READ MORE: “I like him, but he’s a bit pushy”: What Paul McCartney really thought of Andrew Watt during their early sessions together

Citing the 4-track as an example, McCartney says, “With the four-track, you’ve got to wipe things because there’s only four tracks and you may want to do eight things. You take two tracks where you’ve got, let’s say, drums and bass, and you reduce them to one track, which frees up these tracks so you can keep recording.”

He explains that that added constraint was not a drawback but part of the creative process.

“That’s actually a great thing,” says Macca. “I say to young bands nowadays, don’t rely too much on the sort of gadgetry. Just play it all, learn it all, write it all because it’s better.”

While he remains open to experimentation (“I like odd things. I like tape loops,” says the musician), McCartney notes that there is a difference between using technology as a tool and depending on it as a substitute for musicianship.

“What will happen is a lot of people rely on it,” he says. “So you get records that sound like they’ve been made by gadgets. I don’t like that.”

That said, McCartney also acknowledges that modern conveniences like the smartphone have transformed the way he captures and develops musical ideas. Having a recording device in your pocket at all times, he says, means unfinished songs can be saved instantly and revisited later.

“[In the past] you always had to finish a thing because there was nowhere to put it. You had to put it in your mind. So you had to finish it. So you did.”

“Now I must have over a couple of thousand sketches on my phone because I’ll put it down and think, oh yeah, okay, I’ll come back to that. I’ve saved it. It’s okay,” he says. “Because of the luxury of a phone, if you don’t have long but you got an idea, you’ll put it down.”

Watch the full interview below.

The post Paul McCartney’s advice to young bands: “Don’t rely too much on gadgetry. Just play it all, learn it all, write it all” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

$349, positivegrid.com

Hands up if you’re sick of hearing about AI? It is the two letters everyone seems to be getting increasingly fed up of here in 2026, as promises of generative AI solving all the world’s problems a year or so back seem to have ended up with a reality where the technology’s primary application seems to be driving your friends to psychosis, rendering your job obsolete or, at best, ensuring that your next phone or laptop is going to cost dramatically more than it should do.

• READ MORE: Blackstar ID:X 50 review: “stands out by knowing exactly what it is, and who it’s for”

Obviously, not everyone feels that way, but if there’s one group of people who seem to be inclined to be even more sceptical about the benefits of large language models than the general population, it’s musicians.

Wholly AI-created music and art is straight up bad, and morally suspect along with it – you won’t find too many real musicians dying on that particular hill – but is it always a bad thing, necessarily? Are we still capable of detaching the useful and non-sketchy uses of machine learning from the attention-grabbing stuff that everyone seems to hate?

All of which is a long-winded way of observing that it’s a pretty interesting time for smart amp king Positive Grid to be launching its first real foray into creating a proper for-purpose gigging guitar amp… and one that has AI quite literally written on the control panel.

The Reactor is that amp, but PG is at pains to point out that the ‘AI’ in this case actually stands for “Amp Intelligence” – and it promises a wholly new way for guitar players to go about crafting their guitar tones…

Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – what is it?

It’s important to point out right at the top that the Reactor is deliberately and intentionally NOT a Spark product. Positive Grid’s revolutionary smart amp family has spent half a decade building up goodwill amongst the guitar community – and with good cause given how impressive the Spark is and remains as a platform.

The Spark has, on several occasions now, attempted to break away from the confines of bedroom practice – the Spark Cab made any Spark amp gig-ready, while the Spark Edge and Spark Live portable PA systems were designed to cater to whole bands.

The Spark could never fully escape its roots as a pure home practice solution, however, and so it makes sense that Positive Grid has now created a bespoke new platform that combines some of the best bits of both Spark and its BIAS X amp software, and put it into an affordable proper guitar amp.

But, Positive Grid being Positive Grid, they were never going to put out yet another affordable modelling combo into the great Katana-killer bun fight. To their credit, the brand always tries to come to the party with something new and innovative, and in this case it’s the aforementioned Amp Intelligence.

Amp Intelligence is, says PG, “a new type of sound engine that builds guitar tone on demand”. They’re keen to call it an “intelligent tone engine”, but in real terms that’s an AI chatbot that has been trained on over 200 different amplifiers at a component level – gain stages, transformers, bias points, harmonic response; the lot – and can use that in-depth knowledge of how amps work to build a tone for you on demand.

So the theory goes, that knowledge enables you to have a chat with your amp – via the accompanying Reactor smartphone app – describing the tone you want via text, an image or a sound clip. The AI will then analyse what you’ve given it, and spit out some suggested tones that you can then tweak either on the app or using the controls on the amp itself, and save forever. Like most chatbots, Amp Intelligence can apparently learn your preferences sound-wise over time, and so the more you use it, the better it’ll get at creating sounds you like.

Away from the high-tech stuff, the amp itself is impressively kitted out for one in this price point. The base 50-watt version features a 12-inch custom-designed speaker, with switchable power scaling down to 25w and 1w. Round the back you’ll also find a cab-simulated line out, USB-C for direct recording, MIDI, headphone out, power amp input and effects loop. The amp features built-in Bluetooth; both for communicating with the app, and also for streaming music directly to the unit.

Under the hood and away from the AI, you’ll find 24 different onboard amps to choose from, as well as 28 different effects types. The control panel is fully featured in a way that no other PG amp has been before – you can select from six different amp types using a classic Line 6 Spider-style rotary (from Clean to Extreme) or override them by choosing one of eight onboard signal chain presets.

You get full control of your tone stack, plus the ability to tweak the level of whatever effect is in one of the six different effects blocks. If you want hands-free control, the Reactor pairs with optional Reactor Control Bluetooth controller ($149), which offers you full wireless control of your presets, or the ability to run it in stompbox mode – if you run out of battery the switch can be plugged in, so you don’t have to worry about a lack of juice ending your gig.

Positive Grid Reactor Control Bluetooth controller. Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – build quality and user interface

Upon removing the Reactor from its box, I’m reminded that not every modelling amp can be as back-friendly as the trusty Tone Master Princeton that sits in its usual testing spot – though at 10.4kg, it’s still a good kilo lighter than the Katana 50, though a little heavier than the Blackstar ID:X.

Like all of Positive Grid’s amps, the weight is reflected in a reassuring overall build quality. The wood cabinet feels solid and well put-together, the simple black tolex and black and gold grille cloth are understated and professional, and the control panel is clearly laid out with premium-feeling knobs, switches and buttons.

As I’ve come to expect from Positive Grid, the app connection experience is pretty seamless. I downloaded a test version of the new Reactor app to my iPhone 16 and within a few seconds it had connected the amp and was displaying the signal chain for the preset the amp was currently set to. You can adjust everything in real time both on the app or on the device, and changes are reflected instantly.

We’re 30 years into amp modelling at this point, and so you’d think there wouldn’t really be much to say about the user interface and signal chain given that it’s all rather standardised at this point. Except, for some reason, rather than represent each amp and effect using easily recognisable graphical depictions of said amp – a Tube Screamer, a Marshall amp etc – they’ve opted to use incredibly ugly AI art instead.

Positive Grid Reactor app effects. Image: Guitar.com

For a variety of reasons, this sucks. For one, it sucks that the creative humans at Positive Grid don’t deem the labour of a fellow creative human artist something that’s worth paying for. For another, as a product that’s aimed at newer players, the fact that none of the amps and effects are easily recognisable as themselves makes the whole thing harder to navigate on the fly. Thirdly, they look – and I must allow myself to speak plainly here – total shit. Amps with knobs where knobs would never be, pedals with classic GenAI gibberish written all over them… who wants this?

Anyway, that aside, it’s all pretty straightforward – in fact, if you’ve ever used a Spark amp, the signal chain stuff is basically identical; it’s all very simple.

The app lacks the SmartJam and similar home practice-focused tools of the Spark app, because this is obviously a gig-focused bit of hardware, but you do still get access to the ToneCloud platform, which allows you to search and download user-generated presets. Obviously, I’m reviewing a pre-release demo version, so it’s pretty quiet in there at the moment, but if the Spark version is anything to go by, this could soon become a hugely deep library of sounds.

The last part of the app is the ‘Creator Hub’ and this is the bit where we can delay no further, we must prostrate ourselves at the feet of the Amp Intelligence.

Positive Grid Reactor app Creator Hub. Image: Guitar.com

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – does Amp Intelligence actually work?

Tapping on the Creator Hub takes you to a user interface with four options, displayed with – don’t think you’re getting away that easy – more ugly GenAI art. The options presented let you either describe your tone using text, take a photo of something you want it to create a tone out of, and the ability to upload or record a song for it to analyse.

The text one is probably the one that most of us will go to first, and so it’s where I start first, and instantly I find the hype bumping into the reality of the hardware. Perhaps it’s my fault, but when reading the blurb accompanying Amp Intelligence, I was struck by the claim that “any tone imaginable can be delivered on demand, from the familiar to never-before-heard”. That sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it? Especially when you combine that with the claim that it has “decoded over 200 amp designs at the circuit level”.

With that in mind, I don’t think it was wholly unreasonable to expect that Amp Intelligence would be able to use that circuit-level knowledge to, y’know… create a new amp sound? One that combined, say, the glassy cleans of a Fender with the full-throated roar of a Marshall? But alas no, despite various attempts to get it to mash up amp circuits in an unholy Frankenstein’s monster of tone, it always just gave me one of those 24 amp models with some EQ or other tools to make it sound like I asked for. The future, eh?

The experience of using the chatbot input will be familiar to anyone who’s tried to get any other kind of AI chatbot to do something mildly tricky. Sometimes it works like a charm and gives you what you want straight away, other times it’s massively wide of the mark.

It has a bad habit (just like BIAS X) of responding to my requests to tweak a tone by adding more stuff to the chain – if I asked it to tweak the tone stack, for example, rather than adjusting the settings on the amp, it seemed to want to always chuck an EQ pedal into the mix.

It also seems to do that thing that anyone who’s used an AI image generator will be familiar with – the more you ask it to tweak a thing, the messier the whole thing gets. In practice, it’s easier just to tweak things yourself once Amp Intelligence has got you most of the way there.

It also occasionally just completely ignores what you’re telling it, then telling me that it had, in fact, done what I asked – HAL style. After the second or third go-around in this situation, it led to me having what effectively amounted to an argument with a guitar amplifier – a situation that edified nobody involved, least of all me.

If you keep things simple and clear, however, it has a pretty good hit-rate for providing usable sounds. It also broadly knows what you’re talking about when it comes to artists, albums and the like. You can raise your own eyebrows about exactly what kind of training data the AI has been gobbling up to be able to do that, but from a user perspective – especially for a beginner-focused product – it’s a really handy tool.

Playing a song into it seems to generate more precise results than talking to the damn thing, and I imagine this would be my preferred means of input were it my daily driver. Clearly having a precise sense of what sound you’re trying to get helps it to deliver a more accurate tone out the other end.

The picture-taking option feels like a bit of a gimmick – it is quite fun to see what it thinks would be an appropriate tone for the various tchotchkes I have scattered around my desk, or indeed the handsome cat that wandered into our kitchen (“a tone that captures his playful, agile character” if you’re interested).

It is actually pretty good if you give it something less random to work with – for instance, if you take a photo of a real amp, it’ll do its best to emulate it. Equally, I was impressed with the tones it would suggest based on a picture of a guitar: I snapped a shot of the Klang DC aluminium-necked guitar Cillian recently reviewed and it suggested a bunch of heavy, doomy tones that would be a perfect companion for it.

The final option is the Fix My Tone – basically, you ask the amp to analyse your current sound, tell it what you don’t like about it, and it suggests helpful ways you could change it. While again, the results were not always flawless, the way that it explains what it’s changing and why I think is super useful if you’re a relative newcomer trying to understand how and why a signal chain sounds the way it does. It helps you understand real-world gear in a way that something like this could obscure – and that’s really useful.

What it isn’t, however, is quick. The blurb claims that the AI will spit out a tone for you in ‘seconds’ and while that’s technically true… it is quite a lot of seconds. Especially for the image prompts, I was waiting a good minute or two for it to come back with something.

That said, I’m using a TestFlight version of an app that is still in development at the time of writing, so I’d hope that when things are fully up and running, they might be able to speed things up.

Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – sounds

All the talk about apps and Amp Intelligences and what a cat would sound like if he was a signal chain does rather obscure the fairly basic questions that we should be asking about any amp – does it actually sound any good? Well, yes actually – very.

Firstly, let me get this out of the way – for a 50-watt digital combo, this thing is loud – organ-botheringly loud – especially at close range and with the amp running at full power. This is a box that could easily make itself heard in a small band, and it does so with plenty of clarity even with the master volume maxed out. It’s still punchy enough for a lot of people on 25-watt mode, while the one-watt is home practice suitable without being totally weedy – in fact it retains the punch, warmth and character of the amp even at late-night practice volumes.

If you can get past the godawful visual representations of the amps in question, the sounds here are very impressive indeed. They feel like a definite step up from the (very good) sounds found in the Spark amps, and are much closer to the studio-ready tones found in BIAS X – that 12-inch speaker does a nice job of putting them into the world, too.

Another handy bit of tone sculpting comes in the shape of two toggle switches – Heat and Smooth/Push. The former is designed to give you six different degrees of playing feel and harmonics without altering the volume of the amp. In practice this is more noticeable with high-gain tones, and it’s subtle, but a nice one to have.

Smooth/Push is basically a mid control from what I can tell – in push mode it’s sharper and easier to cut through in a mix, smooth is rounder and better suited to rhythm playing. If you’ve used the similarly named control on a Boss Katana you’ll know the deal – it’s a really useful bit of tone-shaping to have at the flick of a switch though.

Image: Adam Gasson

The effects are broadly very good without being totally spectacular – the dirt pedals have always been a strength of PG’s offering and they are the standout performers here. But you’ll find most of the usual suspects represented in some fashion here, though you’re limited to just one dirt, one modulation, one delay etc.

You might find yourself wondering why on earth there’s only one reverb – click on the relevant effects block and it appears that the only option is “studio reverb”. Thankfully, this is just some uncharacteristically bad UX – there are eight different reverb modes hidden on the ‘mode’ switch of the pedal itself that cover the bases of room, hall, plate and chamber. It’s weird to not have a spring reverb in there, though.

You can, however, move the blocks in the signal chain around at your leisure – something that’s not always the case with entry-level amps – and that’s especially useful if you want to use the effects loop. You can plug your board in and stick it anywhere you like in the chain, really opening up the sonic possibilities.

In terms of how well it takes pedals, well… it’s not going to replace the aforementioned Tone Master as my digital pedal platform of choice, but it acquits itself well, even when faced with the glitchiest fuzzes and the most cavernous reverbs.

Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – should I buy one?

 

There’s a part of me that wishes that the Reactor didn’t build the polarising and variably successful Amp Intelligence stuff so heavily into the marketing razzmatazz, because you sense that it is invariably going to be labelled the “AI amp” and prejudged on that basis.

Because in truth, you could never even glance at the Amp Intelligence section of the companion app, and this would be one of the very best affordable modelling amps on the market.

The sounds are genuinely some of the best in class, the usability and functionality is better than many of the big-hitters in this sector, and it is bloody loud along with it. You could, in the finest traditions of the Spark, spend an afternoon getting your presets set up in the app to your liking, close it down and gig for the rest of your natural life without ever once having to open it again – everything you need to tweak is right there on the amp itself.

But we live in 2026 here, and so the Amp Intelligence thing is very much a key plank of this whole endeavour – no matter how unnecessary it might be for a lot of players. That means that I have no choice but to factor it into my opinions about the product as a whole.

And look… it’s… okay? It’s better than the AI features in Spark, and probably a bit worse than the ones in BIAS X. Most of the time it does a pretty good job of crafting tones for you, and sometimes it makes you pray for the asteroid to hit the earth. Anyone who has had to use an AI chatbot for any kind of serious purpose will understand this feeling.

There is, of course, the ethical elephant in the room. Positive Grid has never provided a satisfactory answer regarding what they’re using to train their AI models with, and there is of course the environmental impact of running LLMs like this. And that’s before we get into what we were talking about up top in this review – that a large swathe of musicians are reflexively hostile to anything that attempts to inject AI into music creation.

It would be a real shame if people wrote the Reactor off on the basis of two letters printed on the control panel, because this is an impressive and serious new contender in the affordable gigging amp world.

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – alternatives

There is perhaps no sector of the guitar amp world more competitive than the one in which the Reactor is wading into. The king of the sector currently is the identically priced Boss Katana-50 Gen 3 ($349 / £269) – it’s simple to use and has a wealth of good onboard sounds. Blackstar’s ID:X 50 ($349 / £289) is an impressive recent attempt to take on the Katana, but if you want something that’s a bit more straightforward and – I cannot stress this enough – comically loud, the all-analogue Orange O-Tone 40 ($399 / £329) is a gig-ready monster. If you like Reactor’s smart amp elements but don’t need the gigging power, the Positive Grid Spark 2 ($349 / £279) is a fantastic home practice tool with less sounds overall, but a much more fleshed-out home-playing experience.

The post Positive Grid Reactor review: does your guitar amp really need an AI chatbot? appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Fender has launched a sprawling new firmware update for its multi-effects guitar processor, the Tone Master Pro.

The update brings an abundance of new amp and cab models plus effects – eight amps, eight cabs and 15 effects, to be precise – as well as a number of new features and “user-friendly enhancements”, including a second page of footswitch button assignments, a new search function and an improved looper.

• READ MORE: “Leo Fender was a technician who admired function and ease of manufacturing; he was not an artist”: guitar brands and Fender trade barbs in legal letters

There’s also a new Strobe Tuner option, a new global setting to enable Tap Tempo for Delays, a range of new footswitch assignment types for EZ Looper, Play/Stop, Record/Overdub and more, a new Song Mode footswitch shortcut, and a redesigned interface for the IR edit screen.

The Tone Master Pro now features over 100 amp and effects models, and over 6,000 Fender-captured impulse responses. A full list of the new amps and effects can be seen below:

Amps

• ’57 Champ
• ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb
• ’68 Custom Princeton Reverb
• ’65 Twin Custom 15
• Rumble 800
• EVH 5150 III 50W 6L6 Green
• EVH 5150 III 50W 6L6 Blue
• EVH 5150 III 50W 6L6 Red

Cabs

• 1×8 ’57 Champ
• 1×10 ’65 Princeton GB
• 1×10 ’68 Princeton
• 1×12 ’65 Deluxe GB
• 1×12 ’68 Deluxe
• 1×15 Twin Custom
• 1×12 EVH 5150 G12H
• 4×12 British G12H

Effects

• Lightyear – inspired by the Greer Lightspeed
• Pinions – inspired by the Earthquaker Devices Plumes
• Runes – inspired by the Earthquaker Devices Blumes
• Integrator Boost – inspired by the TC Electronic Integrated Preamp
• Grunt – inspired by the Fortin Grind
• Rockbox 100 – inspired by the Scholz R&D Rockman X100 headphone amp
• Step Tremolo – Fender original
• Prismatic Delay – Fender original
• Step Filter Delay – Fender original
• Spectral Reverb – Fender original
• Cirrostratus Reverb – Fender original
• Cirrostratus Synthverb – Fender original
• Seventy Sixer Compressor – inspired by the UA 1176 compressor
• Step Filter – Fender original
• Pitch Sequencer – Fender original

To install the latest firmware update for your Tone Master Pro, follow these steps:

1. Head to fender.com/tonemaster_pro to download the latest firmware.
2. Connect your Tone Master Pro to your computer via USB-C.
3. Hold down the firmware update button for 10 seconds while powering on.
4. Your Tone Master Pro will display a “USB Firmware Update Mode” screen.
5. Drag and drop the downloaded firmware update file onto the “FENDER_AMP” drive on your computer.
6. Your Tone Master Pro will display “Applying Updates” on the screen.
7. Your Tone Master Pro will read “Update Complete” once the firmware update is complete. Then simply restart your Tone Master Pro and you’re good to go.

The Tone Master Pro is available now for £1,589. We gave it a solid 8/10 in our 2023 review. Learn more at Fender.

The post Fender issues firmware update for Tone Master Pro – introducing tonnes of new amp and effects models appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

With a spherical roof packed with 1.2 million programmable LED puck lights, the Las Vegas Sphere is one of the most innovative live venues on Earth, capable of bringing the most ambitious of artistic visions to life.

But while many artists have been keen to bring their stage show to the Sphere – including Eagles, Metallica, U2 and Dead & Company – others have dismissed the idea out of fear the visuals would take away from their performance as a band.

• READ MORE: Metallica Sphere residency CONFIRMED

Paul Stanley recently revealed why Kiss refused to play at the venue, saying: “You’re not going there to see a band – you’re going to see screens,” adding, “The truth of it is, the Sphere minimises a band.”

And Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has shared similar scepticism, saying last year: “We just do a lot of stuff: we run around, we go around, and at the Sphere, what’s the point? What’s the point? In fact, what’s the point of even being there, if you’re a band?”

And now, Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen has spoken to SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk about his views on the Sphere, revealing that he’s attended shows there as a fan, but isn’t sure about Def Leppard’s place on the stage.

“This isn’t a diss or anything,” he says [via Blabbermouth], “but it seems that it’s the Sphere featuring whatever band it is. It could be anyone. And that’s what we’d be a bit scared of. I mean, I’d love to play there – it’d be awesome, it’s incredible, and it’d be a great experience – but I think that people focus on just the production as opposed to the band.

“So we’ll see. I don’t know. I mean, I could be wrong. But, yeah, I’d love to play there, absolutely. We definitely would. So we’ll see.”

Collen confesses he hasn’t seen a rock band at the Sphere, and has only attended the venue to watch The Wizard of Oz.

“It’s fascinating. It’s amazing,” he says. “I just wondered [what it would be like to see a band there], ‘cause I wasn’t quite sure. I haven’t seen a band in there, and that’s always a concern that you’d come out there and it’d be like, ‘Yeah, the Sphere was great. Oh, yeah and I saw U2 or the Eagles there as well,’ type of thing.

“Or it doesn’t matter, whether the whole experience kind of overshadows one or the other. It depends. But, yeah, I guess we’ll find out.”

Metallica will become the first large metal band to play at the Sphere when they arrive for four no-repeat weekends on their Life Burns Faster residency. Learn more at Metallica.com.

The post “This isn’t a diss, but it could be anyone”: Why Phil Collen isn’t convinced by a Def Leppard Sphere residency appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The importance of proper guitar maintenance can’t really be overstated. If you’ve ever found your guitar drifting in and out of tuning, or breaking strings every time you bend enthusiastically, you’ll have found this out the hard way. But alongside mechanical and electrical maintenance, keeping your guitar clean and polished, and its fretboard oiled, is essential to ensuring it looks, feels and plays its best.

Guitars are in contact with a lot of stuff all the time, particularly human bodies. Playing for two hours before chucking your guitar straight back into its case, covered in sweat, finger grime, beer and decades-old venue dust is less than ideal. We perhaps don’t pay as much attention to this aspect of guitar maintenance as we should – maybe because things like broken tuners and dodgy output jacks are far more immediate in how they affect things.

However, polishing, cleaning and condition are no less important! On a surface level – quite literally – it just doesn’t look or feel particularly great. But more crucially, not cleaning your guitar can actually lead to corrosion damaging your finish, hardware and frets over time. And not oiling your board can make it more prone to damage, and susceptible to moisture-based cracking.

For decades guitarists have been wiping their instruments down with one-size-fits-all cleaners. But not all surfaces are the same – and many cleaning products can contain silicone or petroleum, which can damage more delicate nitrocellulose finishes, and irritate your skin as you clean.

This is where StewMac’s new GuitarTek line of guitar care products comes in. The brand has been a leader for a while when it comes to the wider world of maintenance and modding – and has brought its experience in keeping guitars performing their best to three new core cleaning products.

The line consists of the Gloss Max high-shine polish, the Clean Axe total care cleaner, and the Board Oil fretboard cleaner and conditioner. Each product is engineered to perform its best in different applications, depending on what your guitar’s finish needs – and has been made from the ground-up with guitars in mind. Let’s explore what makes this new range of care products a game-changer when it comes to making pro-level instrument polishing, cleaning and conditioning easy and accessible.

Gloss Max

Gloss Max is a high-shine polish designed specifically for glossy finishes. If you’ve got a gloss-finished guitar, it can be hard to restore it to a mirror-like shine – particularly if it’s a sensitive lacquer finish. Going at something a little more delicate with a lot of elbow grease can mean you risk damaging your guitar’s look, even taking off a layer of finish depending on what product you use. But the formula of Gloss Max makes it easy for you to get a truly radiant shine on even the most sensitive of lacquers.

Clean Axe

Clean Axe is a super versatile all-in-one cleaning product that’s designed for any finish – gloss, satin and matte included. It’s able to safely remove heavy grime build-ups from your guitar’s body, neck and hardware without you having to resort to an old toothbrush and washing up liquid. It’s available as a spray bottle for easy cleaning, or as very case-friendly wipes – perfect for keeping your guitar in great condition in-between tour stops!

And as it’s designed to work with all kinds of finishes, satin and matte included, Clean Axe won’t lead to you accidentally polishing in shiny spots into your nice tasteful finish. Similarly it won’t leave a dull residue on glossy finishes, as some cleaners can be tricky to fully get rid of once you’ve applied them.

Board Oil

We all love a good open-pore fretboard, however it’s super important to keep a board like this clean and conditioned. GuitarTek’s board oil both cleans finger grease and sweat away, and at the same time hydrates and conditions dry wood – and to make things easier, it comes in a new applicator formula with a thin edge, perfect for actually fitting between frets, particularly in the upper registers.

Pro-level care matters

A broken guitar is one thing – but it’s perhaps worse to accidentally damage your prized instrument with incorrect care, and it’s even worse to be too anxious that a cleaner might affect your finish, and to leave it to sweat, dirt and dryness to do the damage instead. GuitarTek’s new line of cleaners make keeping your instrument in great condition easier and safer than ever.

Each product is formulated with Amazonian Rosewood oil and is free of harmful silicone and petroleum – this is great news for your guitar, and for your hands. If you have sensitive skin and have spent an afternoon spraying and wiping down your guitars, you’ll know that guitar cleaners aren’t often particularly friendly to your skin – but the whole GuitarTek range has been dermatologically tested to be as kind to you as to your guitar.

If you’ve been grabbing a one-size fits all cleaner for your whole guitar collection up until now – or worse, chucking your sweat-covered guitar back in its case after every gig without giving it the TLC it needs – it might be time to check out GuitarTek’s new range.

Find out more at StewMac.com.

The post Here’s how GuitarTek by StewMac’s new cleaners make pro-level guitar care easier than ever appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

So much of the sound of your guitar or bass comes before it’s even hit a pedal, let alone an amp. Technique plays a huge role, of course, as does the construction, assembly and quality of your instrument. A huge factor is the strings themselves, both the material and gauge of strings affecting the resulting sound. While there’s recommended tensions for different tunings, you can explore different tensions for both feel of the instrument as well as the tone they produce.

• READ MORE: What does it mean when your guitar’s pickup is “out of phase”? It’s not magic, it’s science…

Heavier gauge strings pull harder on the neck, closing the gap between the headstock and the bridge, and require the truss rod that runs along the neck to counteract that tension. Lighter gauges do less, and as such might cause your truss rod to be pulling too hard to counteract the tension. A little know-how, some practice and self-diagnosis can have you confidently exploring different string materials and gauges to find the sweet spot!

Raw Materials

String material has a huge effect on the tone. For electric guitars, nickel has been a common material and provides a bright, responsive tone, assuming your strings aren’t too old! Increasingly popular are coated strings, that help to reduce dirt, grime, sweat and build up getting into the core of the strings and affecting structural integrity.

Nickel and bronze alloys have always been popular, and coated strings have come a long way to preserve the brightness of an acoustic guitar. Bass guitar strings are generally pretty long life, yet there is a range of coated strings that preserve the life of even them.

Roundwound strings are generally more prone to dirt and debris, as the gaps between the string’s winds actually create more space for dirt to get in. As such, flatwound strings provide a mellow, warm sound for both guitar and bass, and are less susceptible to dirt and debris.

Image: Adam Gasson

Cable Tied

String gauge is a huge player. Traditionally you’d move up and down gauges to get the same feel and tone from different tunings, but you can use them to give your sound a unique signature as well. Heavier strings possess a punchy, low-mid presence that make them a great option for recording sessions specifically.

They’ll take a little practice to get used to, but their rigidity can also help reduce tuning issues. Simply striking strings causes them to vibrate to produce a note, and lighter strings vibrate more which can push the resulting note out of tune. A heavier gauge string can produce the same note but is harder to bend out of shape, so it’ll be more consistent.

The opposite end of the spectrum is also true and can be used to great effect for unparalleled control over vibrato, bending and expression. E Standard tuning often works well with 0.009 or 0.010 gauge strings (referring to the size of the highest string), but 0.008 gauge strings are also available. These provide an ultra-light feel, requiring very little pressure to both fret notes or bend, allowing players to bend very easily.

It’s important to keep in mind that set-up aside, your strings as a set need to balance each other out. For this reason, extreme heavy gauges on the bottom strings and ultra-light strings won’t play nice without buzz.

Image: Adam Gasson

Perfect Balance

Unbalanced tension can be a real guitar killer, the same as long term storage can on a guitar without strings strung. The truss rod that runs along a guitar’s neck is designed to counteract the pull of the strings. Heavier gauge strings offer more tension and the aforementioned punch, clarity and tuning stability, but the strings pulling harder require the truss rod to be adjusted to retain a flat fretboard.

Understanding this, as well as making small, incremental adjustments can help to navigate setting up a guitar with different strings. When using lighter gauge strings, you might find that your previous truss rod tension is too much for the light strings, and it gives the fretboard a convex shape. Here, the truss rod needs to be loosened to ensure the tension is all balanced as you explore different strings.

This exploration is all good and well, but at extreme ends of the spectrum you’ll need to keep an eye on how much your guitar can take. Low tunings and big, fat strings are common in heavier genres, but standard, factory machine heads may struggle to accommodate the thickness of strings that are 0.60 or higher.

The bridge of your guitar is the same story, with the added break angle and recessed string guides being designed for more standard sizes. Ultra-light strings are much more flexible, but are more susceptible to break because of their tiny size, especially with a sharp machine head edge or bridge; so safety goggles might be a good idea when really going for it in that solo!

Image: Adam Gasson

All The Way Up

Finally, while intonation isn’t as huge a deal here as different tunings, the subtle differences here are enough to shift those octaves out of whack, so it’s important, as always, to check it!

Heavier gauge strings might sometimes require the length of the string to be lengthened to ensure intonation is correct, while lighter strings might require the saddles to be moved forward and the string shortened. Lighter gauge strings will also vibrate more than heavier, as such be super careful to ensure the string isn’t vibrating itself out of tune while checking your intonation or the whole measurement will be off!

Much like exploring pedals, amps, pickups and technique, the strings you use can have a huge effect on your sound. Heavier gauge strings are extremely stable, but require more pressure to fret. There’s an added punch to their tone, but you’ll need to punch those notes out with a strong picking and fretting hand to get ‘em out.

Lighter gauge strings offer supreme flexibility and expression, added spank, but can vibrate themselves out of tune entirely, as well as being more susceptible to breakages before of their small size. Balance is the name of the game here, but your choice of strings in material, gauge, design and tension all play a part in giving you a unique result.

The post How strings, tension, tuning and intonation really effect your guitar’s tone appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Is renowned vintage gear enthusiast Joe Bonamassa coming around to the idea of digital amp modelling?

As the custodian of one of the most extensive personal vintage and analogue gear collections on the planet – housed in two locations, Nerdville East and West in Nashville and Los Angeles, respectively – it might sound hard to believe, but it seems even JoBo is beginning to the see the benefits of digital…

• READ MORE: Ace Frehley’s 1975 Gibson Les Paul guitar fetches half a million dollars at auction

Among that gear collection sit a host of top-shelf tube amps, including a selection of Dumbles, and a new addition as of November 2025, Gary Moore’s old Soldano SLO-100, which he bought for $25,000.

But aside from his analogue-focused gear collection, Joe Bonamassa has been vocally critical of amp modellers as of late, recently questioning whether Eddie Van Halen would have been seen as the ultra-cool guitar icon he was were he to have played a Neural DSP Quad Cortex.

But his views may be shifting, after he revealed in April he’s been using amps from Fender’s Tone Master range – all fully digital – on tour.

In an Instagram post made on 24 April (via Guitar World), the blues ace shared a photo of two Fender Twin Amps, urging fans to spot the (pretty obvious) difference.

“Well, Well, Well!  What do we have here?” he wrote next to the photo, which showed a Fender Twin alongside its digital Tone Master counterpart. “Fresh in from the Arizona territory of Scottsdale. Beta testing something new and exciting on this tour. Spot the difference and you might win a prize. (Prizes will not be honored.)”

View this post on Instagram

And it seems like his affinity for Fender’s digital Tone Master range surprised even himself. Responding to a comment made by Americana guitarist Jason Isbell under the post, Bonamassa confessed he “wanted to dislike it”, saying: “It’s honestly really amazing what they did digitally.”

Fender’s Tone Master range arrived in 2019, promising convincing tube-inspired tones in a totally digital format. The line consists of digital versions of many of Fender’s most classic amp designs, including the Deluxe Reverb, Twin Reverb, Princeton Reverb and more.

Joe Bonamassa’s Instagram post explicitly states he has been “beta testing” a Fender Tone Master Twin – but his praise suggests they may soon make a permanent fixture of his touring rig.

Learn more about the Tone Master range at Fender.

The post “It’s honestly really amazing”: Tube amp aficionado Joe Bonamassa has been “beta testing” a Fender Tone Master on tour – and he’s impressed appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Scottish alt-rock brothers Jim and William Reid of The Jesus and Mary Chain have offered a hot take on rock guitar orthodoxy, arguing that Eddie Van Halen “ruined rock guitar” by inspiring a wave of imitators.

In a new interview with Stereogum, the pair discuss everything from guitar technique to genre labels, and why, in their view, too much musical knowledge can sometimes get in the way of making music.

• READ MORE: “I’m nowhere near qualified to start dabbling in the Van Halen world”: Steve Lukather says he’s not playing any guitar on the posthumous Van Halen record, and that the material Eddie Van Halen left over is “not throwaway s**t”

The idea that technique is somehow the enemy of feel is a familiar argument in indie rock circles. Whether that always holds up is debatable, but the Reids are very much in the “less is more” camp.

Reflecting on his own approach to the guitar, vocalist Jim Reid says that keeping things deliberately minimal is key to the creative process.

“Not having a lot of equipment actually forces you to be more inventive,” he explains. “I can play guitar, but only just. It’s kinda deliberate. I play guitar to the level that I need to play guitar. And sometimes knowing too much about making music gets in the way, and it ends up back to Eddie Van Halen again, do you know what I mean?”

William, meanwhile, takes the argument further, rejecting the idea of technical study altogether.

“I think guitar players should never learn scales,” he says. “I think the worst guitar players in the world – like Eddie Van Halen. I can’t stand Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing. I think he ruined rock guitar all through the ‘80s and ‘90s ‘cause so many people copied him.”

“And I just couldn’t get any of that playin’ as fast as you fuckin’ can and crammin’ as many notes in one second as you could,” William continues. “And I listen to Peter Hook’s bass riffs, and I think that’s as thousand times better than anything Eddie Van Halen could ever come up with.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Jim Reid also takes aim at one of indie rock’s most persistent genre labels.

“Shoegaze, I’ve got a problem with that just because it doesn’t actually exist,” he says. “‘Cause it was some clown at the NME [who] made that up.”

The post “Eddie Van Halen ruined rock guitar”: The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim and William Reid think “guitar players should never learn scales” because it gets in the way of making music appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Geddy Lee has opened up about the chaotic way he and Alex Lifeson wrote music in Rush – and why capturing ideas with the “spontaneous genius” guitarist often meant keeping a cassette recorder running at all times.

Speaking in a recent interview with Rick Beato, Lee reflects on the band’s long-running creative dynamic, where ideas were often born, lost, and rediscovered in the space of a single jam session.

• READ MORE: Alex Lifeson is taking a Kirk Hammett Greeny on the road with Rush: “The relic’ing is just spectacular”

“Al and I lived always in the same town. So, usually he would come over to my place, and we would bang out songs together, and we would jam. Then, he would go sit on the couch behind me and fall asleep,” says the bassist [via Ultimate Guitar].

“And I would methodically go through every inch of our jam, and cut and paste until I had assembled something really nonsensical, or something that he thought was a great riff and [had] a great feel, and then I would start adding beats and removing beats, and make it impossible to play and learn and remember.”

Once those ideas were shaped into something usable, the pair would pass them on to drummer Neil Peart for feedback.

“Once we got those things sorted out, we would send it to Neil, and then he would give his opinion, and we would go on from there,” says Lee.

While such a “methodical” approach worked well for him, Lee says it sometimes came at the expense of the raw, in-the-room energy of the band.

“You kind of miss the three guys in a room bashing away and those spontaneous ideas that come up,” he explains. “So, it gets a little too methodical, which is probably why I like those programs so much because I’m methodical. [Lifeson’s] the opposite of methodical. He’s spontaneously brilliant.”

That spontaneity, however, also meant Lifeson would often forget what he had just played. Lee says that’s why a cassette recorder became essential in early writing sessions.

“I learned really early on, working with him, that I have to have a cassette player. I always have the cassette on when we’re writing. In those earliest days, there was nothing more than literally a little beatbox.”

“I would just turn it on, and Al would play something great, and we would be jamming, and then I’d go, ‘Hey, Al, let’s go back to that riff,’ and he would go, ‘What riff?’ and I’d go, ‘You know, that fucking riff that was just so awesome that you played five minutes ago!?’”

The musician adds that Lifeson would often have already moved on by the time he tried to revisit an idea.

“And he had no recollection,” Lee says, “and so I’d wind the tape back, play it for him, and then he’d have to try to figure it out; he’d already moved past it into some other brilliant riff. And he had the patience to listen to me when I found something that excited me, and he would go, ‘Okay, I think he liked that,’ so he would indulge me, and that’s a lot of times how songs got written with us.”

Watch the full interview below.

The post “He would go, ‘What riff?’” Geddy Lee says he had to record all of Rush’s songwriting sessions because Alex Lifeson would forget “great” riffs just minutes after playing them appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Eric Bibb reckons every guitarist can benefit from a little classical training.

The GRAMMY nominated singer-songwriter and blues veteran recently reflected on his early guitar lessons, explaining how studying classical technique opened his eyes to the instrument’s full potential – and helped lay the foundations for the fingerstyle approach that would later become a hallmark of his playing.

• READ MORE: “You don’t even need a label. You have so many amazing tools like YouTube and TikTok”: Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Gus G explains how the landscape has changed for aspiring guitar players

Speaking in the latest issue of Guitarist, Bibb was asked how his childhood classical guitar lessons influenced his acoustic technique.

To which he replies, “What it told me right from the start was that the guitar really can be an orchestra, and if you use your thumb and three fingers on your right hand, you can arpeggiate and you can create all kinds of different sounds and textures.”

Those lessons proved particularly useful when Bibb later discovered fingerpicking blues players such as Mississippi John Hurt.

“It really helped me when I started discovering fingerpicking – you know, John Hurt kind of stuff,” he explains. “I started out with Carcassi [Matteo Carcassi, 1792 to 1853, author of arpeggio studies still in use today], so all of that stuff sort of came together at a certain point.”

“When I really focused on my own style of playing, I knew I wanted to fingerpick, I knew I wanted to arpeggiate. So all of that has come into my technique,” Bibb continues. “I tried fingerpicks at one point, and thumbpicks, but they’d fly off. I’d get excited and sweaty, and they’d just fly off. But Ry Cooder once said there is really no better tool for the guitar than your right hand. There are so many ways you can approach the guitar with just your bare hands.”

That said, that doesn’t mean his picking hand is entirely maintenance-free. Bibb reveals he uses “acrylic nail enhancements” on three fingers of his right hand to avoid a fingerstyle player’s nightmare scenario.

“I found that, without it, I’m risking breaking a nail and then things get kind of complicated,” he says. “I discovered the hard way that if I chipped a nail in the middle of a show, it was really going to affect my playing in a negative way. And you can cover your nails with hard polish, but I find that the best thing for me is the acrylic. I’m not sure it’s really great for your health, but you sacrifice all for art.”

The post Blues legend Eric Bibb on why you should learn classical guitar first: “It told me that the guitar really can be an orchestra” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

One of the most important guitars in Ace Frehley’s career has found a new home.

The Kiss guitarist’s beloved 1975 Gibson Les Paul – the instrument he played more than any other throughout his time with the band – recently sold for $512,000 at the Julien’s Music Icons auction in New York.

• READ MORE: Featuring a snow globe and even a working thermometer, the bizarre climate change guitar played by Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel is headed to auction

Affectionately nicknamed “Budokan”, the triple-pickup, cherry sunburst-finished guitar was a constant presence throughout Frehley’s tenure with Kiss, accompanying him onstage and in the studio more than any other instrument in his collection.

“This is the very guitar Ace played at the band’s legendary four-night residency at Japan’s Nippon Budokan arena from April 1st-4th, 1977, where it gained the nickname ‘Budokan,’” the guitar’s listing explains. “Ace used it to record the Kiss album Love Gun in May of 1977 and continued to use it on tour as his main guitar through 1979, when it was relegated to back-up duty.”

The listing notes that Frehley continued using the guitar throughout the 1980s, albeit with a number of modifications, including a replacement bridge pickup and the addition of a Washburn Wonderbar vibrato system with matching string retainer at the nut.

Given its history, it’s perhaps no surprise that the Les Paul proved one of the highlights of Julien’s two-day Music Icons auction, held at Hard Rock Cafe Times Square on 29 and 30 May. The guitar ultimately sold within its pre-auction estimate of $400,000 to $600,000.

The Les Paul wasn’t the only Frehley item to attract strong bidding. A stage-played 1997 Gibson Signature Les Paul Custom used during Super Bowl XXXIII sold for $57,600, while a 1996 Kiss Reunion Tour Light Show Sanchez Custom Gibson Les Paul Jr. fetched the same amount – nearly six times its original estimate.

Elsewhere, an Eddie Van Halen striped Charvel Art Series guitar, played during Van Halen’s final performance with Sammy Hagar in 2004, also exceeded expectations, selling for $115,200 – more than double its pre-sale estimate.

The appetite for artist-owned guitars shows little sign of slowing, either. Later this month, a unique climate change-themed Ernie Ball guitar played by Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel will go under the hammer at Gardiner Houlgate specialist music auctions in Corsham.

View more upcoming auctions at Julien’s Auctions.

The post Ace Frehley’s 1975 Gibson Les Paul guitar fetches half a million dollars at auction appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Martin is celebrating a mighty milestone with its new all-koa Custom Shop model, and there are, rather fittingly, only 100 of them available.

The new Custom Shop 0-18K2 CFM IV honours a whole century of the brand using lacquer finishes in pursuit of durability, beauty, and efficiency. When Martin began using lacquer finishes in 1926, among some of the first to benefit were its Concert-sized all-koa models.

• READ MORE: What’s the point of painting a guitar anyway? And does it make any difference to the sound?

The guitar is built with a 0 12-fret body crafted from solid flamed koa, and joins the Martin O’ahu family of instruments, which honours the Hawaiian music craze of the 1920s and early ’30s and its lasting influence on modern guitar design.

It further offers hand-shaped Golden Era (GE) scalloped X-bracing, a GE Modified Low Oval neck, a 24.9” scale length, and an ebony fingerboard with Old Style 18 abalone inlays. Other vintage-inspired details include an ebony straightline bridge and a slotted headstock with Golden Age brass tuning machines.

Credit: Martin

Lacquer went on to become valued for the way it supported an instrument’s natural resonance due to its thinness, allowing the wood to vibrate freely. Still used across Martin instruments today, it remains an important part of the company’s craft.

The new Custom Shop 0-18K2 CFM IV of course has a vintage gloss finish to celebrate the origin of this game-changing practice for Martin. Closely based on what it introduced a century ago, it lets the natural figuring of the koa shine through. Completing this limited model is paper label signed by Chris Martin IV and a hardshell case.

Credit: Martin

In other Martin news, Guitar.com recently reviewed its new Super D-18 model. The guitar joins Martin’s USA-made Standard series, and was previously only available as part of its Custom Shop lineup. This version makes it more widely available. We rated it a perfect 10/10, and described it as a “super by name and super by nature” model that will make you rethink what a standard-tuned guitar is capable of.

The Custom Shop 0-18K2 CFM IV is limited to 100 instruments and will be available through Martin dealers. Find out more via the Martin Guitar website.

The post Martin celebrates 100 years of its lacquer finishes with a limited all-koa Custom Shop model appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

For decades, signing with a record label marked the moment at which you ‘made it’ as an aspiring professional musician. Doing so often led to more dependable, sometimes handsome income, as labels could call upon hefty budgets to pay for album advances and decked out rolodexes to ensure music was successfully promoted.

But the landscape has changed. 

With the rise of social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, it’s never been easier for a musician to cultivate a large audience without any input or help from a traditional record label. 

On the flip side of that argument, the fact it’s easier than ever means more people are doing it, meaning the increased competition makes it no less difficult than before, perhaps, but I digress.

Record labels are very much still a thing, and can offer tremendous benefits for a budding artist signing the right deal, but established artists are increasingly questioning whether signing to one is even necessary anymore.

Recently, Avenged Sevenfold – one of the biggest bands in metal today – announced they’d become a fully independent band, after purchasing back the masters and rights to their 2016 album The Stage from Capitol Records. Indeed, frontman M. Shadows has displayed scepticism over the place of traditional record labels in the modern music landscape on numerous occasions, saying in 2024, “You’re going to take 24 cents on our dollar and that’s all you can do, come up with a f**king fake viral TikTok moment?”

And it seems former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Gus G shares a similar sentiment.

In a new interview with Blabbermouth, the guitarist reflects on how different the music business is now compared to when he was first coming up.

“When people ask me, ‘What do you suggest to someone [about having a career in music]?’ I said, ‘It’s very different.’ When I started, we made demos in the studio. We paid for the studio, put it in an envelope, and sent it to a label, hoping someone would call back.

“Now, it’s not like that. You don’t even need a label. You have so many amazing tools, like YouTube. You can reach everyone through that. You can reach everyone through your socials, your Instagram, your TikToks.”

Gus G posits that the dynamic between artist and label has flipped, and that labels look to sign artists with pre-existing fanbases, rather than sign unknown artists with the intention of building their fanbase for them.

“It’s the other way around: a label will approach you when you already have your own global fanbase, and you’re already generating online buzz,” he continues. “A lot of those guitar players, I’m watching the YouTubers, they’re not really concerned about the live industry. 

“Some of those guys don’t even have to go out and play. They don’t know what it is; maybe they don’t have to worry about it because they make their money from views or sponsorships. It’s a different landscape. That’s how I see it.”

But despite his realisation that the music world has changed, Gus G says there’s no substitute for getting out on the road and paying your dues.

“The whole thing has changed and shifted. I like that I come from a bit more of an old-school, traditional way, where I still believe in hitting every town, hitting the local venue and playing for the people who want to come. I’m a firm believer in that.”

Gus G recently released his sixth solo album, Steel Burner. View a list of his upcoming tour dates at his official website.

The post “You don’t even need a label. You have so many amazing tools like YouTube and TikTok”: Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Gus G explains how the landscape has changed for aspiring guitar players appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

A unique Ernie Ball guitar played by Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel is going under the hammer this month, and is expected to fetch up to £12,000.

The guitar was played by Tufnel (actor Christopher Guest) for the parody rock band’s gig at Wembley Live Earth in 2007. This special one-off event was no spoof, however, and was put on to raise awareness of climate change. Over 150 musical acts played in 12 locations around the world, including London’s Wembley Stadium.

• READ MORE: “I play two hours a day. Three is too much, isn’t it?”: Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel on the secret of guitar practice

As you can imagine for a guitarist who likes to crank things up to 11, the model is particularly wacky and even features a working thermometer. It also has a laser-engraved image of a burning planet Earth, control knobs in the shape of pyramids and ice cubes, and even hosts a snow globe containing a figurine of former US vice president Al Gore.

Based on the Silhouette 20th anniversary model from Ernie Ball, the instrument took over 1,200 hours to design and build. It’s now being sold by a private individual to fund his love of travelling the world to see his favourite bands play live, with Pearl Jam named as a particular example.

Auctioneer Luke Hobbs, who will be selling the guitar, says: “This is one of those weird and wonderful guitars that’s a delight to auction. It’s a genuinely unique instrument – and it always raises a smile.”

The sale will take place at Gardiner Houlgate specialist music auctions in Corsham, Wiltshire on Tuesday 9 June. The World On Fire guitar will be available for public viewing on Friday 5 June and Monday 8 June from 9am–5.30pm, as well as on the day of the sale itself.

Find out more via Gardiner Houlgate.

Credit: Gardiner Houlgate

The post Featuring a snow globe and even a working thermometer, the bizarre climate change guitar played by Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel is headed to auction appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

“Music education is about more than learning notes and chords – it’s a pathway to creativity, confidence, discipline, and human connection,” says Martin CEO Thomas Ripsam.

As musicians, all our stories are different, but we all remember the first time we picked up a guitar, and how quickly we became obsessed with learning how to play the instrument and start playing our favourite songs.

Many persevere, but many aspiring players also quit, and it’s a number Martin has made its mission to drive down. 

As evidenced by its industry-leading contributions to music education programmes – which include 103 grants totalling nearly $600,000 via the Martin Guitar Charitable Foundation in 2025 alone – the legendary acoustic guitar brand is adopting the mantra: “More to start and fewer to quit”, and celebrates all things Music Education in the 2026 edition of the Martin Journal.

The new Martin Journal: The Music Education Issue – created by Guitar.com in partnership with Martin, sees the top brass at the nearly-200-year-old acoustic guitar powerhouse wax lyrical on their formative moments picking up a six-string, and features exclusive interviews with leading Martin players including fingerstyle maestro Molly Tuttle and Americana icon Jason Isbell.

“I had coveted Dreadnoughts since I was a kid,” Tuttle explains of her early love of Martin acoustic guitars. “In the end, my dad worked out a deal with the shop: if I could save up $2,000, they would let me buy a D-28.”

“A Martin guitar doesn’t insist on being the main character,” says Isbell, who recently unveiled two Martin signatures modelled after his treasured pre-war 0-17. “It’s an instrument that’s clearly designed for people who take their music seriously, but it’s not trying to be the most beautiful thing in the room.”

The new Martin Journal also dives deep into Martin’s groundbreaking new partnership with the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), the music school founded by Paul McCartney and Mark Featherstone-Witty. The school – founded in 1996 – reached a milestone in 2025 when it received clearance to award its own degrees, previously awarded through Liverpool John Moores University.

“It’s a huge thing for us,” LIPA’s CEO and principal Sean McNamara tells us in the new Martin Journal. “It completes the last step of the journey, from being established in what was a derelict building in 1996 to becoming an autonomous performing arts university.”

The new partnership has seen Martin donate three guitars, a bass and a ukulele to the school to help students learn, and will see Martin award the top-graduating guitar student with Paul McCartney’s favourite acoustic guitar, the legendary D-28.

“Music, imagination and creative expression are part of our DNA at LIPA, and you can feel that same spirit deeply embedded within Martin as well,” McNamara says.

You can read the full 2026 Martin Journal at martinguitar.com.

The post The 2026 Martin Journal is all about music education, with exclusive interviews with Jason Isbell and Molly Tuttle, and a deep dive into Martin’s new partnership with Paul McCartney’s music school appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Positive Grid has launched a brand-new amplifier range called Reactor, which arrives with new “Amp Intelligence” technology that can use a range of prompts to create unique tones.

The new series marks its first amp range outside of its successful Spark family that has been praised by Guitar.com on numerous occasions, from the Spark Mini to the Spark Live. The Reactor series at launch includes two combo amps that are 50W and 100W respectively, but both offer a selectable wattage slider.

• READ MORE: Positive Grid BIAS X review – “it’s like having a virtual studio engineer doing the hard work”
  

To build Reactor’s Amp Intelligence, over 200 amp designs were decoded at the circuit level: gain stages, transformers, bias points, and harmonic response were examined, capturing the behavioral DNA of popular and “legendary” amps.

In true Positive Grid fashion, players can use the accompanying Creator Hub app to get the most out of Amp Intelligence. Here, its Tone Capture tool lets you input your desired images, audio or text. You then get a complete signal chain or custom amp in return.

Essentially, you can take photos of any amp, pedalboard, or anything else that inspires a sound. You can also describe amps, artists, other ideas in your own words, or upload a track. Reactor remembers your prompts, adjustments, and settings.

Further features can be accessed via control knobs and switches on the amp itself. Its panel hosts one knob that includes six amp categories: Extreme, Hi-Gain, Crunch, Grit, Warm, and Clean.

You can also tweak classic Gain, EQ, and Master controls, or experiment with “two switches you won’t find on any other amp”: Reactor’s Push/Smooth takes you from laid-back rhythm to cutting lead, while its Heat +/- switch adjusts feel and harmonics without significantly changing volume, according to Positive Grid.

Credit: Positive Grid

Its selectable wattage lets users toggle between 1W, 25W, or full power and both amp variations host a custom 12″ speaker in a wood cabinet. You can also purchase an optional Reactor Control footswitch for further, hands-free control.

View the videos below, including a demo from Smashing Pumpkins’ Kiki Wong, to learn more:

The 50W variation of Reactor is priced at USD $349, while the 100W version is USD $449. View full specifications at Positive Grid.

The post Meet Positive Grid’s Reactor amp series – powered by “Amp Intelligence” that builds tone from text prompts, photos and recordings appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

There are some debates in the guitar world that are perennial. ‘Is it better to spend your money on a good guitar or a good amp?’ is one. ‘Does tone come from your gear or your fingers?’ is another.

But one of the fiercest debates among gearheads revolves around whether vintage guitars are inherently better than newly built ones. Legendary guitarist Eric Johnson thinks they’re not always better, saying in April this year: “It’s not the perfect guitar just because it’s old and worth money.”

But like all of the guitar space’s biggest debates, there are prominent voices on both sides, and one player who reckons vintage guitars are better than new ones is Welsh-born American and Canadian guitarist Philip Sayce.

• READ MORE: “We wanted to rethink the entire approach to guitar care”: StewMac launches new GuitarTek range of premium guitar cleaning products

As he reasons in a new interview with Guitarist magazine, vintage guitars sound better as their wood is decades old and is “dry and settled”, leading to a better tone.

“I don’t think modern builders are getting it wrong or missing anything,” he says. “The wood on a vintage guitar that’s 60-plus years old is dry and settled. When those guitars were made, that wood might’ve already been 100 years old. You can get really close now, but there’s maybe that last five or 10 per cent where it comes down to the resonance and the age of the wood.”

Sayce also believes the pickups on vintage guitars plays a part in their superior tone.

“The pickups make a huge difference, too,” he continues. “Some people have this idea that overwinding a pickup is better, and that’s not always true. The pickups in [Sayce’s] ‘Mother’ [Stratocaster] are from ‘58. They’re slightly underwound and sound great.

“We also did a project with Seymour Duncan, recreating the pickups from ‘Mother’, and it was fascinating, just really getting into the details of what made them sound that way. The Seymour Duncan team did a fabulous job and the Duncan Mother pickups sound fantastic.”

 Philip Sayce’s love affair with vintage Strats has been a long one. He says it was “always a dream” to have one of his own.

“All my heroes – [Eric] Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, [Mark] Knopfler, Buddy Guy – they were playing those guitars,” he explains. “I had been hearing from players and collectors over and over again that the ‘62s and ‘63s were the sweet spot for vintage Strats.

“A friend of mine helped me find my first one. The second one, the ‘Big Daddy’ Strat, was actually a guitar I missed out on years earlier. Then 10 or 15 years later, a buddy called me and said, ‘Hey, I just saw this guitar and it made me think of you.’ He sent a picture and it was the exact same guitar. So I sold a bunch of stuff and bought it. That one felt like it was meant to be.”

You can view a list of all of Philip Sayce’s upcoming tour dates via his official website.

The post Are vintage guitars better than new ones? Philip Sayce thinks so – and here’s why appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The next time you catch an elbow at a show, take a second to see if it’s connected to someone wearing a Guilt Trip shirt. A lot of hardcore bands have blown up in recent years, with American heavyweights Turnstile and Knocked Loose chief among them, but the Manchester upstarts typify a young, hungry breed of UK acts rapidly closing the gap, with eye-watering streaming numbers crashing into the huge circle pits they’re whipping up across festival grounds.

• READ MORE: “It’s the beginnings of the development of the electric guitar, it’s iconic” – Gina Gleason on 75 years of the Telecaster

Their new record Armour of Angels is intended as fuel for this fire, with the band picturing how each shoutalong hook or ignorant breakdown might spark carnage in a crowd. “We’re definitely having them conversations while we’re writing,” guitarist Jak Maden says. “We always say to each other, ‘Are you moshing?’”

And there are precious few moments on the LP that aren’t spinkickable. Vocalist Jay Valentine is spring-loaded with Jamey Jasta-esque energy, barking and snarling while bassist Lily Kilcoyne and drummer Tom Aimson lock into pummelling rhythms, with songs such as Veins getting through nu-metal atmospherics, murderous double kick salvos and a ripping skank part in a shade under three minutes. Tapping into this fast-moving sense of mayhem, Maden and Sam Baker’s guitar style is defined by muscular chug, dives, scoops and wah-laced thrash solos.

Image: Press

Brutish And Short

It feels odd to say that it’s a refinement of their approach on 2023’s Severance given the brutish nature of the record, but that’s what it is. In the decade and change since they formed – Valentine and Maden have been friends since primary school, meeting Kilcoyne, Aimson and Baker in the Manchester hardcore scene – the band have found a way to thread their influences through the eye of a needle.

In recent photos of the group, the T-shirts on display range from Staind to All Out War, Slipknot to Biohazard, and you can hear it in each change-up. In the here and now, Baker says, Guilt Trip are simply better at writing Guilt Trip songs than they were a few years ago. “This album is heavier, but not intentionally,” he says. “Especially with Jak’s writing, there’s a lot of Whammy in the riffs and I think it’s just because it’s fun [for us]. We don’t play things, or write things, that would be boring live, you know?”

Armour of Angels was produced by the band at StudiOwz, a residential facility in Pembrokeshire, Wales. “We’ve always self-produced,” Maden observes. “A lot of bands our size are clawing [their way] into that metal world rather than the hardcore world. Usually, they’ll get a producer. But we’re all so hands on — we’ve already got [multiple] opinions. I understand that having one more from outside can help calm everyone else down, but I think we would struggle with constantly disagreeing with that person.”

Jak Maden. Image: Georgina Hurdsfield

Peripheral Vision

This time, they recorded alongside engineer Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood, best known for his work as guitarist/bassist and producer with tech-metal giants Periphery. As well as playing Decapitated in the control room, Getgood had Bullet For My Valentine’s The Poison in mind as a guitar template.

For Maden and Baker, meanwhile, the holy grail was located somewhere between Machine Head’s The Blackening and Dez Fafara’s post-Coal Chamber outfit DevilDriver. “Not many bands are doing that now,” Maden observes. “A lot of them are in drop G with HM-2s on it, whereas this is literally a refinement of your stock metal tone from the mid-2000s. That’s what we love.”

Guilt Trip went in knowing this is what they wanted and Getgood helped them to get there. Crucially, they did it using the band’s own equipment. Guitar-wise, the dominant force was a Jackson RR24 Rhoads, which “won the shoot out” due to its capacity for Meshuggah-esque chug.

“Then it was a Peavey 3120, which is quite a rare guitar head, straight into the miniature Ibanez Tube Screamer,” Maden says. “That’s it for the rhythm tone. Then we discovered the [Electro-Harmonix] Electric Mistress – all the harmonics were recorded with that on, and all the leads.”

“Every harmonic on the record has a bit of chorus on it,” he continues. “Nolly basically did a deep dive into Robb Flynn’s rig from Machine Head. We found that he was using that chorus so we bought one instantly. We turned it on and straight away it was like, ‘Yeah, we found it, finally.’ We tweaked it a little bit so we’ve got our own sound with it. But all the little leads, especially on Cut From God, that cool lead part, that’s all using the Electric Mistress. That’s it, I think.” Baker confirms it. “That’s literally it,” he says.

Sam Baker. Image: Georgina Hurdsfield

Travelling Light

This is a bit of a recurring theme for both guitarists – they’re not ones for gear overkill, whether that’s live or in the studio. Maden points to a recent co-headline trek with their friends in Sheffield metalcore institution Malevolence as an example of their approach. “They had to freight their gear and had like 14 Pelicans and the guitars,” he says. “And we literally had five things on the plane.” One of them, Baker notes, was a reusable carrier bag from UK sports retail institution Sports Direct full of merch. “When we go international now, our Quad Cortex is just going in our backpack,” Maden adds, with both players leaning hard on new EMG humbucker-loaded Jackson American series Soloists for that run.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those precision-tooled metal guitars are a far cry from the duo’s entry point into playing. For a 12-year-old Maden, the first step was a sunburst Squier Strat from Argos, complete with “little amp, cables and all that shit”. “It was Kaiser Chiefs that made me want to play guitar,” he recalls.

“Music had finally become, like, an actual thing that I wanted to put on. Before that, I was just playing out, riding bikes, playing with Lego. I think I finally found something that I liked, whereas it was always just the radio in the car before that. With indie music it was the guitars that made it different to pop. I begged and begged my mum and dad for a guitar.”

Baker was a drummer first, but guitar was never far away thanks to an older brother who practiced religiously at home. Through sibling osmosis he heard Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down, eventually deciding to set aside the sticks in favour of six strings and a cherry red Epiphone SG.

“It was a joint Christmas present,” Baker says. “But I didn’t really play it at all. I got it, and then I just stopped until I was about 15. A mate of mine knew that I played a bit, and he was like, ‘Do you want to start a hardcore band?’ I played my first gig on guitar half a year after that. I’d just turned 16. The first thing guitarist-wise that I latched on to would have been something like Gallows, hardcore punk from the UK. I saw them jumping around and I thought, ‘That looks way more fun than drums.’”

Jak Maden. Image: Georgina Hurdsfield

Running Free

Running like a thread through both guitarists’ history, though, is one small red rectangle. It’s there on the spine of The Blackening and the Slipknot records that paved the way for Baker to get into genuinely heavy stuff — the Roadrunner Records logo. Now, years later, Armour of Angels is set to be released by the label that shaped their understanding of metal, closing a loop.

“Every band that I’ve idolised has been on that label, or is still on that label,” Baker says. “My first CD was a Nickelback one, All the Right Reasons,” Maden adds. “That was a Roadrunner one. For some reason, even as a kid, I just remember that little red thing. It’s probably the only record label I knew the name of. It’s a dream come true for all of us.”

It’s not one they intend to let fade out. Once Armour of Angels is released they’ll hit the road, mixing the odd festival date with a run opening for Dying Wish in the United States, building up to a set at Sound & Fury, one of the key dates in the hardcore calendar. Then, in the autumn, they’ll play an eye-catching headline run on home turf, including the Electric Ballroom in London, before heading to mainland Europe.

At each turn, they’re keen to put on for their scene, drawing attention to the way things have changed in the UK and, more pointedly, Manchester in the recent past. Twenty years ago bands such as Broken Teeth were holding down the fort. Now, the annual fest Outbreak has an arena-sized footprint on the world stage. They’re part of that buzz. “Not many UK bands have gone to America and headlined similar caps to what they do at home or in Europe,” Maden says. “Us and Malevolence going out there has really opened the door, I hope. We really flexed that we were from the UK.”

Guilt Trip’s Armour of Angels is out on June 5 through Roadrunner Records.

The post “We don’t write things that would be boring live” Guilt Trip on why they’re committed to keeping hardcore as intense as possible appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

When news broke of Steve Lukather collaborating with Alex Van Halen to rework and release old Van Halen demos, people assumed the Toto guitarist would be filling in for the late Eddie Van Halen. However, Lukather has set the record straight – he’s offering his services as a co-producer, not a guitarist.

Who is playing guitar on the new Van Halen record, then? Well, that’s the exciting part: every riff on the record was recorded by Eddie. That means a whole album of unheard Eddie riffs is coming… and Lukather has called them “jaw-dropping”.

Speaking to Guitar Player, Lukather emphasises just how exciting these new tracks are sounding. “I’m telling you, this is not throwaway shit,” he says. “When I heard them, I said to Al, ‘How fucking come you didn’t use these?’ And the answer was because nobody could write to [Eddie’s abandoned recordings].”

• READ MORE: Steve Vai recalls hearing unreleased material at Eddie Van Halen’s house: “Nobody plays like they do when they’re in their room alone… It was such great stuff”

“If you think this is a bunch of throwaway crap that we’re trying to Mickey Mouse together to suck the dollar out of poor, unsuspecting Van Halen fans, it’s not,” he adds.

Lukather is quick to silence any rumours of him taking on Eddie’s axeman duties. “That’s the most ridiculous and humorous thing I’ve ever heard,” he laughs. “I am no more qualified to try and play like Ed Van Halen than I am to be the first man to tug my dick on the planet. I don’t know how anybody could think that would even be a reality. Honestly, it’s laughable… I don’t play like Ed.”

After insisting “I’m not qualified,” he provides a list of more suitable options: “Call Dweezil Zappa… he plays that shit. Call Nuno Bettencourt! I can name 10 guys, like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani. I’m nowhere near qualified to start dabbling in the Van Halen world.”

With that in mind, Lukather isn’t offended that his guitar skills aren’t being utilised. “I am there 100% to be his co-producer and help him through the technical aspects – I’m not gonna play,” he clarifies. “There’s not gonna be any Lukather or Toto fingerprints on a Van Halen thing. I can fucking promise you that!”

In fact, Lukather was simply happy to lend a hand and support Alex, who has been a close friend for over 45 years. “I don’t have ulterior motives,” he says. “This is not about money. This is about love of the guys and trying to help. I’m not gonna be involved in an obvious way. So, I wish people would get the fuck off my back!”

Lukather’s chat with Guitar Player corroborates a previous interview Alex had with Brazilian journalist Gastão Moreira for Kazagastão back in February. At the time, the Van Halen drummer explained that “the drums, the guitar and the bass are already in there”.

While some believed this could mean Lukather had already recorded some new riffs, Lukather’s interview makes things a lot clearer. The guitars were already recorded before he got involved – and they had been recorded and ready to use for years.

The post “I’m nowhere near qualified to start dabbling in the Van Halen world”: Steve Lukather says he’s not playing any guitar on the posthumous Van Halen record, and that the material Eddie Van Halen left over is “not throwaway s**t” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

‘My budget is limited – do I spend more on my guitar or on my amp?’ It’s a question which plagues new guitarists and even seasoned ones alike, with veteran players everywhere having vastly differing views.

Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X, for example, is firmly in the ‘guitar’ camp, saying last year that “what’s in your hands is most important” when it comes to your tone. Whitesnake’s Doug Aldrich agrees, saying in April last year that “you can get a great sound out of any amp that works”.

There are, however, plenty of guitar players on the other side of the debate, saying the amp should be where prospective rig builders should be focusing their attention. Math rock legend Yvette Young, for example, said she’d rather have an expensive amp than an expensive guitar. 

• READ MORE: “We wanted to rethink the entire approach to guitar care”: StewMac launches new GuitarTek range of premium guitar cleaning products

And it turns out The Cult’s Billy Duffy is also team amp…

In a new interview with Guitarist magazine, Duffy makes his opinion clear that you can work with a bad guitar, but a bad amp will always ruin your sound.

“It’s interesting because a good amp is a very useful thing to have because there are a lot of bad amps out there… If you buy a good guitar and a bad amp, you’re gonna have to get a good amp or else you’re always going to sound shitty,” he says.

“If you do it the other way around, you might actually sound better with a bad guitar because if the guitar is badly put together, you could change the pickups. It’s much easier to throw a good pickup in the shitty guitar and transform it, right?

“Unless it’s a bad acoustic… You’ll have to find somebody to take it off your hands because there’s no fixing a bad acoustic.”

So there you have it. In a debate which shows no signs of slowing down, you can count Billy Duffy on ‘team amp’.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Duffy is asked which he’d choose if he could only use humbuckers or single-coil pickups for the rest of his career. His answer is simple:

“With humbuckers, I just love the thickness of the sound. Personally, I have never really gotten over walking on stage with a really good Les Paul and a really good Marshall amp, and just letting rip with the visceral nature of what that can do, you know?

“I’ve used single coils on albums for bits and pieces here and there, and for layering guitars. But, for me, they’re a bit too… they’re just kind of delicate, I guess. I’m a bit of an old-school player who likes to feel the air move and the raw power of the thing. And that’s a humbucker for me.”

The post “Get a good amp or you’re always going to sound s**tty!”: Billy Duffy on why it’s more important to have a good amp than a good guitar appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.