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GALLERY: Vintage Epiphones of the 1930s
In the early 20th century, Epiphone was known as one of New York''s premier archtop builders. See 14 exquisite examples of early works and learn how the company changed in the first three decades of the 20th Century.
"This Zenith was based on the standard models of 1935 (with a 14 3/4"" width), but was specially produced for an outside distributor. It is a 16"" archtop with a laminate-spruce top, maple back and sides, rosewood fretboard, and diamond inlay. The adjustable rosewood bridge is not original. "
The long-running punk quartet pick prototypes, P basses, and Pauls for their latest live shows.
On tour supporting their 12th full-length record, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…, California rockers AFI rolled through Nashville’s Marathon Music Works in October. After first running down their rigs in 2017, PG’s Chris Kies linked up again with guitarist Jade Puget and bassist Hunter Burgan to see how their gear has evolved in the past eight years.
Puget found this Les Paul Standard hanging at Guitar Center 15 years ago, and it’s still his go-to live guitar. A surprisingly light specimen, it’s had a Seymour Duncan pickup swapped in, and it’s strung with Ernie Balls—usually .010s.
Throughout AFI’s set, Puget switches between tunings: D sharp, drop C sharp, D standard, and E standard.
Silver Surfer
This new Schecter, a prototype made for Puget, is his first ever silverburst, which saw service in the music video for “Holy Visions.” It’s loaded with a Sustainiac system in the neck position.
Willing and Ableton
Puget has experimented a lot to get his rig to this point. His signal runs through a pair of rack-mounted Line 6 Helix units in a stereo configuration, and also through a computer running Ableton that triggers the exact sound designs he created while recording. The RJM Mastermind and Effect Gizmo are programmed to control all pedals, the Helix, and Ableton.
Jade Puget’s Pedalboard
Most of Puget’s effects come from the Helix, but he also runs a few pedals in his rack, including an MXR EVH 5150 Overdrive and Carbon Copy, Boss DC-2W, RV-2, and BF-2, and a Keeley Compressor.
Another board carries a Boss TU-3, TC Electronic Mimiq, EHX The Clone Theory, TC Electronic Arena, MXR Echoplex, and L.R. Baggs Venue DI.
Blackout
In live contexts, Burgan uses Fender P basses exclusively. This is his No. 1, which he’s had since 2012.
Pinky
This dazzling Fender P was made custom for Burgan before this tour.
Triples is Best
Burgan runs this trio of Ampeg SVT Classics.
Hunter Burgan’s Rack Setup
Burgan uses a RJM Mastermind GT to control his in-show switching. In his backstage rack, there’s an EHX Bass Big Muff, Micro Synth, Satisfaction, Nano POG, Bass Clone, and Graphic Fuzz, and on a second shelf, there’s the rest of the collection: a Bass Soul Food, Battalion, Lizard King, Neo Mistress, and Memory Toy.
If there’s any company you’d expect to understand the delicate relationship between pickups and pedals, it’s Seymour Duncan. The company’s Pickup Booster Mini, an evolution of the Pickup Booster that’s been around for roughly two decades, certainly reflects a less-is-more philosophy about what you should stick between a good pickup and your amplifier. But while the Pickup Booster is simple, it’s far from inflexible, nor, in most cases, does it sound very “mini.”
Friend to the Single Coil
The Pickup Booster Mini’s versatility is most evident in its resonance control. These shifts are clear when you use the pedal with single coil pickups at the front of a pedal chain—in fact, the resonance switch works onlywhen the Pickup Booster Mini is the first stomp in a line. The differences between settings are also apparent when used with a clean amp. So yes, Fender-oriented players, with their single coils and high-headroom amps, get a fatter share of the fun when using the Pickup Booster Mini, as well as a greater sense of the pedal’s transformative power.
For all its single-coil bias, the Pickup Booster Mini is still a good buddy to humbuckers.
I tested the Pickup Booster Mini’s interaction with different pickups using two contrasting rigs—first between a Fender Jaguar and black-panel Deluxe Reverb, then an SG and the Marshall 18-watt setting on a Carr Bel-Ray. To widen the stylistic disparity between these surfy- and AC/DC-sounding setups, I deliberately set up the Jaguar/Deluxe tandem for fairly anemic output, with the amp volume just past 2. Without the Pickup Booster Mini the combination was thin and lifeless. With an assist from the pedal, the previously absent low- and low-midrange became quite prominent—and not in a fashion that just added mud to the equation. Instead, it lent sustain and a warm, discernible glow to overtones while maintaining the Jaguar/Deluxe combination’s sunny essence. Could I have generated the same tone by turning the amp volume up, the guitar down, and adding some bass? Not easily with the Jaguar’s 1k pots. But even a Telecaster with a finely tapered volume control couldn’t always match the low-mid punch the Pickup Booster Mini added at lower amp volumes.
For all its single-coil bias, the Pickup Booster Mini is still a good buddy to humbuckers. In the more AC/DC-like SG/Carr set up, the Pickup Booster Mini worked best as a lead boost. And in terms of creating bolder tone contrasts, I had good luck with the pedal’s resonant peak 2 setting which, while ostensibly ideal for making single coils sound like high-gain humbuckers, can lend an almost cocked-wah like focus to leads.
You don’t have to use the Pickup Booster Mini at the front end of a pedal chain. Its buffer also means you can use it at the end of long cable runs to make up for the associated tone loss. You lose the flexibility of the resonance switch, but it still sounds fantastic and can work as an almost compression-like glue to meld overtones and artifacts from delay, reverb, and modulation units.
The Verdict
If, like me, you’re always looking for ways to shrink your pedalboard, the Pickup Booster Mini makes an appealing ingredient in a compact setup. Though it doesn’t excite the treble spectrum quite as much as some boosts and overdrives, it restores the fullness often lost when using single-coil pickups at low amp volumes, making it a simple, cost-effective cure for one of many performer’s most common challenges.
Thanks to some key years working at a celebrated music store, this band of brothers has the goods.
The Band Royale, the Chicago-based brotherly “yacht metal” outfit, know a thing or two about gear—guitarists Joel and Zach Bauman, plus bassist Marc Najjar, all worked at Chicago Music Exchange, one of the premier music shops in North America. PG’s Chris Kies traveled deep into the band’s bunker in Chicago for this Rig Rundown with Najjar and the Bauman brothers.
This 1972 GibsonLes Paul Custom was Joel’s first “real” guitar, which he bought from CME. It’s all original except for the tailpiece, and weighs in at a whopping 11 pounds. Joel keeps it in open D6 tuning.
Mock Mockingbird
Someone brought this fake Mockingbird into CME one day, and Joel decided he had to have it. It boasts neckthrough construction with maple and mahogany, a Bill Lawrence dual blade pickup, brass nut, and heftier .012-gauge strings. The original builder must’ve liked the sticker he added to the body; it’s underneath the lacquer.
Warming Up
While Brian Carsten was still an amp tech at CME, Joel bought this Carstens Amplification Warm Machine off of him—the first he ever made. It’s designed around a master-volume, 50-watt Marshall head circuit, with a bit more warmth. Joel has had this one for over two decades now, and runs it through a Fender Bassman 2x12 cab with Celestion Creamback speakers.
He’s also been experimenting with a Quilter Overdrive 200 for a lighter solution, which he runs through a Bergantino 2x12 cabinet—Joel calls the cab and Quilter combo a “game-changer.”
Joel Bauman’s Pedalboard
The jewel of Joel’s board is a 1981 Ibanez Tube Screamer, gifted to him by Josh Klinghoffer. There’s also a Durham Electronics Sex Drive, EHX Micro POG, Xotic EP Booster, Friedman BE-OD, Boss CE-2W, Strymon El Capistan, and Strymon Flint, plus a Korg Pitchblack Advance tuner.
Holesome
Zach Bauman isn’t bothered by the gaping hole in his 1990 Gibson SG; it gives the guitar a whole lot of character. This guitar has a Gibson T-Top Burstbucker in the bridge, and has been modded to have just two pots for master tone and volume. Zach strings it with .011–.052s.
Painted Paul
Zach snagged this 1979 Les Paul while working at CME, and scraped off a nasty previous paintjob with a card before getting to work making it his own. A friend painted the headstock, and another made him this custom pickguard. It’s also got T-Tops in the neck and bridge.
Mig Buff
Zach loves his Sovtek Mig 60 head, which he plays through a cab he built himself at a pipe-organ shop in Denver. Every glue joint is lined with thin leather for maximum air tightness, and it’s stocked with Celestion G12M Greenback speakers.
Zach Bauman’s Pedalboard
On Zach’s board, we find a Klon clone, Ibanez Tube Screamer, Boss VB-2W, Ibanez Mini Chorus, Strymon Flint, and Strymon El Capistan, along with a Dunlop Volume (X) pedal and a TC Electronic PolyTune.
Bergantino’s Best
Najjar has deep love for Holly and Jim Bergantino and their Bergantino Audio Systems products. He plays with both a Forte and Forte HP Ultra—a 2000-watt prototype—through a Bergantino HDN112 cab and special 3x10 cab.
Bass for Babies
Najjar’s Sandberg Forty Eight finished in shoreline gold, nicknamed the “golden baby,” was the first of its kind.
Going to California
This Sandberg California TT4 has ’70s-style J-bass pickups and a 34” scale. Najjar gets a “Geddy Lee-style” vibe from it.
Marc Najjar’s Pedalboard
Najjar’s tone temple is topped off with a Bergantino Super Pre brass preamp into his Neural Quad Cortex.
Khruangbin is a band that moves freely in negative space. They don’t deal in negative vibes, mind you, but the spaces in between objects—or in music, between notes and tones. In Khruangbin’s case, negative space isn’t quite as empty as it seems. In fact, a lot of it is colored with reverberated overtones, which is an aesthetic well suited to Mark Speer’s instrument of choice. Because if you want to color negative space without being a space hog, there are few better means than a Stratocaster.
Speer’s signature Stratocaster, is not, in the strictest sense, a classically Strat-like specimen. Its bridge and neck pickups, after all, are DiMarzio Pro Track humbuckers, with a design informed more by PAFs than Fender single coils. Nor is it modeled after a priceless rarity. Speer’s main guitar is a humble ’72 Stratocaster reissue from the early 2000’s. But the Speer signature Stratocaster is a thought-provoking twist on classic “Stratocaster-ness,” and one well-suited to the atmospherics that mark Khruangbin’s music, but also soul, reggae, jazz, and any other expression where clarity and substance are critical.
Mr. Natural Takes It In Stride
I have to admit—and no doubt some of you will disagree—for most of my life, as an early- to mid-1960s-oriented aesthete, an all-natural-finished Strat with an oversized headstock looked flat-out wrong. My opinion on the matter has softened a bit since. And I think the Speer Stratocaster is beautiful, elegant, and does much the flatter the Strat profile. The pronounced grain in the ash body is lovely, and it certainly doesn’t reflect the drop in ash quality that many feared when ash-boring beetles started to decimate swamp ash supplies. It also looks great against the milk-white single-ply white pickguard and all-white knobs (another nice study in negative space).
Elsewhere, many features are authentically 1972. The 1-piece, 3-bolt maple neck with a 7.25" fretboard radius boasts a micro-neck-adjust feature as well as the practical and cool-looking bullet truss rod. The tuners also feature early ’70s-styled machine covers. The neck itself feels great—slightly less chunky, perhaps, than early ’70s Strats I’ve played, and, oddly, not worlds apart from the neck on my Mexico-made ’72 Telecaster Deluxe, which has a much flatter 12" radius. Some of the similarities in feel may have to do with the jumbo frets, which here give the gloss urethane fretboard a slinky, easy touch. Less delicate players (like me) who tend to squeeze when chording should check out the Speer before purchasing to make sure they don’t pull everything sharp. The frets do make string bends feel breezy, though. Other details, apart from the jumbo frets, that deviate a bit from 1972 Fender spec include a bone nut and Graphtec saddles and string trees.
Warmth of the Sun
The DiMarzio Pro Tracks dwell in an interesting tone space. They’re built with ceramic magnets (vintage Strat and Gibson PAFS were made with alnico magnets) with a resistance of about 7.7 k ohms, which is in the range of a vintage PAF humbucker but hotter than most vintage Stratocaster pickups. In terms of tone signature, they sound and respond a little more like PAFs than Stratocaster pickups, too, which aligns with DiMarzio’s design objectives. But in the neck pickup in particular, the Strat-iness is very present. And when I switched back and forth between a Stratocaster and PAF-equipped SG as baselines for comparison, I marveled at how well the DiMarzios retained qualities of both. It’s hard to know how much Fender’s 25 1/2" scale factors into lending the extra bit of Fender color. But the sound is distinctly, authentically, Speer-like. (For the record, I replicated much of Speer’s circa 2018 signal chain for this test, including a Fender Deluxe Reverb, Dunlop Cry Baby, Boss PH-3 and DS-1, MXR DynaComp, and a Echoplex-style pedal).
The PAF qualities of the DiMarzios are most pronounced in the bridge pickup, which is much burlier and thicker than a Stratocaster single coil. The one single coil on the guitar meanwhile, the middle pickup, will sound and feel familiar to any old-school Stratocaster player. It’s also perfect for chasing Jerry Garcia tones if you’re selecting the Speer for its likeness to Jer’s “Alligator.” The real treat among the Speer’s many sounds, though, is the number 4 position, which combines the neck pickup and middle pickup out of phase. It’s snarky, super-focused, and just a little bit nasty, especially with overdrive and treble bump from either a wah, OD, or boost pedal.
The Verdict
For those players who fall in love with the comfort, feel, and looks of a Stratocaster, only to find it a bit thin-sounding for their purposes, the Mark Speer Stratocaster is an intriguing option. The humbuckers deftly thread the needle between Stratocaster and PAF tonalities, with a distinct lean toward the latter, and the out-of-phase number 4 position is a cool sound that lends the Speer Strat expansive smooth-to-nasty range. Like so many Mexico-made Fenders, the quality is superb. And while the $1,499 price tag represents a Signature Series bump compared to the similar $1,209 Vintera II ’70s Stratocaster, the Speer’s extra tone range and ash body do a lot to soften any sticker shock. If the options here fit your style, it could be well worth the extra dollars.
OC Pedal Co. was formed in 2024 by Santa Ana native Evan Haymond, a session ace who toured with Jack Russell of Great White in the 2010s. Not surprisingly, OC Pedal Co.’s U.S.A.-made LA HABRA Hard Clipper evokes many of the crunchy sounds from that era.
Less is More
The LA HABRA’s control panel is minimal, with just two knobs—volume and tone. There’s no gain knob, instead you get a gain switch that lets you choose between two clipping profiles. In the right position the pedal employs op-amp clipping. Set it to the left and a set of LED diodes are activated. With humbuckers, the gain switch set to LED mode, and the tone knob at 11:00, the LA HABRA produced a toothy sound that, sure enough, produced power chord sounds that sounded more than a little like Great White’s cover of “Once Bitten, Twice Shy.”
Though the lack of a gain knob may leave some players feeling limited, the tone knob is a powerful tool for shaping the characteristics of the distortion, and with the tone knob at its darkest setting, the LA HABRA still delivers ample definition. Move the tone knob up to around 3:00, though, and there’s enough clarity and treble detail to make leads sizzle. To my ears this is where the pedal shines, and bumping the tone knob all the way up (with the gain switch still set to the LED clipping mode), the sound is super aggressive without being over-saturated.
In general, with the gain switch set to LED clipping you get a high-end boost and hear and feel more compression. Op-amp clipping tames some of the highs yielding a more balanced output, which is particularly noticeable when the tone knob is set to 3:00 and above. I generally preferred the gain switch set to op-amp clipping but each clipping mode yields sounds that can work in many contexts.
The Verdict
The LA HABRA has plenty of definition for melodic parts and is tough enough for bluesy riffs. For legato shred-type playing, there were times when I wished the pedal had a little more gain. But LA HABRA has a knack for feeling amp-like, particularly in terms of dynamics and touch sensitivity—much more so than many pedals that occupy this mid- to high-mid-gain category.
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Zach loves his Sovtek Mig 60 head, which he plays through a cab he built himself at a pipe-organ shop in Denver. Every glue joint is lined with thin leather for maximum air tightness, and it’s stocked with Celestion G12M Greenback speakers.
