When I played the Sage acoustically and dug in hard with a pick, the guitar’s sound compressed nicely, accentuating the guitar’s thick midrange projection, without leaving behind the high-end sparkle and low-end definition.
Monel strings are known for giving a warm, rich sound that highlights a more even, natural guitar tone while offering natural corrosion resistance.
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The Recording King Dirty 30s Deluxe Single 0 guitar shares the same woods and electronics as its Dirty 30s Series 11 counterparts, but with a few key differences.
This steel-string incorporates elements from the luthier's nylon-string background, such as the combination of an ebony fretboard and a rosewood bridge.
It sure makes gratifying sounds while in the driver’s seat, but all of the 001’s good qualities shine even brighter from the audience’s perspective:
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For many players, these personalized inlays are not about having a flashy stage guitar, but about adding embellishments that makes a guitar their guitar.
For much of his career, White played this 1933 National Duolian, serial number C7094, which he called “Hard Rock.”
Carrying on the work of company founder and namesake Preston K. Thompson, who died April 11, 2019, the small cadre of builders at Preston Thompson Guitars, in Sisters, Oregon, is one of those teams that’s capable of delivering extraordinarily crafted steel-strings time and again, and this Thompson 000-14SBA is one of those fine instruments.
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In the past 20 years, the resonator guitar has seen a reawakening as builders continuing to refine the basic concept that’s nearly 100 years old.
The wide tonal palette of acoustic guitars includes archtop, resonator, and baritone colors. Here's more about the history, makers, and players of these instruments.
This unique Eric Weigeshoff-built instrument is as individual as the music Yasmin Williams creates with it.
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This was a year in which we saw the results of several large makers looking to the future of the guitar and daring to do something different.
B&G throws in some of its own ideas to create an instrument that is a more of an individual interpretation than any kind of replica.
Eastman’s Double Top series is among the first to use the boutique-maker idea of a double top—a soundboard incorporating two outer wooden layers over a synthetic core, for enhanced sound and responsiveness—in a production steel-string guitar model.
The Modèle Elan 12 is based on Maccaferri’s original Modèle Jazz guitar, a 12-fret design from the early 1930s.
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“I’ve always been ‘the OM guy,’” says Eric Schoenberg, from his shop in the tiny enclave of Tiburon, California, just north of San Francisco.
A collaboration between two French companies, the Lâg Tramontane HyVibe, turns the guitar’s body into a speaker that can add several different effects to your acoustic tone, loop, metronome, and interact with a smartphone app for even greater control of the preamp’s parameters.
These two Nationals display age and use in a way that museum curators treasure. These guitars were meant to be used, and their accumulated wear and patina reveal a lot about the lives they have led and the people who have played them.
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A clever new accessory from G7th, the Performance 3 capo, has a feature that sets it apart from anything else out there: namely the company’s “adaptive radius technology” (ART).
In standard tuning, this guitar was great for cranking out my inner jukebox of classic-rock riffs from the ’70s and ’80s.
No matter how I played the Angelus, it delivered a nicely proportioned sound, with a spanky top end layered over a controlled bass and midrange. The low end wasn’t cavernous or boomy, which helped it feel balanced across the frequency range, especially useful for fingerstyle parts on open tunings and easy to control through a loud amp.
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he player who ends up favoring the Fender Acoustasonic Telecaster is anybody’s guess, but it’s likely to be a musician who places a priority on functional, accessible tools. It’s certainly going to find an audience among those who need acoustic and electric tones at the ready and value the Acoustasonic’s looks and high level of comfort.
Guitars can use a little care from time to time, and the GrooveTech Acoustic Guitar Tech Kit covers all of the essentials.
Our pitch to makers was simple: Send us a guitar that uses no rosewood and has a real-world cost of $500–$1,500. Since some makers have many models that qualify, we limited each brand to one guitar of any shape or size, with or without electronics or a cutaway. Laminated and solid woods were okay, but no composites such as carbon fiber (that’s a roundup for another time). What you’ll see over the following pages are a dozen acoustic guitars, presented alphabetically, that show off some of the delightful choices available in this popular price range.
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After setting up shop in a garage in Phoenix, Arizona, in the early 1980s, Jeff Genzler, a professional musician and electronics enthusiast, did much to advance the art of bass amplification with his state-of-the-art class-D solid-state amps. With the introduction…
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