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Wild Rabbit Salad’s “Postcard From Houston”

Wild Rabbit Salad’s “Postcard From Houston”
Bucky and Marietta Roebuck of Wild Rabbit Salad indulge us with an intimate run through the title track of their latest album, “Postcard From Houston.” That’s Bucky’s ’74 Les Paul Custom offering accompaniment, and he recalls his (eh hem) salad days buying great guitars (before they were “vintage”) at pawn shops in Alabama. Catch our review of the album in the June issue. Read Now!


Kay-Ta Matsuno’s fluid fingerstyle

Lovers of fingerstyle likely know the music of Kay-Ta Matsuno. For the uninitiated, here’s a glimpse of his first-call work. Using his Godin MultiAc nylon-string, he shows us “Smog Free,” from his new album, “Distance.” Catch our review and an interview with Kay-Ta in the June issue. Read Now!


Charlie Starr: Open-Tuning Magic on “Azalea”

Enjoy a bit of the supremely tasty “Azalea,” played by Charlie Starr and his ’55 Gibson J-45.  It’s just one of the great vintage guitars (check out the two ’63 Everly Brothers in back) you’ll hear on Blackberry Smoke’s new album, “Be Right Here,” which is reviewed in the June issue, accompanied by an interview in which Charlie digs into it. Both can be read right here. Read Now!


Wild Rabbit Salad’s “Postcard From Houston”

Wild Rabbit Salad’s “Postcard From Houston”
Bucky and Marietta Roebuck of Wild Rabbit Salad indulge us with an intimate run through the title track of their latest album, “Postcard From Houston.” That’s Bucky’s ’74 Les Paul Custom offering accompaniment, and he recalls his (eh hem) salad days buying great guitars (before they were “vintage”) at pawn shops in Alabama. Catch our review of the album in the June issue. Read Now!


Kay-Ta Matsuno’s fluid fingerstyle

Lovers of fingerstyle likely know the music of Kay-Ta Matsuno. For the uninitiated, here’s a glimpse of his first-call work. Using his Godin MultiAc nylon-string, he shows us “Smog Free,” from his new album, “Distance.” Catch our review and an interview with Kay-Ta in the June issue. Read Now!


Charlie Starr: Open-Tuning Magic on “Azalea”

Enjoy a bit of the supremely tasty “Azalea,” played by Charlie Starr and his ’55 Gibson J-45.  It’s just one of the great vintage guitars (check out the two ’63 Everly Brothers in back) you’ll hear on Blackberry Smoke’s new album, “Be Right Here,” which is reviewed in the June issue, accompanied by an interview in which Charlie digs into it. Both can be read right here. Read Now!


Reddick Voyager CS

Boss Delay Machine DM-101 Reddick Echo Heaven

Love the simplicity and warmth of analog in your effects? Well, meet Boss’ new Delay Machine DM-101, housed in a chassis that echoes their very first delay (the late-’70s DM-1) and with eight BBD chips in a 100-percent analog signal path. Yes, DM-101 has digital brain that helps organize things and saves 12 presets, but […]

What good was selling a newfangled electric guitar back at the dawn of the revolution if you didn’t have an electric guitar amplifier to go along with it? Any significant brand that offered a lap steel or electro-Spanish model in the early days of rock and roll also needed to offer an amp in order […]

Classics: July 2022

Jack Jones Doubleneck

In November of 1954, 16-year-old Jack Jones walked into a Seattle pawn shop and noticed a strange doubleneck guitar. “It was like a magnet – I knew it was meant to be mine,” he said. The tag was marked “$125.” “I offered the entire $110 that was in my pocket,” he added. “The guy’s wife […]

Wally Stocker

A Baby Grows Up

After decades away from the music scene, guitarist Wally Stocker is back on his feet again and back where he belongs, playing lead guitar with a new lineup in The Babys. From 1977 to ’80, the group amassed a string of radio-friendly hits including “Isn’t It Time,” “Every Time I Think of You,” “Head First,” “Back […]

Gibson Super Jumbo 100

The Super Jumbo 200 is Gibson’s most celebrated flat-top model, and deservedly so, thanks to its use by cowboy movie stars in the pre-World War II years and by country music stars in the post-war years. The Super Jumbo 100, on the other hand, is one of Gibson’s more obscure models – a status it […]

Eric Krasno

Front Man

Because Eric Krasno isn’t quite busy enough performing 188 dates a year with Soulive, moonlighting with the band Lettuce, or producing Norah Jones and Aaron Neville, he recently felt the need to release a solo record. Blood From A Stone positions the eclectic songwriter/guitarist front and center for the first time as a singer. Soul […]

Tomas Janzon

From Stockholm With Love

On Tomas Janzon’s Nomadic, the Stockholm transplant based in New York channels his inner Wes Montgomery to unveil fresh compositions with clever harmonic twists, all supported by lush hollowbody tones and a silky touch. Janzon’s pursuit of jazz excellence is particularly admirable because he’s European, and Nomadic is perfect late-night ear candy. What was on […]

Recording King Ray Whitley

As a maker of high-quality instruments, Gibson was hit hard by the onset of the Depression in the 1930s. Company president Guy Hart, a former accountant, recognized that Gibson could not survive by simply waiting for better times, and he took action, diverting some guitar production to wooden toys, creating the Kalamazoo line of budget-priced […]

Boggs' Quad

Boggs’ Quad

Four-neck Fender From a Friend

Noted in musical history as one of the players who pushed the steel guitar beyond Hawaiian music to more-complex chording and wild interchanges with Spanish-style electric guitarists, Noel Boggs emerged from a tragic childhood, using the guitar and music as a motivator, guide, and ultimately, means to a make a living. Boggs was born in […]

Have Guitar Will Travel – 024 Featuring Barry Grezbik

In Ep. 24 of  “Have Guitar Will Travel,” host James Patrick Regan visits with luthier Barry Grezbik, of Grez Guitars. They discuss talk Barry’s influences and how he is applying his experience as a designer of audio products and sound systems to create non-traditional guitars with an emphasis on function. They also touch on his […]

Jazz Player of the Year

George Benson Awarded in 2018 Even within the category of jazz, it’s hard to pin down guitar wizard George Benson. In a career lasting over a half-century he has played straight-ahead standards, post-bop, soul ballads, and danceable funk-pop featuring his silky, soulful vocals. Find all the details in the 2018 VG Readers’ Choice Awards. Allan […]

The Reverend Koch Gristle 90

Pop The Hood

What happens when you mix a classic design with the creativity of twang ace Greg Koch? You get the Reverend Gristle 90, which may look like a sporty T-style guitar but has cool things under the hood. Specs include a chambered korina body and a set 24.75″ korina neck. The former’s raised midsection brings to […]

Guy Pratt

Rickenbackers and a Resistance

Guy Pratt has been the bass player for Pink Floyd since signing on for the tour to support 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. With the gig came a rapid accumulation of basses. “I arrived for rehearsals in Toronto with the paltry stable of a Steinberger, a Status II fretless, and ‘Betsy’ – my ’64 […]

The Ray Butts EchoSonic

If you want to talk star-user ratio, the Ray Butts EchoSonic is near the top of the heap. Most accounts agree that fewer than 70 amps were ever made, yet owners among that modest number include Chet Atkins, Luther Perkins, Roy Orbison, Paul Yandell, Carl Perkins, and, the most celebrated in EchoSonic lore, Elvis Presley […]

Fender Harvard

Given the current craze for semi-small “home” and “recording” amps, Fender’s 5F10 Harvard of 1955-’60 could be the ideal tweed amp, yet, in its day, it fell between two stools and never sold in large numbers. Or, make that three stools. With the Champ and Princeton in its rear-view mirror and the Deluxe and Tremolux […]

Daion Headhunter HH-555

The trajectory of the Japanese guitar industry in many ways has mirrored that of the United States, though in a slightly compressed timeframe on the front-end because America had a fairly big head start. In any case, people worked for someone, had a better idea, went out on their own, and by the mid ’70s […]

One of Two of a Kind

Gibson’s L-3 Ganus Brothers Special

Making custom instruments has always been problematic for companies designed to manufacture in quantity. Though it had an unenforced policy against one-off projects, this guitar illustrates how the company did just that and demonstrates the struggle between accounting and public relations.

Hound Dog Taylor, Son Seals, and Others

Alligator Records 40th Anniversary Collection

“I’m A Woman” sings Koko Taylor in her face-smacking distaff take on Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man” to open this collection of Alligator’s best, past and present. Telecaster god Albert Collins follows with “I Ain’t Drunk,” a joyous ode to intoxication chased by feverish, industrial-strength slide guitar on “Strange Feeling” from Michael Burks, a bluesman […]

Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC+

The Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC+

Early Mesa/Boogie Mark Series amps were something of a sensation, but even with the line now having stretched all the way to the massively featured Mark V, many fans of these powerful little beasts feel the evolution peaked at the end of the Mark II range, with the Mark IIC+. Though at the time they […]

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