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Bell Custom Guitars Jazzblaster Hot Rod
If hot-rodding your guitar’s body shape or paint job isn’t your thing, why not go with souped-up body material? The Bell Custom Guitars Jazzblaster Hot Rod features a maple/plexiglass
If hot-rodding your guitar’s body shape or
paint job isn’t your thing, why not go with
souped-up body material? The Bell Custom
Guitars Jazzblaster Hot Rod features a
maple/plexiglass body that has a different
tone from a guitar made of pure wood.
“The plexiglass addition isn’t just for
show,” Bell designer Paul Reid tells us.
“We feel that keeping the pickups, bridge,
etc. connected to the wood, then using
the plexi to compress and deliver the tone
created by the wood, you get more sustain
and a very focused tone, in addition to a
striking visual effect.”
This guitar is also loaded with hand-wound
Amalfitano pickups and user-controlled
LEDs that illuminate the plexi wings. The
Jazzblaster Hot Rod has a 25.5” scale
length, a rosewood fretboard and a 1.695”
width at the nut. It also features chrome
hardware and a machine-turned stainless
steel pickguard and truss rod cover.
Fresh off a substantial break and a live acoustic recording from Paris’ infamous catacombs, hard-rock titans Queens of the Stone Age stormed back to life this spring with an American tour, including back-to-back nights in Boston at Fenway’s MGM Music Hall.
PG’s Chris Kies snuck onstage before soundcheck to meet with guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and get an in-depth look at the guitars, amps, and effects he’s using this summer.
Van Leeuwen started working with Echopark Guitars luthier Gabriel Currie around 12 years ago, and this custom De Leon model is the product. It’s nothing fancy, says Van Leeuwen, with a walnut bolt-on neck and single-coil bridge/humbucker neck configuration, but it’s just made well. This one is tuned to C standard and strung with a custom set of Dunlop strings (.012–.058).
TVL’s RIY (Relic It Yourself)
TVL’s RIY (Relic It Yourself)
This is the first-ever prototype of the signature oxblood Jazzmaster that Van Leeuwen received from Fender’s Custom Shop, and it also carries his first attempt at writing out his own signature. (It got better.) Van Leeuwen relic’d it himself with hard playing and natural wear and tear. It’s got a Mastery bridge.
Double the Jazz
Double the Jazz
This is number two of two double-neck Jazzmasters produced by Paul Waller at Fender’s Custom Shop. The bottom 6-string neck is essentially the Troy Van Leeuwen Jazzmaster, while the top splits the difference between an Electric 12 and a Telecaster, with a single-coil Tele pickup in the bridge and an offset pickup in the neck. A selector at the top toggles between top, bottom, or both signals, and basic controls for tone, volume, and pickup selection stay at the bottom.
Exploiter
This Echopark Explorer-style, nicknamed the “Exploiter,” came from a love of ’80s Ibanez and Hamer guitars. On its way back on a boat from Europe, it got exposed to seawater, which helped Van Leeuwen out with the relic’ing.
Van Leeuwen also packs a custom Echopark modeled after an old Teisco electric and a custom Fender 12-string Telecaster. Van Leeuwen hints that he’s been working with Squier to make an affordable version of the 12-string Tele.
A GMI PSA
Along with Currie and GMI’s Sean Romin, Van Leeuwen helped develop the GMI Public Address Systems 33F6. He describes it as having the power section of a Fender and the preamp section of a Marshall Jubilee. It’s a great pedal platform.
Van Leeuwen runs two 33F6s plus a Vox AC30. One 33F6 has his dry signal, and the AC30 carries the wet, while the second 33F6 carries wet lead signals. One cabinet is dedicated to the dry signal, while the other cab has one 12" speaker for the AC30 and two 12" speakers for the lead 33F6 signal. Three Austrian Audio condenser mics capture the signals.
Troy Van Leeuwen’s Board
All of Van Leeuwen’s pedals go through loops, with a RJM Mastermind PBC/6X and Mastermind GT/16 handling the switching, and most processing done through a Fractal FM3 and a pair of Eventide H9s. Van Leeuwen designed the boards, and his tech Cody helped build and program it.
Across the two boards, there’s a pair of both Electro-Harmonix Superegos and Way Huge Saffron Squeezes, plus Dunlop expression and volume pedals; EarthQuaker Devices Tentacle, Rainbow Machine, and Fuzz Master General; Way Huge Effect Pedal, Green Rhino, and Atreides; Echopark Echodriver; Ten Years Is A Decade; modified EHX Holiest Grail; and Dr. No Effects TVL Raven.
With a tone vocabulary that spans clean, smoky, grinding, and growling—plus a Two notes speaker simulator—the 25-watt Airwave is a ferociously fun, potentially formidable amp for any size stage or studio.
Needless to say, the splashy news about Supro’s Airwave is its onboard Two notes cab sim that expands the amp’s studio and live capabilities, not to mention a player’s creative options. Having Two notes cab simulations onboard is a cool thing. It takes many of the cab sim tailoring capabilities of, say, the Universal Audio OX or Boss’ WAZA Tube Expander, and makes them part of the Airwave’s amp architecture, which is no small victory for convenience.
- YouTube
But the 2x6V6 Airwave is a very cool stage and studio amp before you ever touch the cabinet simulation capabilities. At 25 watts, with tube-driven tremolo and spring reverb, it’s a cool alternative for players considering a tweed Deluxe, Deluxe Reverb, Princeton Reverb, or, for that matter, any of Supro’s excellent low- to mid-power combos. But while it’s not quite the blank slate a Deluxe Reverb is (the Airwave’s voice is generally more compressed, with lower headroom), if I had to record or play a show with the Airwave, a delay pedal, and a guitar, I’d do so confident that I had about 4-zillion awesome, tender-to-gnarly textures to work with.
Little Basher
The Airwave is a handsome amp, designed with lots of vintage Supro motifs, a wide aluminum control panel, rocker switches, and a control layout that are more than a little evocative of the Rolling Stones’ early Ampegs. There’s also a little Stones swagger in its voice. For while it can do a very convincing approximation of bright, almost-cleanish Princeton Reverb or Deluxe Reverb sounds, it’s basically grittier than either of those. Not in a way that confines the Airwave to garage-rock trash realms, but which hints at sepia-tone speaker sounds and a loud, rowdy vintage Supro or tweed Fender edge when you dig in with a flatpick. These savage-around-the-edges facets of the Airwave’s personality are tempered, perhaps, by the 12'' speaker, which adds thickening counterpoint to the barky midrange growl and enhances bass frequencies. It helps make the 3-band EQ section feel more sensitive and interactive, too.
The tone variations available between just the EQ and master volume/gain control interplay are plentiful. But all those sounds can be dramatically recast and even made electrifyingly aggressive with the onboard, switchable boost and drive, which are activated by the two rocker switches on the front panel or optional footswitches.
Alternate Realities
To interface with the Airwave’s Two notes capabilities, you download the Torpedo Remote app. But you can obtain excellent sounds without going deep, thanks in part to the amp’s onboard boost and drive switches. They feel like pedals perfectly selected to work with the amp and each other. The drive in particular is tough and snarling. And though your results may differ, to me the effects feel organically enmeshed in the fabric of the amp’s output. Both effects can be gritty, punchy, and explosive extensions of the amp, and together they can make it sound huge for 25 watts. The Torpedo Remote app calls up more-or-less photorealistic representations of several studios and live spaces (ancient temples included!), microphones, and cabinets. As in many other cab sim applications, you can readily and easily change microphones, slide microphone positions back and forth, switch between virtual cabinets of various sizes, as well as add preamps and reverbs with easy-to-use analog-style interfaces. If the wealth of sounds here isn’t already everything you need to get a great recorded sound, they get you off to a great start. What’s important, though, is how seamlessly they function with the whole range of the amp’s tones.
The Verdict
Although $1.5K might seem like a lot to pay for an Indonesia-built tube amp, it’s noteworthy that amps like the Fender ’65 Deluxe Reverb reissue are now pushing the $1.8K barrier. But the Airwave includes a useful and well-integrated Two notes Torpedo cab sim solution worth several hundred dollars by itself. Most impressively, Airwave excels in both the purely analog and digital cab sim realms without compromising capabilities in either. The amp has loads of personality and range. It’s up for a punky Kinks/Ramones rumble or Alvin Lee rippage, but just as eager to please as a clean-cut extra in a Jaguar-and-spring-reverb surf party flick or vintage soul session. If you’re the kind of artist inclined to do a little of all that in your recording and performing life, the Airwave satisfies on every count.
In some ways, it’s hard to know whether to categorize the Martin D Jr E StreetLegend as a backpack or travel guitar. After all, Martin still maintains the LX Little Martin line, which is marketed in very specific terms as a travel instrument. And the D Jr E’s size, which isn’t a whole lot smaller than my Martin 00-15, stretches the boundaries of that classification. But Martin definitely leans into the go-anywhere appeal of the D Jr E and its brethren in the new revamped Junior Series. If the soft case fits, wear it. Assuming it lives, at least partly, in that category, it is among the best sounding travel guitars I’ve ever played. Thanks to the all-solid spruce and sapele body construction, it possesses a warm, woody, and organic voice that is likely made richer by the new, longer 24.9" scale.
Stretching Travel Boundaries
Even apart from backpack-guitar-or-not classification questions, it must be a little tricky marketing the D Jr E StreetLegend. With its distressed finish, the StreetLegend version costs just less than 900 bucks, which, in inflationary times, might be a threshold that budget-conscious, small-guitar customers might be hard-pressed to cross. But if you broaden your expectations of what the D Jr E StreetLegend can be, the price looks less formidable, because it can definitely be a front-line, everyday instrument.
If you’ve spent any considerable time with Martins, the D Jr will feel familiar, and though its shrunken dreadnought body profile can be oddly disorienting, the longer, 24.9" scale (the previous Junior series guitars featured a 24" scale) is the same as full-sized Martin mainstays like the 000 and 00. At 1 3/4", the nut width matches the wider spec for the Martin OM, which lends the D Jr E fretboard a spacious, accommodating feel. I’d wager that more than a few players would identify the D Jr E as an instrument from Martin’s full-sized lines. Body aside, it just doesn’t feel small.
Like many guitars built in Martin’s Mexico factory, the D Jr E StreetLegend’s build quality is excellent. And though it doesn’t benefit from the nano-level attention to detail of an upmarket Nazareth-built guitar, you won’t see a trace of the hastily sanded bracing or sloppy fret dressing that mark many accessibly priced instruments. The rounded and beveled fretboard edges, which also highlight the very nice fretwork, give the D Jr E a comfortable, broken-in, and inviting feel. Our review guitar’s action was on the high side (though well within the bounds of acceptable), and though Martin didn’t include a hex wrench for adjusting the neck relief, there is room for adjustment there, as well as a break angle at the bridge that will permit shaving a few millimeters off if you want to adjust the action from that end of the string’s length.
“You won’t see a trace of the hastily sanded bracing or sloppy fret dressing that marks many accessibly priced instruments.”
It’s important to know that the D Jr E StreetLegend is not the only junior dreadnought in the line. And if you want to save 200 bucks you can opt for the natural finish D Jr E. That’s a good thing in more ways than one, because the distressed finish on the StreetLegend version is bound to be polarizing. Though the “wear” is patterned after instruments in Martin’s own museum, and identical to the pattern on the $2,500 D-18 StreetLegend, the effect is created on the D Jr E by dyeing the top and the almost uniform flatness in the distressed zone makes the faux finish damage less than convincing.
Boisterously Voiced
The D Jr E, like many small-body flattops, is strong in the midrange, which can generate brashness under really hard strumming, and if you use that technique exclusively, the bass can be a bit too boxy to offset the bright presence of the mids. If you suspect you have a heavy hand, it will pay to check how the guitar responds to your approach. A lighter touch definitely brings out the best in the D Jr E, and though there’s not much dynamic range in terms of headroom, it sounds awake and responsive to picking nuance.
The Martin E1 electronics and built-in tuner go a long way toward enhancing the utility of the D Jr E. The presence of any reasonably effective pickup and preamp would make the D Jr E very appealing to a gigging guitarist on the move. But the E-1 system is remarkably natural sounding for an affordable acoustic pickup and it can do a lot to round off sharp edges in the guitar’s treble spectrum when amplified and playing loud.
The Verdict
Though the effectiveness and appeal of the distressed StreetLegend finish will be a very personal matter, there is no denying the D Jr E’s strengths—most notably a great neck, solid woods, and responsiveness to a light touch. The extra 200 bucks you’ll pay for the StreetLegend finish makes the D Jr E seem more expensive than it should be, so it’s important to point out again that the more traditional natural finish model, at $699, will be much kinder to thy wallet and is priced more in line with comparable guitars in the liminal market space between travel, backpack, and merely small guitars. Given that, you should consider the value and design scores here on a sliding scale. But any small flattop that features all-solid-wood body construction, an OM’s wider nut width, a full scale, and fits in an overhead bin merits attention. Martin has, indeed, carved out a very interesting niche here.
A Canada-built, tastefully styled mini jumbo serves up comfort, a unique and expansive tone profile, and addictive playability.
Godin may be a Canadian company that skews modern in its design approach. But staring across the room at the new Godin Connaisseur MJ, glowing in soft spring sunlight, I kept thinking about two very classic American guitar companies. Martin and Rickenbacker are famous for very different things, and one of them rarely made acoustic instruments. But check out the Godin’s sunburst finish—it sure reminds me of Rickenbackerfireglo. The herringbone-patterned purling evokes that found on a D-28 as well as Rickenbacker’s checkerboard binding. The split-hexagon fretboard inlay? It conjures thoughts of aD-45, and Rickenbacker’s shark-fins. There are practical reasons that this Godin feels like an alternate-universe offspring from the two American companies—most notably the super-satisfying playability. Hermann Rorschach might have told me I’m more inclined to see and feel these likenesses in the Connaisseur MJ (I’m genuinely captivated by the beauty of Rickenbackers and Martins). But style is a big part of what sets the Connaisseur MJ apart, and you don’t need an inkblot test to know that the Godin Connaisseur MJ is a handsome, well-built, and fine-playing flattop. It’s a guitar that reveals its virtues quickly and easily.
Maple Leaf Rag
Consider another unorthodox melding of concepts: “mini” and “jumbo.” Obviously, they are a contradiction in terms. But as an acoustic guitar design guideline, the combination can yield pure gold. The jumbo in mini jumbo (MJ in Godin nomenclature) alludes to the body’s basic shape which, in its fluid curvaceousness, echoes Gibson’s SJ-200. But while the Connaisseur MJ isn’t a behemoth like the SJ-200, it’s not exactly mini either, and feels much more like a shapelier Martin OM. It’s a very comfortable profile that does much to alleviate the arm fatigue that can come from wrestling a dreadnought or genuinely jumbo jumbo.
At $2,499 the Canada-built Connaisseur MJ is Godin’s most expensive flattop by several hundred dollars. And at that price it has to tussle with giants like Martin, Gibson, and Taylor—all of whom sell very established and well-known models in a crowded market segment that most of us could call “getting expensive enough to hurt.” So, what distinguishes the Godin in a densely populated field? Well, it’s certainly pretty, and the melding of classic flattop design touchstones and contemporary styling moves achieves a unique, attractive result rather than an uncomfortable, incohesive mash up of influences.
Golden Glow
In the sonic sphere, theConnaisseur MJ exhibits many classic spruce-and-mahogany characteristics. The warm, concise fundamentals, sunset-hued, softly decaying overtones, and lack of brashness are all hallmarks of this tonewood combination. But the Godin definitely doesn’t live on the dusty, dry, and antique end of the mahogany-and-spruce spectrum. It’s alive and dynamic and responsive in ways you might even categorize as “modern,” and has ample headroom that leaves space for shifts in mood and intensity without shedding its essential voice. It’s easy to be struck by the Connaisseur MJ’s sparkle, especially when you use a light fingerstyle touch. But as I got to know the guitar, I grew to love the balance and resonance in the low end. I suspect that the mini jumbo body, and perhaps the 25.5" scale, have a lot to do with the Godin’s even, inviting voice and range. There is a beautiful combination of energy and air, even in the most softly plucked notes, and it’s easy to see how the extra expanse of spruce aft of the bridge might have a lot to do with how lively and rich the Godin sounds.
“The Godin definitely doesn’t live on the dusty, dry, antique end of the mahogany-and-spruce spectrum. It’s alive and dynamic and responsive in ways you might even categorize as ‘modern.’”
All the tone in the world doesn’t mean much if a guitar plays like a log. But the Connaisseur MJ shines in the playability realm. A few less-than-perfectly-dressed fret ends aside, the neck is addictively comfortable. If there’s a lot of Richard Thompson hammer-ons and pull-offs in your own playing vernacular, you’ll love the snappy touch responsiveness.
The Verdict
The biggest compliment I can offer the Connaisseur MJ is the considerable time I spent with it in a meditative musical state—thinking not about a review, just basking in its warm, sprightly resonance and inviting touch response. At $2,499, the Godin arguably offers more personality than a satin-finished instrument at the same price with a more famous name. It’s well built and feels like a guitar that’s in it for the long haul. And when it comes to tone and a pure playing experience, the Connaisseur MJ shines.
Echopark Shark
TVL’s RIY (Relic It Yourself)
Double the Jazz
