Your summer is about to get way better with this exclusive giveaway! You could win a Pigtronix Star Eater, Supro Royale, and D'Angelico Deluxe Mini DC! Hurry, this giveaway ends August 11, 2022.
Having quickly become a fan favorite, the new Deluxe Mini DC is equal parts stripped down and strapped with features, incorporating features previously only offered in Limited Edition collections. It makes use of Seymour Duncan Seth Lover A4 humbuckers (including coil-spliting capabilities) for warm, gooey tones and Seymour Duncan Stacked P90s for noiseless single-coil bite, while semi-transparent satin finishes meet a variety of natural body woods, including Maple, Mahogany and Dao. Combined with a speedy neck shape, ebony fingerboard, and premium Jescar fretwire, the Mini DC's ergonomic 14-inch-wide body make it the most wieldable semi-hollow in the D'Angelico line. Now available in three colors: Satin Honey, Satin Trans Wine, and Satin Brown Burst.
Made in Canada, this two-voice guitar features a chambered Mahogany body, carved Swamp Ash top, 25.5” scale Mahogany neck and Rosewood Fingerboard.
Godin Guitars launches the Radium-X as part of its high-quality guitar lineup. After over 30 years of hand-crafting award-winning multi-voice guitars, celebrated by players worldwide, we are proud to introduce the Godin Radium-X! Designed to be ultra-versatile, the Godin Radium-X delivers both electric and acoustic tones.
With a Seymour Duncan Jazz SH-2 at the neck and a Bare Knuckle Boot Camp True Grit Zebra at the bridge, the Radium-X is designed to be a powerhouse of tone. This diverse magnetic pickup combo is capable of delivering powerful, warm distortion to clear, glassy tones, appealing to a wide range of players and musical styles. The Radium-X’s stunning acoustic voice comes courtesy of a custom-designed LR-Baggs X-Bridge tremolo with six built-in “HEX” saddle transducers.
A collaboration honoring Grammy-award winner and guitar virtuoso Christone "Kingfish" Ingram featuring his signature humbucking pickups.
"The Kingfish Telecaster Deluxe guitar gives me a sense of comfort when I’m playing across genres; everything from blues to smooth rock, it’s all about versatility. For me, it is important for people to play other genres,” said Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. “One of my favorite features on the Tele are my signature pickups because they’re a solid option for players in all genres. Being a blues player is a beautiful thing, but it’s about more than that. I’ve always been into heavy tones from my influences like Gary Moore and various blues players like Freddy King. I hope this Tele inspires players of all genres to dig in and rock out.”
The Kingfish Telecaster Deluxe guitar has been designed to the artist’s specifications with an emphasis on power and personal flourish. The heart of the instrument is the Kingfish Signature Humbucking Pickups, custom wound for velvety lows, punchy mids and a snarling high end. The custom pickups will also be sold separately, making it that much easier for players everywhere to achieve Christone’s signature tone. Finished in mesmerizing Mississippi Night, the guitar looks as stunning as it sounds and the custom color is more than meets the eye. This mystifying shade of purple harkens back to the deep night skies Kingfish would often marvel at while growing up in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Kingfish Telecaster Deluxe features an alder body. The “V”-shaped roasted maple neck gives the instrument a distinctly vintage feel and the comfortable 12” radius rosewood fretboard allows for huge bends and scorching riffs up and down the neck. A custom “K & Crown” logo on the pickup covers and Kingfish’s signature autograph on the headstock rounds out the instrument’s personalized touch.
Gain is fun in all its forms, from overdrive to fuzz, but let’s talk about a great clean tone.
We’re all here for one thing. It’s the singular sound and magic of the stringed instrument called the guitar—and its various offshoots, including the bass. Okay, so maybe it’s more than one thing, but the sentiment remains. Even as I write this, my thoughts fan out and recognize how many incarnations of “guitar” there must be. It’s almost incomprehensible. Gut-string, nylon-string, steel-string, 12-string, 8-string, 10-string, flatwound, brown sound, fuzztone…. It’s almost impossible to catalog completely, so I’ll stop here and let you add your favorites. Still, there’s one thing that I keep coming back to: clean tone.
I’ve had the luck and good fortune to work in the studio with Robert Cray, and it was the first time I watched how a human being could split the atom with tone so pure that you could feel it in your blood, not just your gut. It’s a piercing voice like heaven’s glass harmonica. Now, I’ve had fellow musicians turn up their noses when Cray is mentioned, but that’s their problem. I love a saturated guitar—my Analog Man King of Tone cranked way up high in the clouds—but it’s a power trip. I know it’s scarier to get it right when down low and tight. Fearless Flyers tight.
It’s not that I don’t like distortion. I’ve chased saturated and singing sustain all my guitar life. I’ve experienced it all, from big amps with quads of Mullard bottles glowing brightly as they approached meltdown, to tweed combos turned up to a sagging and farting 12. There have been racks full of effects piled upon effects—hushing, squashing, squeezing, chorusing, echoing, and expanding my guitar’s output like some Lego sound transformer. The good, the bad, and the relatively unknown. I even tried building my own amp line with a friend when I was 17 years old just to get what I heard in my head. But when I’m honest with myself, the stinging clean sounds of guitar strings are what move me the most.
When I started playing guitar, clean was about all you could get. If an amp started to distort or feed back, we worried that the amp might burst into flames. I didn’t understand how it worked, but I learned fast. The instruments didn’t ignite, but the sound did. That buzzing, clipping tone hid all my bad finger technique, and I was on my way, squealing and spitting fire from the speakers. The neighbor lady complained to my parents, so, clearly, I was doing something right. It was the power I was looking for in my young life. Clean tone was a thing of the past; long live the square wave on the throne of 16 speakers piled high above the stage.
Many of us have clamored for that thick distorted sound we’ve heard on records and in concerts. Guitarists still curate their collections based upon the building blocks we all discovered during our formative years. It started on the early rock ’n’ roll recordings, when small combo amps got turned up loud to compete with the horns. Bluesmen dimed their amps on Chicago’s Maxwell Street to be heard down the block—good for business. The Brits cranked it up a notch and we players took notice. To some degree, clean was being pushed out. Then, in 1978, “Sultans of Swing” and “Roxanne” came clean. Alongside the slow burning rise of metal, the chiming clarity of the guitar returned to the fray. I’m not trying to build a definitive timeline history of popular guitar sounds here. I’m just merely acknowledging that they ebb and flow. But I always come back to clean.
Even the apex of thick, fat, beefy tone—the PAF humbucker—was and is built for bold hi-fi tone. Its shimmering, articulate clean highs are often lost on period recordings or lousy playback systems. If you doubt it, listen to Michael Bloomfield’s piercing tone on “Albert’s Shuffle” found on the Super Session album. His contemporary, Peter Green, also made extensive use of the clean tones available from his PAF-loaded axe on seminal Fleetwood Mac recordings. Humbuckers can play sweet and clear. It’s worth contemplating that some of the most revered guitar sounds ever committed to record were, in fact, cleaner than we remember. Don’t even get me started with country music.
A lot can be said about practicing guitar with a frighteningly clean sound. Strip away the fuzz and echo and bask in the glory of that stringy, popping, slicing tone that will reward your progress but punish your carelessness. Even after all these years, I’m a sloppy player. But getting it right when all the distortion is put back in the toy box is a scintillating high you can be proud of. It’s just a different addiction. The best part is that when you dial up the dirt again, it feels like flying.