Looking for this year's hottest guitar gifts? Look no further than the 2021 Holiday Gift Guide!
Mod Electronics Seismic Shift
The Seismic / Shift is a JFET boost based on one of the earliest effects to ever be used on stage. This pedal adds subtle color to a guitar's sound while maintaining the natural tone of the guitar. It packs a serious punch that can cut through any mix when soloing or whenever some extra "umph" is required. The Seismic Shift pairs nicely with amps and other pedals. Place it ahead of tubes, preamps, overdrives, distortions, and fuzz pedals to shift your gear onto a new level.
The Seismic / Shift pedal kit is the introduction to the Nexus Series from Mod® Electronics. This series features a PCB base rather than the Mod® Electronics' traditional point-to-point wiring kits to offer builders an even wider variety of effects to build. The Seismic Shift kit is designed for all skill sets and is the perfect first build for those unfamiliar with PCB construction.
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Volt Power Supply
Don't step on stage without the Ernie Ball Volt Power Supply. For musicians on the move, this ultra-compact, road-ready unit puts a complete powering solution in the palm of your hand. Connect all your favorite digital and analog pedals to multiple high-current DC outputs for clean, regulated power. Relax and rely on thermally protected, short-circuit-proof design with ultra-low noise operation. When the road calls, the Volt demands a place on your pedalboard.
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Lindy Fralin's Customizable Prewired Pickguard
Don't just settle for some one-size-fits-all generic pickguard. Instead, design your own! Lindy Fralin's Prewired Strat Pickguard line features the highest quality parts - and pickups - in the industry. Built to order and wired by hand by experienced craftsmen, these Prewired Pickguards are available in SSS and HSS combinations. In addition, each pickguard is fully customizable - from appearance to pickups to the wiring. With hundreds of options available, you can fully customize your tone - from our award-winning pickups to cutting-edge push-pull mods. So treat your Strat® to something special this holiday season with a Lindy Fralin Prewired Pickguard - exclusively available at fralinpickups.com.
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Guitar Slip No More
Guitar Slip No More, GSNM is the new electric and bass guitar accessory designed for the seated guitarist. GSNM is form fit to the bottom rail of your guitar and prevents the guitar from slipping and improves guitar balance. Anytime a guitar is in your lap is the right time for a GSNM! Buy yours today!
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Kingston Super and Kingston Z
For the discerning player in search of a handmade look and sound, we have the MTD Super and Z Series, which incorporates many of the superior design elements present in MTD Handmade instruments, into a production model. Powerful electronics, premium finishes, and a sleek carved body, make the Kingston Super and Z models the perfect combination of beauty, brawn, and tonal flexibility.
Kingston Z5(Tobacco Sunburst): $1800, Kingston Super5(Dr.Brown's Burst or Matte Black): $1525
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Oliver Mahogany Jr.
Looking for your next travel guitar? With a comfortable, ¾ size grand concert body, the Oliver Jr. is the perfect accompaniment for your next big adventure. Oliver Jr. sports a solid mahogany top with layered mahogany back & sides for a warm, balanced tone. Every Orangewood comes professionally set up before delivery, so your guitar is ready to play right out of the gift box. Plus, the Oliver Jr. includes a premium gig bag, so you can play anywhere inspiration strikes.
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Echo
With an iconic dreadnought acoustic shape, Echo's resonant voice is the perfect gift for your favorite singer-songwriter. Topped with a solid Sitka spruce top for a bold, crisp sound that delivers on stage, the Echo also features a natural gloss finish and stunning abalone detailing for a sophisticated aesthetic. The Echo Live comes equipped with a Fishman Flex Plus-T EQ System, featuring a built-in tuner and onboard volume/tone controls, to round out this acoustic-electric model that's perfect for performance. Plus, a premium gig bag and professional setup come included.
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Shubb Capo Royale Pāua Pearl C1P for steel string guitar
Shubb's latest endeavor is a continuation of their Capo Royale Series, utilizing their titanium-based PVD finish. Pāua is the Maori (native New Zealand) name for a species of abalone whose shells are the most beautiful and colorful. Luthiers often use Pāua shells for the inlays on their most special guitars. Fine jewelry crafted from the shells are known as Pāua Pearls.
When the R & D Department at Shubb came up with this new finish, its dazzling iridescence reminded them of Pāua pearls, and so that became its name. It uses the same durable titanium process as their other Capo Royale models, so its eye-popping, color-shifting
beauty will last practically forever. The renowned and reputable Shubb cam lever capo design has gotten a good dose of peacocking just in time for the holidays !
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The finish on this 2019 PRS Custom 24-08 is called “Angry Larry,” but stare long enough and you’ll realize it’s not so angry, and has much more of a deep, mesmerizing kind of vibe. (And Larry? He’s not so angry either.)
I am one hundred years old, so I remember when PRS guitars began creeping into the pages of my guitar magazines in the mid ’90s. While legends like Al Di Meola had long been on board with PRS, he played jazz. As an aspiring shred-hero-demon-master, I had little patience for jazz. It was seeing Dave Navarro and Mark Tremonti with PRS guitars in the pages of guitar magazines that made me sit up and take notice. Those guys were on VH1, and I planned to be cool like them.
Somewhere along the line, PRS began to become associated with a very different type of guitar player. They became “dentist guitars,” as coined by the denizens of Reddit: expensive yet mainstream instruments with a flashy look, a status symbol of the elite and untalented. Certainly not a tool for a real musician.
Why do certain guitars get these scarlet letters? And why are we so quick to buy into the notion of, “Oh, that guitar’s not for me,” because of a vibe we got from Instagram?
That tiny 10 tells us that this guitar features a 10-top, a designation reserved for the company’s finest figured-maple models.
It’s not easy to divorce ourselves from the reality curated by internet influencers. But at Fanny’s House of Music, we occasionally find the strength to peek behind the digital curtain. We are delighted to report there are some great guitars back here! Take, for instance, this 2019 PRS Custom 24-08. It has a special-ordered “10-top,” a designation reserved for only the finest figured maple tops PRS produces. The desirable and collectible nature of PRS 10-tops has very little to do with how playable the guitar is. Their rarity drives up their price, fueling the anti-dentist hordes on the internet.
“It’s not a red guitar that screams, ‘I’M A RED GUITAR’—it’s more subtle and refined.”
If you take the horde wisdom as gospel, what you may not discover beneath the almost three-dimensional flame is an instrument with soul. There’s something special about this guitar. It’s hardly been played, but it’s begging to be. The edges of the fretboard are perfectly rolled and the pattern-thin neck shape—which feels, to this author, like a slightly thinner ’60s Gibson slim-taper neck shape, although your mileage may vary—is invitingly shaped like the palm of your hand. The PRS 85/15 pickups pack plenty of oomph, but not so much oomph that even the clean channel on your amp sounds distorted. There’s warmth to them, but also clarity. It’s a musical sound that kept me contentedly noodling in the electric guitar room at Fanny’s for an almost uncomfortable amount of time. (Thanks, as always, to the nonjudgemental and endlessly patient employees of Fanny’s.)
This instrument features PRS’s pattern-thin neck shape, which measures 1 11/16" at the nut.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in anti-anti-snobbishness to be learned from the handsome deep-red finish of this guitar, curiously called “Angry Larry.” It’s a dark red, with an almost purple hue in some light. It’s not a red guitar that screams, “I’M A RED GUITAR”—it’s more subtle and refined. According to PRS forum lore, while trying out new finishes, PRS Sales and Marketing Manager Larry Urie took a shine to the dark red. Coincidentally, his white skin would occasionally, under certain circumstances, acquire a strikingly similar color. The folks at PRS decided to name it “Angry Larry” in his honor, although it has been occasionally reported that he’s not an especially angry guy. Someone trying to perfectly orchestrate their internet persona might take umbrage to the association, but not Urie. He has taken it in stride and can be seen posing with the guitar on the social media of Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center, making a humorously scrunched-up angry face.
Maybe fancy flame tops aren’t your thing. That’s fine! But if you don’t have a strong opinion on fancy flame tops, this PRS Custom 24-08 kindly requests that you avoid allowing a pitchfork-wielding crowd to shape it. Whatever your “thing” is, you can discover it by getting a lot of guitars in your hands. Do you like the way it sounds, plays, and looks? Then it’s a great guitar for you. The next time you visit Fanny’s or any great guitar store, pack an open mind. You may find you have more in common with dentists than you thought.
Sources: prsguitars.com web site and forums
The Barstow Bat is designed to offer a versatile 3-band EQ section to create colors and tones beyond that of its influence, with a surprisingly quiet and calculated circuit under the hood. For even more sonic versatility, the TURBO button swaps between classic silicon RAT distortion and a more open and aggressive TURBO RAT LED clipping mode.
Features
The Barstow Bat highlights include:
- Classic RAT Distortion with a super-quiet noise floor
- Eye-catching graphics based on the work of Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman’s iconic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Massive output volume
- Active isolated 3-band EQ for a wide range of tones
- Selectable clipping modes (Standard or TURBO)
- True Bypass on/off switch
- 9-volt DC power from external supply, no battery compartment.
- Hand assembled in Peterborough, Canada
- LIMITED EDITION BLACK version available until 2025
Tinkering with theSDE-3 Dual Digital Delay suggested a similar, possibly enduring appeal. As an evolution of the Roland SDE-3000rack unit from the 1980s, it’s a texture machine, bubbling with subtle-to-odd triangle LFO modulations and enhanced dual-delay patterns that make tone mazes from dopey-simple melodies. And with the capacity to use it with two amps in stereo or in panning capacity, it can be much more dimensional. But while the SDE-3 will become indispensable to some for its most complex echo textures, its basic voice possesses warmth that lends personality in pedestrian applications too.
Tapping Into the Source
Some interest in the original SDE-3000 is in its association with Eddie Van Halen, who ran two of them in a wet-dry-wet configuration, using different delay rates and modulation to thicken and lend dimension to solos. But while EVH’s de facto endorsement prompted reissues of the effect as far back as the ’90s, part of the appeal was down to the 3000’s intrinsic elegance and simplicity.
In fact, the original rack unit’s features don’t differ much from what you would find on modern, inexpensive stompbox echoes. But the SDE-3000’s simplicity and reliable predictability made it conducive to fast workflow in the studio. Critically, it also avoided the lo-fi and sterility shortcomings that plagued some lesser rivals—an attribute designer Yoshi Ikegami chalks up to analog components elsewhere in the circuit and a fortuitous clock imprecision that lends organic essence to the repeats.
Evolved Echo Animal
Though the SDE-3 traces a line back to the SDE-3000 in sound and function, it is a very evolved riff on a theme. I don’t have an original SDE-3000 on hand for comparison, but it’s easy to hear how the SDE-3 bridges a gap between analog haze and more clinical, surgical digital sounds in the way that made the original famous. Thanks to the hi-cut control, the SDE-3’s voice can be shaped to enhance the angular aspect of the echoes, or blunt sharp edges. There’s also a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats. That also means you can take advantage of the polyrhythmic effects that are arguably its greatest asset.
“There’s a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats.”
The SDE-3’s offset control, which generates these polyrhythmic echoes, is its heart. The most practical and familiar echos, like quarter, eighth, and dotted-eighth patterns, are easy to access in the second half of the offset knobs range. In the first half of the knob’s throw, however, the offset delays often clang about at less-regular intervals, producing complex polyrhythms that are also cool multipliers of the modulation and EQ effects. For example, when emphasizing top end in repeats, using aggressive effects mixes and pitch-wobble modulation generates eerie ghost notes that swim through and around patterns, adding rhythmic interest and texture without derailing the drive behind a groove. Even at modest settings, these are great alternatives to more staid, regular subdivision patterns. Many of the coolest sounds tend toward the foggy reverb spectrum. Removing high end, piling on feedback, and adding the woozy, drunken drift from modulation creates fascinating backdrops for slow, sparse chord melodies. Faster modulations throb and swirl like old BBC Radiophonic Workshop sci-fi sound designs.
By themselves, the modulations have their own broad appeal. Chorus tones are rarely the archetypal Roland Jazz Chorus or CE type—tending to be a bit darker and mistier. But they do a nice job suggesting that texture without lapsing into caricature. There are also really cool rotary-speaker-like textures and vibrato sounds that offer alternatives to go-to industry standards.
The Verdict
The SDE-3’s many available sounds and textures would be appealing at $219—even without the stereo and panning connectivity options, a useful hold function, and expression pedal control that opens up additional options. The panning capabilities, in particular, sparked all kinds of thoughts about studio applications. Mastering the SDE-3 takes just a little study—certain polyrhythms can be dramatically reshaped by the interactivity of other controls and you need to take care to achieve identical results twice. But this is a pedal that, by virtue of its relative simplicity and richness and breadth of sounds, exceeds the utility of some similarly priced rivals, all while opening up possibilities well outside the simple echo realm
