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Taylor are offering something a little unusual as part of their 35th Anniversary instruments. Take a look at that headstock. Yep, it’s a nine-string guitar.
Well, while it’s odd, and I’m at a loss to think of any other purpose-made nine-string acoustics, Taylor inform us (and it’s true) that the country scene have sometimes, down Nashville way, used a nine-string format (though generally utilising a 12-string instrument).
The idea is to get some of that 12-string vibe into the midrange without sending the instrument over the top into utter jangle. The D …

Amps, Featured, News »

A five-watt, class A, all-valve, baby-Bluesbreaker? Yes please.
This is the Class 5 from Marshall who are, thankfully, jumping on the low-powered valve amp-wagon. Sporting a pair of ECC83s in its preamp stage and a single EL84 to perform power-amp duties, Marshall tell us it’ll do the necessary for home, studio, rehearsals or even small gigs. This latter may require using its handy speaker output but bedroom guitarists around the world should be ably catered for.
Simplicity is the order of the day. You get your Treble, Middle and Bass tone shapers …

Accessories, Featured »

Agile Partners’ GuitarToolkit (iTunes Link) provides a bundle of guitary goodness all wrapped up in the Appley goodness of your iPhone.

First off there’s a tuner. Using the built-in microphone on your iPhone, you can use the GuitarToolkit’s chromatic tuner to sort yourself out. Alternate tunings aren’t an issue and you can even create your own if whatever weird one you’re using isn’t available.
Potentially more useful for guitarists to carry around in their pockets, however, is the scale and chord library. There’s half a million chords squeezed into this thing.
You can …

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Wow! No denying that it’s eye-catching. This is the new Gibson SG Zoot Suit. Really, Zoot Suit. It’s made from a sandwich of multiple laminations of birch wood. Each is dyed before being pressed into a single block. Those crazy stripes you’re seeing are the edges of each thin layer of the laminated body – it’s not a paint effect. The images here show the Rainbow finish but it’s available in a number of two-colour finishes that sport alternating laminations of black and red, black and orange, red and blue …