Lloyd Baggs: From State-of-the-Art Guitars to Great Pickups—and Back Again

Lloyd Baggs has reemerged from the shadows of guitar design, for the first time since the late ’80s, with his innovative AEG-1 instrument.
Following the release of the AEG-1, the multi-dimensional creative and intuitive engine behind acoustic-guitar pickup manufacturer L.R. Baggs shares the fascinating story of how he’s always been a builder, too.
In Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, the German filmmaker, opera director, actor, and author tells his colleague Paul Cronin, “Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking—like great literature—must have experience of life as its foundation.” When applied to the story of Lloyd Baggs, founder and owner of the L.R. Baggs Corporation, who’s been a cellist, car mechanic, aspiring racecar driver, fine-art printmaker, photographer, and self-taught guitar builder and acoustic pickup engineer, Herzog’s sentiment grows legs.
“I had intended at some point to retire and head off into the sunset as a photographer,” Baggs tells me over a Zoom call, concluding that he’s become content with the other paths down which life has taken him. “Being out doing landscape photography helps me think and organize my thoughts for the business, and I get lots of inspiration while I’m out letting my imagination soar, thinking about anything but guitars. If you cut me, I’ll probably be bleeding ‘photographer’ before anything else.”
That approach has yielded not only a successful business, but one of the best in its league. And, on November 1, L.R. Baggs debuted the AEG-1—the acoustic pickup manufacturer’s first ever guitar—a high-quality acoustic-electric whose body is made of plywood. Ask anyone you know in the industry, and they’ll tell you it sounds amazing—and not just for a guitar that’s made of plywood.
Not only is its sound impressive, but, appearing alone on the roster in the year of its company’s 50th anniversary, it seems to have come out of nowhere. We know L.R. Baggs’ status within the acoustic pickup industry, yet suddenly, they’re spelling out a new name for themselves for acoustic-electric guitars. Why now?
Baggs in the workshop, sanding the side of one of his AEG-1 models.
Baggs admits that he’s not a very good guitar player. He tried learning in college before he got into building, but what really started his career in music was cello, which he began playing in fourth grade. “I wouldn’t consider myself a prodigy, but I was close to one. By the time I was in high school, I was fourth chair in the UCLA Symphony,” he says. “My teacher was Joseph DiTullio, who was then the chief cellist with 20th Century Fox, but was the concert master of the L.A. [Philharmonic] before that. He said he was going to start subbing me on dates that he couldn’t take with 20th Century.”
Outside of his early accomplishments as a cellist, Baggs was a distracted student, more interested in surfing and working on cars than school. Despite his average grades, he ended up being accepted into Occidental College in Los Angeles on the invitation to join their budding cello department. Unfortunately, that plan had an untimely expiration date.
“Within about three months of being in college, I got in a fist fight with the halfback on the football team,” says Baggs, “and I broke my left hand very badly—to the point where I couldn’t even make a fist for almost a year.”
He shifted his studies to fine art and photography, and, after graduating in 1970, began working as a fine-art printmaker in the area. “I worked in a place that did Warhol, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Sam Francis, [Frank] Stella, [Ellsworth]Kelly—all the big New York artists. At the time, one print would sell for $1,000.”Baggs crafted this custom–built guitar in 1977, for the great Ry Cooder. When Baggs showed Cooder his first polished instrument, the roots-music master said, “I think it’s fantastic. Will you build me one?”
A couple years later, he accepted a master printer position at Editions Press in San Francisco, and would commute there from his place in Berkeley. It was in 1974 that he started building guitars as a hobby, beginning, rather unconventionally, with a copy of a ’30s Washburn archtop with an oval soundhole, thanks to his love for cello and jazz. Around that time—through his connections in the art world—he befriended Ry Cooder.
“Being out doing landscape photography helps me think and organize my thoughts for the business … letting my imagination soar, thinking about anything but guitars.”
“I brought [my first guitar] down to Ry,” Baggs shares, “and just said, ‘Hey, what do you think, man?’ ’Cause he was playing carved-tops and all kinds of crazy stuff. And Ry said, ‘I think it’s fantastic. Will you build me one?’ That launched my career.”
Not long after, Baggs was offered another, more-attractive printmaking job with a prestigious shop in L.A., and moved back, while also building a loft workshop in an old fire station downtown to continue developing his guitar business. After making about seven or eight models, he transitioned to flattops, and his clientele expanded to include Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Janis Ian, and “a bunch of the jazz-heads and flamenco players around L.A. I was getting $3,000 dollars for my guitar, just unadorned, and I had a waiting list of a year or two,” he says.
Meanwhile, Baggs and Cooder had been collaborating on finding the best way to amplify the acoustic Baggs had built for the guitarist. “We’d put all kinds of crazy stuff in there—we mostly landed on a magnetic pickup and a microphone. And hehad this refrigerator-rack-sized gear that he used to swear at and try to make it all work together. I mean, it was brutal! Then, in 1978, he calls me and says, ‘Hey Lloyd, I’m working on an album down at Warner Brothers; you want to come down? There’s something I want you to hear.’”Here’s a close-up of the simple but highly effective control set on the Baggs AEG-1.
When Baggs made it to the studio, Cooder, who was recording his 1979 album, Bop Till You Drop, surprised Baggs with an acoustic-electric guitar equipped with the best-sounding pickup either of them had heard at the time. The only issue was, the instrument was a Takamine that the Japanese company had designed to mimic Baggs’ exact model, from headstock to strap button.
“I thanked him for showing it to me, left, and I sat out in my car on the street for about a half an hour alternately fuming and excited,” Baggs says, “and that was the moment at which I said to myself, ‘This is where I need to be. This is the future of acoustic guitars.’”
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“I still shudder to think about this: I’m driving down the freeway from Santa Monica, in this beat-to-crap old ’59 Chevy pickup truck that I had, with Ry—a national treasure!—sittin’ in the passenger seat; no seatbelts,” Baggs reflects. The two were on the way to NAMM to meet with Mass Hirade, Takamine’s president at the time, to discuss the copy of Baggs’ model.
“I broke my left hand very badly—to the point where I couldn’t even make a fist for almost a year.”
“I complimented him on the guitar,” Baggs says, describing the meeting, “and said, ‘You know, you’ve done a really nice job. But I’m kinda hurt that you didn’t involve me in this in some way, and it does feel like you’ve taken something from me. Don’t you feel like you owe me something?’ And he lowers his head and says, ‘Yeah, we do. What do you want?’
“I said, ‘Well, I build 10 guitars a year. I need to amplify my guitars; will you sell me 10 systems a year? And he said, ‘“Sell” you? Ten systems a year—that’s all you want?’ I said, ‘Yep, that’s what I want. I know you don’t sell that system to anybody, but I’d like to be the guy.’”A photo of the guitar’s inside reveals its key structural component: a piece of poplar plywood made up of a circular frame of the soundhole, suspended slightly under it by one top section that attaches to the neck joint and two diagonal sidebars that extend to the sides at the guitar’s waist.
Hirade accepted the agreement and, shortly after, sent Baggs two of the Takamine pickup systems to start. With earnest curiosity, Baggs immediately set about reverse-engineering it, approaching the task with his knowledge of car mechanics but with no background in electronics. What he found inspired him to develop something a bit savvier, and soon the LB6 unitary saddle pickup was born.
Baggs’ pickup, which, rather than an undersaddle design, also functions as the saddle, caught on quickly. Several country artists, along with Leo Kottke, were early adopters; Baggs jokes that they could tell where Kottke was on tour by which stores they would hear from when he was visiting. Then, one day, Baggs received a call from guitar manufacturer Robert Godin, who asked if he could use the LB6 in his models. Baggs had to develop a preamp first—at the time, he didn’t know what that was—and his next step was to design a new guitar.
Baggs elaborates, “I was trying to figure out how to sell more pickups, and I thought, ‘I’ll just make an acoustic-electric guitar and put a pickup in it.’ So I bought a Telecaster body from a kit, hollowed the body out on my barbecue with a router, and put an acoustic top on it.”
He also installed some kalimba-like metal rods inside, which, tuned to the main resonating frequencies of a Martin dreadnought, worked with the LB6 to simulate a heightened acoustic quality. The build—Baggs’ second ever acoustic-electric—became Godin’s Acousticaster.
L.R. Baggs AEG-1 Demo
Zach Wish demos the LR Baggs AEG-1. He explores its sonic options and talks about his experience with the guitar on the road with Seal.
But, back to the topic of the AEG-1, and the question posed at the beginning of this article: Why now?
“The word ‘should’ is a very interesting word,” says Baggs, threatening to wax philosophical. “On one hand, ‘should’ should be a four-letter word. Because, it sort of denies reality, and people say, ‘Oh, you should be this,’ or ‘You should be that.’ That’s bullshit. But on the other hand, ‘should’ has this beautiful potential.
“Over the years since the Acousticaster, I’ve kept building,” he continues. “Not building guitars for commercial absorption, but about every couple of years, I would build another acoustic-electric, trying to figure out how to make it sound like a nice guitar.”
It would take a very thorough, deep dive down the rabbit hole to explain everything behind Baggs’ approach to building guitars, but, in short, he’s a devoted fanatic of acoustic physics. “When I built my first guitar, there was one book on building guitars, and the chapter on tone was three paragraphs long,” he prefaces, laughing. In time, he took inspiration from his life as a cellist to pursue what has become a lifelong source of intrigue: studying violin Chladni patterns. His goal has been to harness the information from the symmetrical patterns, which show how a rigid surface vibrates, fluidly, when it's resonating, to improve acoustic guitar resonance. “I would say it’s a fair statement that I was the first builder to start looking into Chladni patterns on a steel-string acoustic guitar,” says Baggs. Now, builders like Andy Powers, Bryan Galloup, Giuliano Nicoletti, and others from around the world attend conferences on the subject, and acoustic physics in general.
The three variations on the AEG-1 in Baggs’ catalog.
Since, Baggs says, “I’ve continued to investigate guitar physics, I’ve continued to investigate Chladni patterns. I’ve gotten more scientific equipment on this thing now [holds up iPhone] than I had when I started looking at building.So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make an acoustic-electric guitar that sounds really nice acoustically to begin with [before adding a pickup].”
When Covid hit, Baggs found himself with ample free time, and was encouraged by his staff to try building another guitar—for the first time since the late ’80s. His first attempt was to make somewhat of a redo of the Acousticaster, but the results were subpar—at least by his own standards. Thinking the problem might be the air volume inside the shallower body, he took an old acoustic-electric, cut a big hole in the back of the body, and epoxied a “big ol’ kitchen pot” to add air volume. “Didn’t change the sound at all,” he says.
To figure out where to go from there, Baggs drew inspiration from his earlier years as a builder. “I had this conversation with José Ramírez III in Germany in around 1990,” he explains. “He told me that on his top models, he made his sides a quarter-inch thick, like the rim of a drum. He said the more rigid your sides are, the better the guitar’s gonna sound.” Baggs states that’s because of one key fact: An acoustic guitar’s back is an anchor for the neck, holding it straight in place. When the sides are more rigid, the back is freer to resonate.
He decided to experiment with that idea on “a little old China-made 000 guitar,” reducing its depth by cutting it in half, adding wood around the inside of the rim “to make the edges totally rigid,” and gluing it back together. “And son of a gun, if it didn’t sound really good! That’s what led to this guitar.”
A rear view of this natural finish AEG-1 reveals its bolt-on neck base and access panel.
On the AEG-1 product page on the L.R. Baggs website, a photo of the guitar’s inside reveals its key structural component: a piece of poplar plywood made up of a circular frame of the soundhole, suspended slightly under it by one top section that attaches to the neck joint and two diagonal sidebars that extend to the sides at the guitar’s waist. “It’s all cut on a CNC machine; it’s machined out like a bicycle part,” Baggs explains. “So, the neck is actually anchored to the sides of the guitar.” (If you were wondering, that’s why it doesn’t matter that it’s made of plywood. Poplar plywood for the structural component was also chosen for sustainability reasons.)
“You know the second skin on the kick drum, the one that has the hole?” Baggs continues. “It’s very important how you tune that. And we discovered that most people like to tune the kick slightly below that of the main head, so it enhances the low frequencies.
“Then, ‘aha!’ Because the back wasn’t holding the neck anymore, we could do whatever we wanted with it. It was no longer a structural part of the guitar. It was the second skin on a kick drum. So, we just went nuts. That was it.”
I tell Baggs, towards the end of our conversation, that his career trajectory reminds me a lot of the concept of divergent thinking: essentially, about drawing connections between ideas that seem disparate to other people. He says he relates to that idea.
“And that was the moment at which I said to myself, ‘This is where I need to be. This is the future of acoustic guitars.’”
“If it hasn’t been by inspiration, we just simply won’t do it,” he says, “because it has no power; it has no meaning; it has no heart. If it’s just something to fill out a line item in the business … it does not have any authenticity because it doesn’t have any need. And I think that one of the reasons our company’s done so well is that we’ve surrounded ourselves with really talented people. Honestly, I feel a lot like the village idiot most of the time,” he says, laughing.
“I had one of the guys from my L.A. posse visit me yesterday,” he shares. “We were talking about creativity, and I remember saying to him that just about anything that anybody does that’s great doesn’t make any sense. It’s not contrived for a purpose like making money. It’s just something you have to do … like absorbing oxygen in your body. People that paint, people who do music—we’re kind of freaks! People say, ‘Oh, you’re so courageous to have started the business.’ Nah-ah,” he says, emphatically. “I was not cut out for anything else! I would suffocate in a suit!”- L.R. Baggs AEG-1 Review ›
- Decoding the Not-So-Secret Language of Acoustic Guitar Tone ›
- Blending Bass With Acoustic Guitar ›
Blackberry Smoke will embark on a co-headline tour with Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs. Lead singer Charlie Starr shares, “What could be better than summertime rock and roll shows with Blackberry Smoke and the one and only Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs?”
Blackberry Smoke’s fan club will have early access to tickets with pre-sale beginning tomorrow, March 11 at 10:00am local time, with the public on-sale following this Friday, March 14 at 10:00am local time. Full details and ticket information can be found at blackberrysmoke.com.
In addition to the new dates, Blackberry Smoke is currently on the road with upcoming headline shows at New Orleans’ The Fillmore, Houston’s 713 Music Hall, Austin’s ACL Live at the Moody Theater, Dallas’ Majestic Theatre and Maryville’s The Shed (three nights) among others. They will also join Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Avett Brothers for select dates later this year. See below for complete tour itinerary.
Tour Dates
March 14—Douglas, GA—The Martin Theatre*
March 15—Douglas, GA—The Martin Theatre*
March 27—New Orleans, LA—The Fillmore†
March 28—Houston, TX—713 Music Hall†
March 29—Helotes, TX—John T. Floore’s Country Store‡
April 24—Montgomery, AL—Montgomery Performing Arts Centre§
April 25—Pensacola, FL—Pensacola Saenger Theatre§
April 26—Tampa, FL—Busch Gardens Tampa - Gwazi Field
May 8—Austin, TX—ACL Live at the Moody Theater#
May 9—Dallas, TX—Majestic Theatre#
May 10—Palestine, TX—Wiggly Thump Festival
May 15—Maryville, TN—The Shed~
May 16—Maryville, TN—The Shed%
May 17—Maryville, TN—The Shed§
May 31—Virginia Beach, VA—Veterans Band Aid Music Festival
June 1—Lexington, KY—Railbird Festival
July 10—Pistoia, Italy—Pistoia Blues
July 11—Milan, Italy—Comfort Festival
July 13—Weert, Limburg—Bospop
July 15—Manchester, U.K.—AO Arena**
July 16—Birmingham, U.K.—bp pulse LIVE**
July 18—Brighton, England—The Brighton Centre**
July 19—London, UK—OVO Arena Wembley**
July 25—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium††
July 26—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium††
July 31—Lewiston, NY—Artpark Amphitheater††
August 1—Pittsburgh, PA—Stage AE††
August 2—Columbus, OH—KEMBA Live! Outdoor††
August 3—Roanoke, VA—Berglund Performing Arts Theatre††
August 5—North Charleston, SC—Firefly Distillery††
August 7—Raleigh, NC—Red Hat Amphitheater††
August 8—Charlotte, NC—Skyla Credit Union Amphitheatre††
August 9—Atlanta, GA—Synovus Bank Amphitheater at Chastain Park††
August 10—Asheville, NC—Asheville Yards Amphitheater††
August 21—Bonner Springs, KS—Azura Amphitheater‡‡
August 22—Rogers, AR—Walmart AMP‡‡
August 23—El Dorado, AR—Murphy Arts District Amphitheater‡‡
August 30—Charlestown, RI—Rhythm and Roots Festival
*with special guest Parker Gispert
†with special guest Zach Person
‡with special guest Brent Cobb
§with special guest Bones Owens
#with special guest Jason Scott & The High Heat
~with special guest Rob Leines
%with special guest Taylor Hunnicutt
**supporting Lynard Skynyrd
††co-headline with co-headline with Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs
‡‡supporting The Avett Brothers
Guest columnist Dave Pomeroy, who is also president of Nashville’s musicians union, with some of his friends.
Dave Pomeroy, who’s played on over 500 albums with artists including Emmylou Harris, Elton John, Trisha Yearwood, Earl Scruggs, and Alison Krauss, shares his thoughts on bass playing—and a vision of the future.
From a very young age, I was captivated by music. Our military family was stationed in England from 1961 to 1964, so I got a two-year head start on the Beatles starting at age 6. When Cream came along, for the first time I was able to separate what the different players were doing, and my focus immediately landed on Jack Bruce. He wrote most of the songs, sang wonderfully, and drove the band with his bass. Playing along with Cream’s live recordings was a huge part of my initial self-training, and I never looked back.
The electric bass has a much shorter history than most instruments. I believe that this is a big reason why the evolution of bass playing continues in ways that were literally unimaginable when it began to replace the acoustic bass on pop and R&B recordings. Players like James Jamerson, Joe Osborn, Carol Kaye, Chuck Rainey, and David Hood made great songs even better with their bass lines, pocket, and tone. Playing in bands throughout my teenage years, I took every opportunity I could to learn from musicians who were more experienced than I was. Slowly, I began to understand the power of the bass to make everyone else sound better—or lead the way to a train wreck! That sense of responsibility was not lost on me. As I continued to play, listen, and learn, a gradual awareness of other elements came to the surface, including the three Ts: tone, timing, and taste.
I was ready to rock the world with busy lines and bass solos when I moved to Nashville in the late ’70s, and I was suddenly transported into the land of singer-songwriters. It was a huge awakening when I heard the lyrics of artists like Guy Clark, whose spare yet powerful stories and simple guitar changes opened up a whole new universe in reverse for me. It was a reset for sure, but gradually I found ways to combine my earlier energetic approach in different ways. Playing what’s right for a song is a very subjective thing.
“If the song calls for you to ramp up the energy and lead the way like Chris Squire, Bootsy Collins, Geddy Lee, Sting, Flea, Justin Chancellor, or so many others, trust yourself and go for it.”
Don Williams, whom I worked with for many years, was known as a man of few words, but he gave me some of the best musical advice I ever received. I had been with him for just a few months when he pulled me aside one night after a show, and quietly said, “Dave, you don’t have to play what’s on the records, just don’t throw me off when I’m singing.” In other words: It’s okay to be creative, but listen to what’s going on around you. I never forgot that lesson.
As I gradually got into recording work, in an environment where creativity is combined with efficiency and experimentation is sometimes, but not always, welcome, I focused on tone as a form of expression, trying to make every note count. As drum sounds got much bigger during the ’80s, string bass was pretty much off the table as an option in most situations. Inspired by German bassist Eberhard Weber, I bought an electric upright 5-string built by Harry Fleishman a few years earlier. That theoretically self-indulgent purchase gave me an opportunity to carve out a tone that would work with both big drums and acoustic instruments. It gave me an identifiable sound and led to me playing that bass on records with artists like Keith Whitley, Trisha Yearwood, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, and the Chieftains.
In a world of constantly evolving and merging musical styles, the options can be almost overwhelming, so it’s important to trust yourself. Ultimately, you are making a series of choices every time you pick up the instrument. Whether it’s pick versus fingers versus thumb, or clean versus overdrive versus distortion, and so on … you are the boss of your role in the song you are playing. When the sonic surroundings you find yourself in change, so can you. It’s all about listening to what is going on around you and finding that sweet spot where you can bring the whole thing together while not attracting too much attention.
On the other hand, if the song calls for you to ramp up the energy and lead the way like Chris Squire, Bootsy Collins, Geddy Lee, Sting, Flea, Justin Chancellor, or so many others, trust yourself and go for it. Newer role models like Tal Wilkenfeld, Thundercat, and MonoNeon have raised the bar yet again. The beauty of it all is that the bass and its role keep evolving.
Right now, I guarantee there are young bassists of all descriptions we have not yet heard who are reinventing the bass and its role in new ways. That’s what bass players do—we are the glue that ties music together. Find your power and use it!
A reverb-based pedal for exploring the far reaches of sound.
Easy to use control set. Wide range of sounds. Crush control is fun to explore. Filter is versatile.
Works best as a stereo effect, which may limit some players.
$299
Old Blood Noise Endeavors Dark Star Stereo
oldbloodnoise.com
The Old Blood Dark Star Stereo (DSS) is one of those pedals that lives beyond simple effect categorization. Yes, it’s a digital reverb. But like other Old Blood designs, it’s such a feature-rich, creative take on that effect that to think of it as a reverb feels not only imprecise but unfair.
The Old Blood Dark Star Stereo (DSS) is one of those pedals that lives beyond simple effect categorization. Yes, it’s a digital reverb. But like other Old Blood designs, it’s such a feature-rich, creative take on that effect that to think of it as a reverb feels not only imprecise but unfair.
In this case, reverb describes how the DSS works more than how it sounds. I’ve come to think of this pedal as a reverb-based synthesizer, where reverb is the jumping-off point for sonic creation. As such, the sounds coming out of the Dark Star can be used as subtle sweetener or sound design textures, opening up worlds that might otherwise be unreachable.
Reverb and Beyond
Functionally speaking, the DSS starts with reverb and applies a high-/low-pass filter, two pitch shifters, each with a two-octave range in each direction, plus bit-crushing and distortion. Controls for lag (pre-delay), multiply (feedback), and decay follow, with mini knobs for volume, mix, and spread. Additional control features include presets, MIDI functionality, plus expression and aux control.
The DSS can be routed in mono, stereo, or mono-in/stereo-out. Both jacks are single TRS, and it’s easy to switch between settings by holding down the bypass switch and selecting via the preset button.
Although it sounds great in mono, stereo is where this iteration of the Dark Star—which follows the mono Dark Star and Dark Star V2—really comes alive. Starting with the filter, both pitch shifters, and crush knobs at noon—all have center detents—affords the most neutral settings. The result is a pad reverb, as synthetic as but less sparkly than a shimmer. The filter control is a fine way to distinguish clean and effect signals. In low-pass mode, the effect signal can easily get dark and spooky while maintaining fidelity and without getting murky. On the other end, high-pass settings are handy for refining those reverb pads and keeping them from washing out the clarity of the clean signal.
Lower fidelity is close at hand when you want it. The crush control, when turned counterclockwise, reduces the bit rate of the effect signal, evoking all kinds of digitally compromised sounds, from early samplers to cell phones, depending on how you flavor it. Counterclockwise applies distortion to the reverb signal. There’s a lot to explore within the wide ranges of the two pitch controls, too. With a four-octave range, quantized in half steps, the combinations can be extreme, and Dark Star takes on a life of its own.
Formless Reflections of Matter
The DSS is easy to get acquainted with, especially for a pedal with so many features, 10 knobs, and two footswitches. I quickly got a feel for the reverb itself at the most neutral filter and pitch settings, where I enjoyed the weight a responsive, textural pad lent to everything I played.
With just the filter and crush controls, there’s plenty to explore. Sitting in the sweet spot between a pair of vintage Fenders, I conjured a Twin Peaks-inspired hazy fog to accompany honeyed diatonic arpeggios, slowly filtering and crushing that sound into a dark, evil low-end whir as chords leaned toward dissonance. Eventually, I cranked the high-pass filter, producing an early MP3-in-a-good-way “shhh” that was fine accompaniment to sparser voicings along my fretboard. It was a true sonic journeyThe pitch controls increase possibilities for both ambience and dissonance. Simple tweaks push the boundaries of possibility in exponentially deeper directions. For more subtle thickening and accompaniment sounds, adding octaves, which are easy to tune by ear, offers precise tone sculpting, dimension, and a wider frequency range. Hearing simple harmonic ideas plucked against celeste- and organ-like reverberations kept me in the Harold Budd and Brian Eno space for long enough to consider new recording projects.
There is as much fun to be had at the highest feedback settings on the DSS. Be forewarned: Spend too much time there and you might need a name for your new ambient band. Cranking the multiply and decay knobs, I’d drop in a few notes, or maybe just a chord, and get to work scanning the pitch knobs and sculpting with the filter. Soon, I conjured bold Ligeti-inspired orchestral sounds fit for a guitar remix of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Verdict
The Dark Star Stereo strikes a nice balance between deep control, a wide range of sonic rewards, playability, and an always-sounds-great vibe. The controls are easy to use, so it doesn’t take long to get in the zone, and once you do, there’s plenty to explore. Throughout my time with the DSS, I was impressed with its high-fidelity clarity. I attribute that to the filter, which allows clean and reverb signals to perform dry/wet balance and EQ functions. That alone encouraged more adventurous and creative exploration. Though not every player needs this kind of tone tool, the DSS is a must-check-out effect for anyone serious about wild reverb adventures, and it’s simple and intuitive enough to be a good fit for anyone just starting exploration of those zones. However you come to the Dark Star, it’s a unique-sounding pedal that deserves attention. PG
Introducing the new Firebird Platypus, a tribute to the rare transitional models of 1965.
In early 1965, the original Firebird design transitioned through several different iterations. One of the significant transitions that occurred flipped the headstock to the Non-Reverse shape. Unlike the original Reverse Firebird headstock design, which featured a two-layered headstock with a holly veneer, the new headstock was flat, like the bill of a platypus.
Mahogany body and glued-in mahogany neck
The Firebird Platypus has a mahogany body with the appearance of a traditional neck-through Reverse Firebird body for that classic Reverse Firebird appearance, while the neck of the Firebird Platypus uses glued-in, set neck construction like the Les Paul and SG and delivers outstanding sustain and resonance.
Platypus transitional headstock design
The headstock features the flat, transitional style “platypus” design that was found only on rare models from the 1965 transitional period when the Firebird was gradually switching over from the features found on the original models that were released in 1963 to the features that were used for the later Non-Reverse Firebird models.
Firebird humbucker pickups
It’s outfitted with two Firebird humbucker pickups. These pickups are equipped with Alnico 5 magnets and have a unique sound that is not quite like any other humbucking pickup, with unmatched clarity, chime, and bite. They sound great for both clean and overdriven tones.
Exclusive Cherry Sunburst finish
This exclusive Cherry Sunburst finish is available only on Gibson.com and at the Gibson Garage.
For more information, please visit gibson.com.