if i thought you were listening, i'd never say a word

Why can two guitars from the same model range, allegedly with the same pickups, tuners and switches, sound just different enough so that you...

The Les Paul and Flying V are religious icons. If you want to drop a Flying V at my place, I will not turn it away. The SG looks like Batman...

The Internet makes a moderate deal about the difference between bedroom or solo tone, and what is needed to mix in with a live band or in th...

Okay. I have the valve amp. I have the fancy wah-wah pedal and the Helix FX. I have double-humbuckers (McCarty 594 SE). I have the Paranorma...

For at least two decades, the pros in Nashville played through Deluxe Reverbs and the pros on the West Coast played through Princetons. It h...

Watch or read anything about guitar amps and pedals, and you will come away with the impression that to get that juicy edge-of-breakup tone,...

  Guitar makers sign guitar players, and PRS does it as well. Santana, Orianthi, a bunch of others, and this guy called John Mayer. Yeah. I ...

And it turns out we're not done with Katanas yet... Roland / BOSS have a thing called Tube Logic. I'd forgotten about it. It's ...

Hope you enjoyed the little psycho-drama. It had no resemblance to the inner workings of my mind. At. All. I'm an engineer at heart. I ...

My guitar-playing friend says that at some stage I really must get a valve amp, and I know he's thinking Fender. It's on my "th...

Playing classical music, the difference between me (or better, someone who can actually play with their right-hand fingers) and the latest c...

The classical guys are trained to play the notes other people wrote. That's how classical music works now - though in the past, the comp...

If you must play electric guitar, make your first one a single-coil. Fender, Squier. A Telecaster  for preference, though you should try a S...

It's been a long time since I've written about my Hunt For Tone. I know, you've been missing it. I'm after tones that make ...

Telecasters are for professionals. Julian Lage plays one. Everyone in Nashville plays one and has another as a backup. Show up with a Tele a...

(Ingredients: a BOSS Katana, a 10-band EQ pedal or 10-band EQ effect in a digital effects board (DEB), guitar of your choice. Has been teste...

Yep, it’s tech time again. There are numerous explanations of these two features of an amplifier, and all those I have seen don’t explain it...

Regular readers will remember the problems I, and everyone else with a Katana, had with recording and playback through the thing. I gave up ...

For reasons to do with me mentioning it, my tutor looked up Joni Mitchell’s Coyote on YT. Within a verse, he detected the down-tuned low-E ...

The tone pots on my Epiphone Les Paul were monsters, especially on the bridge. Turn the bridge tone pot up to 10 and the sound was 10dB (!) ...