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1958 Gibson Flying V
This incredible Flying V is featured on page 126 in A.R. Duchossoir’s book, Gibson Electrics, The Classic Years, and it includes the near mint, original, form-fit hardshell case.
This incredible Flying V is featured on page 126 in A.R. Duchossoir’s book, Gibson Electrics, The Classic Years, and it includes the near mint, original, form-fit hardshell case.
Laney has launched the DB-EAST-PRE Nathan East Signature bass preamp pedal.
What separates the DB-EAST-PRE from generic bass preamps is simple: Nathan East didn’t just approve it. He designed it around the exact problems he encounters every week as a working musician, and it’s designed with enormous flexibility in mind.
Nathan doesn’t play one bass, in one style, in one context. He moves between acoustic and electric basses. Four-string and five-string instruments. Active and passive electronics. Sometimes all within the same set, on the same stage. Most preamps make this painful. Switching instruments means stopping to re-dial input trims and levels. That’s not realistic in a professional environment.
The DB-EAST-PRE solves this with dual inputs, including independent trim control on Input 2. Switch instruments and your levels are instantly matched. No volume jumps. No tone shifts. Just seamless transitions.
The DB-EAST-PRE ships with Nathan East’s favourite LA·IR impulse responses pre-loaded. These aren’t generic cabinet simulations—they’re IRs taken directly from the rigs that have defined his touring and studio sound.
Even better, the system is intelligent. Select Input 1 and the corresponding IRs load automatically. Switch to Input 2 and the cabinet responses adapt to match. It’s fast, musical, and invisible in use.
Run the DI output straight to a front-of-house console, into a DAW, or into a powered speaker system. Using the companion app, you can manage real-time parametric EQ and store cabinet IRs tailored to specific venues or recording situations.
Every control on the DB-EAST-PRE exists for a reason. The master volume lets you shape the preamp’s character while maintaining precise control over overall output. The TUBE channel includes dedicated EQ voicing for players who want to refine the drive characteristics of their tone.
The RANGE control reinforces low-end weight within the drive section, while selectable mid pre-shapes allow you to fine-tune presence, punch, and articulation.
This isn’t complexity for its own sake. It’s acknowledgement that professional bass players need precision, adaptability, and control—night after night.
Key Specifications
Signature Dual-Input Bass Preamp – Designed with Nathan East for seamless switching between multiple basses, active and passive
Independent Input Trim Control – Automatic level matching between instruments for uninterrupted live performance
LA·IR Advanced Impulse Response Technology – Pre-loaded with Nathan East’s personal touring and session cabinet IRs
Professional DI & Recording Ready – Optimised outputs for live consoles, DAWs, powered speakers, and silent practice
Precision Tone Shaping – Tube channel voicing, selectable mid pre-shapes, RANGE low-end control, and master output control
Handcrafted in England – Built at Laney’s Black Country Customs workshop; compact, pedalboard-ready
Handcrafted in the UK the DB-EAST-PRE is pedalboard friendly and robust enough for demanding session and touring work.
Italian effects maker Dophix®, known for its handmade analog pedals that blend sonic artistry with Tuscan craftsmanship, announces the release of the Magnifico Dual Independent Boost Pedal. The pedal is the result of a collaboration with Artur Menezes and the first ten will be personally signed my Menezes. Available now worldwide through select retailers, the Magnifico represents a refined evolution in the pursuit of expressive tone and musical warmth.
Inspired by the spirit of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s “Il Magnifico”, the celebrated patron of Renaissance art and culture, the new Magnifico pedal embodies both elegance and power. This dual channel boost pedal offers players exceptional dynamics, precision, and tonal control in a fully analog, hand-wired design.
Featuring two completely independent boost circuits, each has its own Level control and dedicated input/output jacks for true signal separation. Whether used to push an amplifier into natural overdrive or to elevate solos with transparent volume lift, the Magnifico gives guitarists total command over their tone.
Constructed with discrete, high-quality components and vintage-grade resistors, the Magnifico delivers the warmth, clarity, and harmonic richness that define the Dophix sound. Each pedal is handcrafted in Italy, employing true bypass switching to preserve tonal integrity when not engaged. Designed for flexibility and musical sensitivity, it draws only 19 mA with LED on and operates on a 9V DC external power supply.
Rooted in the artistic legacy of Florence, Dophix continues its mission to merge Italian design, handcrafted quality, and vintage sound philosophy. The Magnifico stands as both a tribute to Renaissance craftsmanship and a modern tool for discerning guitarists who demand authentic analog character.
For detailed specifications, please visit www.dophix.it.
Jens Mosbergvik, left, helps Matt Schofield, middle, set up in 2013.
As a Fender amp guy, I frequently cross paths with musicians and guitar players in all sorts of situations. What I enjoy most is fieldwork—setting up amps onstage or troubleshooting tubes, fuses, speakers, and rattling noises on the fly. Here are a couple of stories where I got the last-minute call to save the gig.
In 2013, organizers of the Kongsberg Jazzfestival in Norway reached out in urgent need of guitar amps for Robben Ford and Matt Schofield. I was thrilled—I knew I had the perfect amps for these blues aficionados. Though I had never seen Ford play live, I knew from reading interviews that he liked black panel Fenders. Schofield was more familiar to me. I’d caught him several times, always playing his SVL guitars through Two-Rock amps. I particularly remember one time he taped over the logo of a 4x12" Marshall speaker cabinet, probably because he didn’t want to be associated with the brand.
I loaded my car with my best Super Reverb, a silver panel Vibrolux Reverb, and a silver panel Deluxe Reverb as backup amps, both converted to black panel specs with modern upgraded speakers. The Vibrolux had a pair of 10" Weber 10A125s and the Deluxe a 12" Celestion Century Vintage, the very first guitar amp speaker with a neodymium magnet. Together with a custom pair of 6L6s, this amp was both lighter and twice as loud and punchy as a normal Deluxe Reverb.
For Matt, I borrowed my brother’s Two-Rock Custom Signature v3 and a 40 kg oak cabinet loaded with four heavy-duty Weber 10A150 and 10F150 speakers. It even had a cool Weber logo on the front. At soundcheck, I met up with Simon Law, Matt’s guitar tech and the founder of SVL Guitars. He was a bit unsure about the robustness of the original CTS speakers in the Super, but I assured him that they could take a beating.
We set up both the Super and Vibrolux for Robben and the Two-Rock for Matt on top of the huge Weber cabinet. I remember Matt spending a lot of time rotating the Two-Rock’s knobs to find his tone. Meanwhile, Robben didn’t even look at his amps before he struck a chord, and he was shocked by the loud volume! He walked back a few meters to dial down the level on both amps.
“The whole shop erupted when Kirk demoed a few Albert King licks—powerful bends, vibrato, and those unmistakable facial expressions to match.”
During the gig, I stood right in the line of fire of all the amps and enjoyed the show. Robben’s ES-335 sounded clean and articulate, and Matt had his typical saturated and fat single-coil neck-pickup Strat tone. They both sounded fabulous. It was great seeing them perform, and also meeting them before the gig.
A few years later, I was introduced to two of my all-time guitar heroes, Kirk Fletcher and Josh Smith. The meeting came via the talented Adam Douglas, who also lives in Norway. Adam came up with an idea to do a daytime jam session with Kirk and Josh in a guitar store. So I texted with the owner of Vintagegitar, a high-end boutique shop in Oslo, who immediately said yes. I lifted 15-20 different vintage Fender amps into my Fenderguru trailer and headed for town.
On the shop floor, we had nearly every Fender blackface amp in existence, plus a few great silver panels. Kirk played his flametop Les Paul while Josh had his regular black Chapin T-Bird. I plugged them into different amps and started turning knobs. Josh spent time with my 1966 Princeton Reverb, loaded with a custom '60s Jensen C10n speaker. Meanwhile, Kirk grabbed a Flying V hanging on the wall. I plugged him into a stock 1964 Twin Reverb with Oxford 12T6 speakers. With the volume between 4 and 5, the Twin was loud, and the Flying V's hot humbuckers filled the room with sustaining single notes.
The whole shop erupted when Kirk demoed a few Albert King licks—powerful bends, vibrato, and those unmistakable facial expressions to match. Goosebumps.
Kirk liked that Twin so much he asked to borrow it for his gig that night. A few songs from that October 2015 show at Herr Nilsen are documented on YouTube for anyone wanting to hear some serious blues guitar.
Finally, after 5 years of talking Fender amps for Premier Guitar, the time has come for me to say goodbye to all of you. I’d like to offer a huge thanks to all the readers and the professional, fun, and knowledgeful people at PG, in particular my editors Ted Drozdowski and Luke Ottenhof. I have really enjoyed working with you, and I hope my contributions have inspired older and newer generations to enjoy the classic Fender amps and to keep the legacy going.
Cloud Microphones has unveiled its new Cloudlifter Mini CL-25 compact mic preamp. Offering the same award-winning circuitry and performance specs as the original Cloudlifter CL-1, the Mini CL-25 is a custom engineering collaboration with Neutrik. Using standard 48-volt phantom power, the unit’s ultra-compact in-line design interfaces directly with dynamic, ribbon, and tube microphones to provide up to +25 dB of ultra-clean gain, and is the smallest and most portable Cloudlifter ever produced for studio, broadcast, and live sound professionals.
Plugging directly into microphones, preamps, mixers, stage boxes, and wall panels, the Mini CL-25 is built utilizing a custom Neutrik gold-plated XLR connector system. Employing hard-soldered, wire-free internal circuitry designed to meet the demands of thousands of insertion cycles, the device offers reliability within live and studio environments where daily hard use is the norm.
As a tool to achieve more clarity while reducing noise or coloration, the Mini CL-25 adds clean, transparent gain before your preamp using standard phantom power that isn’t passed along to the microphone. Along with cleaner gain, the unit lets users operate with lower preamp gain settings to better preserve clarity, detail, and authenticity. Resulting performance provides more of the actual microphone and less preamp coloration and artifacts, along with increased headroom.
Optimal for voice mics, dynamic mics, and low-output microphones, plus situations where protection for ribbon mics is desirable, the CL-25 will find itself completely at home in applications including studio recording, broadcast, location recording, podcasting, and live sound. Advantages within the latter category center around its compact form factor that won’t pull or stress microphone connectors, clear gain and natural frequency response (which helps reduce artifacts that cause feedback), easier EQ control from the mixing console, its ability to eliminate the need for an extra mic cable, and an external black finish that maintains a low visual profile onstage.
Designed using state-of-the-art multilayer technology and high-tech engineering, the streamlined miniaturization process at the heart of the Mini CL-25 brings the smallest footprint possible to the Cloudlifter universe, but guarantees that no sacrifices to either performance or audio quality are made along the way. The true sound of the source with all the attributes the Cloudlifter line has built its reputation upon remains totally uncompromised.
The Cloudlifter Mini CL-25 is now shipping and carries a street price of $149. For more information visit cloudmicrophones.com.
Spending quality time with the Silktone Expander is like getting lost in a garden maze in late spring. You might not always know where you are, but the sensory overload is so rich and intoxicating that you’ll forget you were trying to get anywhere specific in the first place. Using the Expander, a player encounters full, resonant boost, overdrive, and distortion tones that can sound great in the most straightforward applications. But there are also unusual gain flavors in abundance, ranging from exploding-5-watt-antique-amp textures, thrilling uncommon fuzz fare, and ghostly, smoky, fiery, in-between sounds that defy easy categorization but can drive a mixer, arranger, or songwriter’s inspiration to white-hot levels.
Getting the most out of the Expander’s, well, expansive tone vocabulary requires you to be realistic and honest about your relationship to strictly analog methods. There are no presets here. And while the Expander can cover textures you might otherwise assign to three or four gain devices with their own dedicated footswitches, you do all that here with a single footswitch, three knobs, and a toggle. So, tapping into the breadth of the Expander’s capabilities in performance takes confidence, and a creative mindset that allows for happy accidents. If your composing and performance style is more “roll-with-it” than surgical and uncompromising, the Silktone Expander opens doors that reveal unexpected surprises.
A Chameleon, An Individual
One of the trickiest things about reviewing the Expander and boiling it down to its essence is how hard it is to find equivalent sounds as a base for comparison. The germanium heart of the pedal is inspired by a Dallas Rangemaster, and some overdriven and fuzzy facets of its personality sound and behave like a germanium Fuzz Face. At other times it responded like my Jext Telez Selmer Buzz Tone clone running at 3 volts. Some of the Expander’s warm, fizzy drive tones also evoke console preamp-style pedals like the Hudson Broadcast. But on the flip side, I’d plug the Expander in alongside a favorite clean boost, sparkly overdrive, or preamp, and end up totally preferring its balance of clarity, detail, and energy.
If you find a combination this pedal sounds lousy with, let us know! We’re still looking.
How did Silktone craft a pedal that’s so many pedals in one? There are clues to Silktone founder Charles Henry’s intent. In addition to the Rangemaster influence, Henry gravitated toward the Shin-Ei FY-2 and FY-6 as well as the Roland Bee Baa—all fuzzes that speak through bold, often radical voices. Certainly, tones of that ilk live here. But there is much in the Expander that reflects the mindset of an amp builder—and Henry is a very creative one. In lay terms, the Expander’s circuit works like this: A JFET transistor that emphasizes rich, consonant, 2nd order harmonics makes up the first power stage. The second stage is Henry's riff on the germanium Rangemaster circuit. That is almost certainly the origin of many of the Expander’s hazier, fuzzier, but also more dynamically responsive tendencies. A JFET at the output stage effectively emulates the saturation that occurs in a real tube amplifier's first stage—probably a reason the Expander sounds great at low amp volumes. There’s nothing terribly complex going on here. But in practice you hear a balance more typical of a great amp: Warm when clean, full of overtone character when run at its limits, and responsive across a wide dynamic range and EQ spectrum.
It’s true that this breadth of sounds could be a challenge to manage for players accustomed to pedal presets. The Expander is a very hands-on pedal. But it must be said that the intuitive ease with which you can move between radically different sounds is impressive. The simple controls have great range, especially the tone or “choke” knob, which alone can recast a given output volume or gain level drastically. The choke knob can, in turn, be radically reshaped by the 3-position voice switch, which enables moves from a dark voicing at the left-most position, a neutral position in the center, and a bright setting at the right. Henry suggests that the dark voicing is best for high-gain sounds, and the bright switch for low-gain output. He’s right. But perhaps predictably, the Expander gave me many satisfying reasons to violate this guideline.
Equal Opportunity Expander
Though I tried, I really couldn’t find an amp and guitar pairing that wasn’t enhanced by the Expander. A Jaguar running through a hot, 15-watt EL84 amp at attenuated levels? Magic! An SG driving a Fender Reverb tank and a 50-watt Bassman? Double, extra-thrilling, super-loud magic! A Rickenbacker and Champ? That combo sounded ten times as big and fat, all at a volume that any soundman or engineer could love. I could go on. I threw Danelectros and Eko 12 strings at this pedal. Mixed it with other gain sources as divergent as Harmonic Percolators, Selmer Buzz Tone clones, Tube Screamers, Boss DS-1s and Vox Tone Benders. In every case the Expander was not just agreeable and accommodating but had real enhancements to lend. If you find a combination this pedal sounds lousy with, let us know! We’re still looking.
The Verdict
For all its understated, elegant design, the Silktone Expander is packed with sounds that not only bring a lifeless amp to life, but do so in ways distinctive enough to jump-start a stalled recording project or rescue a song from the doldrums. The straight-ahead, all-analog design means that presets aren’t coming to save you in a pinch. You’ll need to get crafty, be resourceful, and practice using the Expander. But it is incredibly forgiving, a willing co-pilot, and full of alternative tone treasures—particularly for players willing to explore and improvise. While $269 might seem a lot for a pedal this simple, the quality is tip-top, and it certainly makes several of my gain devices feel superfluous. If you have downsizing to do, the Silktone Expander, despite its name, is a beautiful solution that leaves you no less rich in tone options.