
Caught here onstage in Berkeley, California, in February '23, Jake Eddy plays one of his solo flatpicking performances, which is a testament to his ability and confidence as a player.
These four young firebrands are kicking the doors of bluegrass guitar wide open.
The fine folk art of bluegrass flatpicking has probably never been on the minds of more music fans than it is today, thanks to the rise of Billy Strings as an arena-scale artist. His chops and musicality, combined with strong songwriting and a superb band, have made him a different kind of guitar hero—one whose own heroes include Doc Watson, Tony Rice, and Norman Blake.
Of course, Billy Strings isn’t the only picker of his generation inspired by the greats or making new things happen on the flattop with a flat pick. Molly Tuttle has emerged as the most influential woman in the field’s history, as a two-time International Bluegrass Music Association guitarist of the year and a Grammy Award winner. Impressive flatpickers Grant Gordy, Jake Stargel, Cody Kilby, Chris “Critter” Eldridge, Trey Hensley, Courtney Harman, and Jake Workman have also toured and recorded widely, contributing to the approach’s elevation.
So, who’s next? We looked into the talent pool of emerging flatpickers and asked some of today’s leading players who’s been impressing them. And we came up with this list of four young, dynamic musicians with bright futures—playing bluegrass guitar and then some.
Jake Eddy
When Jake Eddy recently moved into his new house, a few hundred feet from the home where he grew up in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the first things he unpacked were a rug and the stereo. “And I laid on the rug, and I listened to A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and Manzanita [by the Tony Rice Unit]. And I cried my eyes out,” he says. Eddy offers this anecdote in a conversation about his musical passions and influences, and, sure enough, his growing body of work already includes abstract jazz, progressive string music, and traditional bluegrass.
What’s wild is how much this gregarious player and teacher has achieved by the age of 23. He’s visible and outspoken on Instagram and YouTube, and has a packed schedule of students. He plays gigs with mandolinist Andy Statman, one of the most sophisticated roots musicians out there, and he also has the nerve to perform live as a solo bluegrass flatpicker. Most everything about him feels unreasonably precocious and one-of-a-kind.
Eddy grew up in the bluegrass music world—a “festival rug rat”—and his abundant self-assurance seems to have shown itself early on. When he was just 14, the late road warrior Melvin Goins invited Eddy on the road, just as he had with a young Jason Carter years before the fiddler joined the Del McCoury Band. Jake’s family said okay, stipulating that his bluegrass picking grandfather go out as chaperone. Then, when the bass player quit, grandad stepped in and finished the tour. Jake actually played banjo in that band, “but I got to stand every night beside Junior Blankenship, who played guitar for Ralph Stanley.” So, to say it was a learning experience would be an understatement.
When the time came for college, Eddy had a scheme, which was to enroll in a music program, front load his music classes, and then split before the electives and humanities courses came due. (“I had always intended to quit,” he affirms.) His offramp was a job on the road playing guitar with the Becky Buller Band, which he did for a couple of seasons as the pandemic ban on touring lifted. Now, he’s independent again and focusing on his own identity as a player. That’s led to a self-titled debut EP, made in Nashville with Bryan Sutton and other bluegrass luminaries.
More recent, though, is his audacious solo album Live at Spanish Ballroom, recorded in Seattle with crafty takes on standards like “Beaumont Rag” and “Kentucky Waltz,” and plenty of magnetic stage banter to capture the feeling of being in the room with a self-assured storyteller. Solo flatpicking concerts are rare to say the least—virtuoso David Grier is one of the only guitarists to rise to the challenge—because it’s so hard to fill the musical space without support, but Eddy was born with a large dose of courage. “I never thought of it as limiting,” he says. “I thought it was cool.”
Jake Eddy’s Gear
Jake plays a 1951 Martin D-18, with D’Addario XS medium strings, and uses a ToneSlabs Tri XL 1.4 mm pick.
Luke Black
When Luke Black’s mother took him to a music store in first grade and urged him to pick up an instrument, he chose the banjo, thinking “it would be funny.” But he started something pretty serious that day, which led to a passion for bluegrass and a burgeoning career on the acoustic guitar. Black, now 20, is a swift and smooth flatpicker with an ambitious touring band, a degree from Berklee College of Music halfway complete, and a love of musical fusion and improvisation.
Black’s story is an endorsement of the local music scene around his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. It started at Fretted Instruments in the Homewood neighborhood, with Scruggs-style banjo lessons. Guitar came a few years later. His family wasn’t especially musical, but the store exposed him to a community, and “that ability to play with other musicians and feel that connection at a young age got me into it,” Black says.
What set him on his current trajectory, though, came after his first guitar teacher passed away. Luke saw that teacher’s son, a well-known regional picker and educator named Allen Tolbert, playing with his band at a nearby festival. “I went up to him after he played, and I was like, ‘Hey man, like, show me how to do this,’” and they were off. Tolbert introduced Black to the spacegrass universe of Tony Rice, and that approach was so influential that when he started his band, he adapted Rice’s model and called it the Mountain Grass Unit.
Playing mandolin and singing lead in the band is Drury Anderson, a lifelong friend and companion on Black’s bluegrass journey. “He was a big inspiration. We both just play off each other,” Black says. “We kind of started instruments at the same time, at the same music store. He picked up mandolin when I picked up banjo, and so we’ve been playing ‘Clinch Mountain Backstep’ together for like 12 years now.”
Black says he’s never been to the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, where newcomers tend to get noticed by the industry, but he and his buds started attending the smaller Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America winter conventions in Nashville. As old-school as that convention is, the jamming and the youth network helped him develop a personal vision. “After getting really involved in the bluegrass community, I started branching out. I mean, initially, it was just all Tony Rice,” he says. But he dove into Béla Fleck and Mike Marshall’s music, while young pickers such as Trey Hensley and Billy Strings offered contemporary inspiration. And don’t forget Jerry Garcia—there’s a Grateful Dead banner on his dorm-room wall at Berklee.
The Mountain Grass Unit is prepping for its second summer of touring with one album under its belt. Berklee’s showing him a variety of approaches and tightening up his music theory and jazz knowledge, but it’s safe to assume that we’ll see Black and his Unit following the Billy Strings trail on the jam circuit. “I really want to play as many genres as possible,” he says. “But my first language is definitely bluegrass.”
Luke Black’s Gear
Luke plays a Santa Cruz 1934 D, using 80/20 bronze Elixir strings with a BlueChip TAD 60 pick and an Elliott capo.
Alex Graf
Alex Graf’s bluegrass epiphany, or one of them, anyway, occurred at a festival performance by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder with Cody Kilby playing guitar. Alex was then a devoted jazz guitarist, planning for collegiate music studies, and the mystique of flatpicking had never revealed itself. Yet “it made instant sense to me,” he remembers. “The repertoire, the canon, the jamming, and that shared language. I was deep into Charlie Parker at that point. And I was like, ‘Holy cow, this is not the same,’ but it just resonates. I had never understood that.”
Even so, Graf, now 28, didn’t chase that Cody Kilby vibe for quite a few more years, developing what he jokes is a case of “late-onset bluegrass.” He buckled down after moving to Durango, Colorado, with his fiancée in 2017, and especially during the pandemic, when he learned solos from Tony Rice and Clarence White with the same focus and intent that he’d done for jazz solos years earlier. Today, Graf pursues a hybrid musical style with ’grass and jazz equally in reach, chiefly through his trio Tone Dog, with Tony Holmquist on mandolin and Silas Hamilton on bass. Separate from that, Graf self-produced a striking recent album of guitar tunes—original and traditional—called Sagebrush Continuum, a nod to the scrubby high desert where he lives, somewhere between sea level and his adopted state’s alpine peaks.
Tony Rice’s music, he says, “brought me into the world of bluegrass and new acoustic music. And something about it felt dangerous, like I wasn’t supposed to do that. So that made it really exciting. I became obsessed with taking the jazz stuff that I had and trying to reinterpret myself, or that understanding, through acoustic music and bluegrass.” Yet he’s never attended the IBMA convention or had contact with a thriving scene besides his friendship with Durango’s Stillhouse Junkies, who are signed to Nashville’s Dark Shadow label, so he’s in a good place to develop a sound all his own.
“I am chasing something,” he says, while stretching to define it. “A lot of it is coming through developing an improvisational language. I feel like every time I’m improvising, I’m getting a little bit closer to being able to express myself in the truest way. I know it’s a little woo-woo philosophical, but that’s kind of what drives me.”
Alex Graf’s Gear
Alex built his repertoire and recorded his album on a Taylor 100 Series acoustic, but he recently picked up a new Martin D-18. He plays D’Addario XS medium gauge strings with a BlueChip TAD 60.
Zeb Snyder
Twenty-seven-year-old Zeb Snyder has more miles under his tires and more albums in his discography than the other flatpickers in our story. He’s been playing the instrument for 20 years and touring since he was 12 with the Snyder Family Band, with his father Bud on bass and sister Samantha on fiddle. Since 2017, he’s been the youngest member of Appalachian Road Show, a hard-driving bluegrass band of veterans. And yet Snyder’s articulate, dynamic picking deserves to be better known.
Usually, family bluegrass bands are run by a patriarch, but the Snyders were a bottom-up operation. Zeb and Samantha started by taking youth lessons on classical guitar and violin, but growing up in Lexington, North Carolina, their listening tastes ran to country and bluegrass, so they started picking at local events. “The more lead guitar I started playing, and the more serious we got, we wanted somebody else to play with us. So, we asked Dad to play bass,” Zeb says.
Thing is, Bud hadn’t played since high school, so Zeb taught himself the instrument and then taught his dad how to play parts he and Samantha were coming up with, song by song. “My Dad was working a full-time job the entire time, so he didn’t have time to really study it. He always played what I taught him.” Meanwhile, Zeb and Samantha worked together on songs—she with her lyric focus and him with his instrumental chops. “So, my sister and I led the whole thing.”
Remarkably, the Snyders put out a string of independent albums and then got signed to a bluegrass label, where they issued two more … all before the youngsters reached college age. Moreover, they were pretty funky, in the vein of Nickel Creek, but that didn’t determine Zeb’s future as a bluegrass artist. When the Snyders wound down, he was taken on the road by the traditional and blues-minded mandolinist Darrell Webb. Then, Webb soon conspired with two former members of Mountain Heart to create Appalachian Road Show, a semi-conceptual band that weaves narrative and wardrobe into its throwback vibe.
Initially, the Road Show brought in hired guns for its first album, so newcomer Zeb played second to Bryan Sutton during the sessions, which he regards as “transformative” in his guitar education. Since then, he’s cultivated his bluegrass with a hybrid right-hand picking style adapted from the late electric-guitar wizard Danny Gatton.
“We take great care to protect this Appalachian Road Show vision and be really specific about what each individual song needs to sound like,” Zeb says. Whether a tune calls for a Doc Watson touch or Travis-style picking, or something else from the tradition, he’s got that in his bag. “The family band was progressive and original, and ‘let’s see what kind of weird stuff we can come up with.’ And this is a more subtle, directed kind of creativity,” he says.
Zeb Snyder’s Gear
Zeb plays a 1955 Martin D-28 that once belonged to Phil Rosenthal of the Seldom Scene, strung with D’Addario XT medium gauge phosphor bronze strings. He uses a BlueChip TAD 45 pick and a McKinney-Elliott capo he’s had since he was 13.
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Robillard has made more than 40 albums fronting his own band and with Roomful of Blues.
The roots and jazz guitar virtuoso offers insights and guidance on how to make the most of the vintage sound of the company’s enduring RH, FH, and Rhythm Chief pickups.
What do the screaming tone of Elmore James’slide guitar, the dirty rumble of early Muddy Waters recordings on Chess, the smooth 6-string voice of Johnny Smith, and the warm melodies of Gábor Szabó’s eclectic repertoire have in common? DeArmond pickups. Since 1939, DeArmonds—in particular the company’s RH (round-hole) and FH (f-hole) models, and the Rhythm Chief 1000 and 1100—have helped define the sound of experimenters and traditionalists, depending on the era.
One of today’s most notable DeArmond players is the revered blues and jazz guitar virtuoso Duke Robillard, a deep student of vintage tone who has learned how to recreate many historic guitar sounds. We asked Robillard to share his expertise and experience with DeArmond pickups, which goes back to the mid-1950s, when he and his father built his first guitar for a school science fair. They took the neck from an old, acoustic Kay Kraftsman and cut a Tele-shaped body from two pieces of 3/4" plywood, inspired by the guitar James Burton played on TV’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Then, they recycled the Kay’s bridge and tailpiece, and ordered a DeArmond. “A week after that, I was in a band,” Robillard says.
DeArmond originally referred to its pickups as “guitar microphones,” as they were designed to amplify acoustic guitars without altering their organic tone. Of course, once plugged into an amp all bets on that were off, given the breakup characteristics of the small combos that were common at the time. The RH pickups, which James and Szabó, for example, used, are held in place by clamps. The FH and Rhythm Chief models are floating pickups, mounted by what’s often called the “monkey-on-a-stick” method. Essentially, the pickups are held in place by a metal bar that’s screwed to a guitar’s body, and the pickups can slide up and down the bar, like a simian might scale a tree, to find the sweet spot.
DeArmond’s Rhythm Chief 1100.
By the time Robillard founded the swing and jump blues band Roomful of Blues in 1967, he was playing a Gretsch Synchromatic archtop fitted with a DeArmond, in quest of the authentic vintage tones he heard on records from the ’30s, ’40s and early ’50s. “Then I went to a Gibson ES-125, where I ended up finding a way to make a Rhythm Chief 1100 work in the neck position,” he recounts. “Then I added a P-90 for the bridge. I didn’t want to use a guitar with a cutaway because I wanted every setback that the guitar players in 1940 had. That stopped me from going high on the neck all the time, which I think was a discipline that made me a better musician.”
“The cheapest model [the 1000] is really the best sounding one.”
Today, he uses a variety of DeArmond pickups on his guitars, but his favorite is the Rhythm Chief 1100, which has screwdriver-adjustable pole pieces. And he applies the tricks he’s learned over the years, like placing stick-on felt pads under DeArmonds positioned near the bridge, to raise the floating pickup to the correct height. He also notes there is an alternative to attaching the monkey stick behind the bridge. “A lot of jazz players would shorten the bar and have it flattened out, so you could screw it to the side of the neck. That became popular with guitarists who played Strombergs, D’Angelicos, and L-5s, for example.
“The cheapest model [the 1000] is really the best-sounding one,” he continues. “And you need to use a wound G string on an archtop, or it’s going to howl like crazy. It isless of a pickup than a microphone. You can actually talk into it, and I’ve done gigs where something went wrong with the PA and I’ve sung through the pickup.”
Robillard’s latest album, Roll With Me, includes “You Got Money,” played on his DeArmond-outfitted J.W. Murphy archtop.
These days his favorite archtop is a J.W. Murphy with an 1100 with a shortened bar attached to the side of the neck. He puts stick-on felt pads under the treble side to keep the pickup height as he likes, and to preserve the natural sound of the guitar. You can hear Robillard play his DeArmond-outfitted Murphy on “You Got Money,” a track from his new album, Roll with Me, on Bandcamp.
One more recommendation: “Use a small amp because that’s what they sound best with,” he says. “Small tube amps are what these pickups were made for, but if you’ve got a closed-back cabinet they tend to feed back on the low end. Keeping the bass side of the pickup lower helps with that. When you’re setting up the pickup, press down on the last fret and get the treble side high and the base side low, and then just balance it out till you get the right sound.”
The body shape of this 6-string seems surprisingly ergonomic, but that perception changes when you hold its neck!
Originally priced at $25 and tagged for the student market, this guitar built at the Kawai factory sounds surprisingly good, but its neck is a “husky” fit.
Recently, I celebrated a birthday—and let me tell you, after 50 I just feel thankful for a shot at another day. I’m at the point in life where I wake up with injuries, like random bruises or sore joints after a good night of sleep. What the heck! As part of being over 50, I find it necessary to keep up on my vaccinations and health things, and in my recent travels, I was surprised to learn that so many people have a birthday around the same time as me. It started with various phlebotomists, doctors, and nurses. Then it continued with people at work and social media messages. I never really thought about it before, but I did some research and, in fact, more babies are born in September than in any other month! My birthday is October 6, but according to my dear mom, I was two weeks late (as usual).
And so it goes that I pondered this proliferation of Virgos and Libras, and my hypothesis came into focus. Were we all the result of our parents’ Christmas and New Year’s celebrations?! I have to say, there was a camaraderie discovered among my fellow party babies when I presented my findings to them. Now, being born in the early ’70s also had me thinking of the culture of the times. Hippie life was fading as young people started to realize they had to get a job, and alas, long hair and beards were being replaced by staid 9-to-5 gigs that could slowly suck the life out of you. So, given the cultural mores of that era, I thought that this month I should write about the Sorrento Swinger.
“Hippie life was fading as young people started to realize they had to get a job.”
Born around 1967—maybe in September—these Swingers hailed from the “crazy” design period of the Kawai Co. Kawai produced some of the coolest guitar designs from 1967 to ’69, and there were some very creative guitar designers there on the job. Kawai had poached some of the finest employees from the wreckage of the Shinko Gakki factory (Pleasant, Intermark, etc.) and through the purchase of the Teisco brand. In this era, Kawai usually used three different standard pickups and they all sound great, plus the units are always wired in series, which is just awesome.
For a 25-buck, Japan-made guitar from the ’70s, the Swinger has an elite-looking headstock—and, on this example, most of its tuners.
Now, the Swinger (and similar Kawai-made guitars) came from an era where U.S. importers would order small batches of instruments that were often unique and extremely gonzo. The guitars might have been destined for medium-sized music stores or direct-order catalogs, but whatever the case, the importer usually gave the guitars names. In this instance, it was Jack Westheimer who featured this model as an “exclusive” design. In Westheimer Corporation catalogs from the time, the Swinger carried the A-2T model name (there was another one-pickup model called the A-1) and sold wholesale for $25 in 1967! As the catalog mentioned, these were “priced for the teenaged trade.” This particular guitar featured the Sorrento badge, and was sold through some sort of music store that’s probably long out of business, but all the Swingers were the same.
The Swinger’s large mahogany neck (sans truss rod) is robust and beefy in all the nicest ways. Like, when I was a kid, I was considered a “husky” fit. That’s this neck: husky! The striped pickguard is a Teisco holdover and the controls are as simple as it gets. Two knobs (volume, tone) and two pickup selectors is all there is, but the beauty is in the body. That lower bout is shaped like some sort of 1969 lounge chair. The strap pin is totally in the wrong place, but the big bottom swoop is worth it. Yep, the Swinger was ready to bring in the dawn of the 1970s, but alas, the guitar came and went in a blink.
Hand-built in the USA, this pedal features original potentiometer values, True Bypass, and three unique modes for versatile distortion options. Commemorative extras included.
This limited-edition pedal is limited to a 1,974-piece run to commemorate the year of DOD’s start, 1974. The original OD250 put DOD on the map as “America’s Pedal” and continues to be an industry favorite today. Each pedal will have a serial-numbered Certificate of Authenticity, a commemorative laser-etched pedal topper, several commemorative guitar picks, and multiple commemorative stickers.
Hand-built in the USA, the DOD OD250 – 50th Anniversary Edition pedal boasts Gain and Level controls using the original potentiometer values and tapers giving the control knob the feel and range that DOD enthusiasts love. A three-position toggle switch features the OD250’s classic “SILICON” mode replicating that original sound. The “Ge/ASYM” mode uses a vintage Germanium diode for asymmetrical even-harmonic distortion. “LIFT” mode cuts the diode clipping from the signal path allowing for a clean boost or even a dirty boost when the vintage LM741 op-amp is clipped at higher gain settings. The DOD 250 also features True Bypass to maintain the integrity of your guitar tone.
This limited edition OD250 is outfitted in a stunning metal flake gray finish with classic yellow screenprint in a callback to the original OD250 of the 1970s. An etched aluminum badge on each unit commemorates this occasion. The DOD OD 250 – 50th Anniversary is ready to take its place among the historic DOD pedal lineup.
When John Johnson and “Mr. DOD” himself, David O. DiFrancesco set out to make DOD Electronics in Salt Lake City, Utah 50 years ago, they had no idea how enduring their legacy would be. Now 50 years later, DOD Electronics continues to be at the forefront of pedal technology. The DOD OD 250 – 50th Anniversary Pedal is an exceptional testament to DOD Electronics’ long–standing success.
Retail Price: $250.00
For more information, please visit digitech.com.
Want to know how tubes shape your tone? Join PG contributor Tom Butwin as he breaks down preamp vs. power tubes, tone tweaks, and biasing, in this ultimate beginner's guide to tube amps. From Fender cleans to Marshall grit, learn how to unlock the full potential of your amp!
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