An eye-popping gallery of radically reimagined guitars.
Danny Carr
Danny Carr of San Jose, California, says this sparkle-flamed beauty started out as a 2004 Roland Ready Strat. “Aside from the wood, frets, Roland circuit boards, and hex pickup, there’s not much left that’s original,” notes Carr. The new neck and middle pickups are single-coil GFS Vintage Staggers (neither is reverse-wound), while the bridge is a Duncan Li’l Screamin’ Demon humbucker. The pickguard is from Pickguard Heaven, the pearloid-knob tuners are by Schaller, the locking whammy system is by Super Vee, and Willies Rod and Kustom Car Shop of Campbell, California, provided the glorious paint job.
The electronics are equally ambitious: Switch 1 is a standard 5-way pickup selector. Switch 2 activates the bridge pickup (providing seven possible combinations from the non-synth pickups). Switches 3 and 4 control the synth pickup, and a push/pull tone knob houses a fifth switch to toggle the humbucker between series and parallel mode. “For 16 years I’ve played in a classic-rock cover band, which means I have to cover a ton of sonic territory,” says Carr. “With the mods on this guitar, there’s not much I can’t do.”
Throughout the year we collect stories and photos of guitar-mod projects created by you, our dear readers. Some are so inspiring that we include them here in our annual Hot Rod issue.
On Halloween, the pride of New Jersey rock ’n’ roll shook a Montreal arena with a show that lifted the veil between here and the everafter.
It might not seem like it, but Bruce Springsteen is going to die.
I know; it’s a weird thought. The guy is 75 years old, and still puts on three-hour-plus-long shows, without pauses or intermissions. His stamina and spirit put the millennial work-from-home class, whose backs hurt because we “slept weird” or “forgot to use our ergonomic keyboard,” to absolute shame. He leaps and bolts and howls and throws his Telecasters high in the air. No doubt it helps to have access to the best healthcare money can buy, but still, there’s no denying that he’s a specimen of human physical excellence. And yet, Bruce, like the rest of us, will pass from this plane.
Maybe these aren’t the first thoughts you’d expect to have after a rock ’n’ roll show, but rock ’n’ roll is getting old, and one of its most prolific stars has been telling us for the past few years that he’s getting his affairs in order. His current tour, which continues his 2023 world tour celebrated in the recent documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, follows his latest LP of original music, 2020’s Letter To You. That record was explicitly and thematically an exploration of the Boss’ mortality, and this year’s jubilant roadshow continues that chapter with shows across the U.S. and Canada.
“The older you get, the more you realize that, unless you’re über-wealthy, you probably have a lot in common with the characters in Springsteen songs.”
I was at the Montreal show on Halloween night, where Bruce, the E Street Band—Steven Van Zandt, Nils Lofgren, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, and Roy Bittan, along with Soozie Tyrell, Charles Giordano, and Jake Clemons—and a brilliant backing ensemble of singers and musicians performed for roughly three hours straight. The show rewired my brain. For days after, I was in a feverish state, hatching delusional schemes to get to his other Canadian shows, unconsciously singing the melody of “Dancing in the Dark” on a loop until my partner asked me to stop, listening to every Springsteen album front to back.
“The stakes implicit in most of these stories are that our time is always running out.”
Photo by Rob DeMartin
I had seen Bruce and the E Street Band in 2012, but something about this time was different, more urgent and powerful. Maybe it’s that the older you get, the more you realize that, unless you’re über-wealthy, you probably have a lot in common with the characters in Springsteen songs. When you’re young, they’re just great songs with abstract stories. Maybe some time around your late 20s, you realize that you aren’t one of the lucky ones anointed to escape the pressures of wage work and monthly rent, and suddenly the plight of the narrator of “Racing in the Street” isn’t so alien. The song’s wistful organ melody takes on a different weight, and the now-signature extended coda that the band played in Montreal, led by that organ, Bittan’s piano, and Weinberg’s tense snare rim snaps, washed across the arena over and again, like years slipping away.
The stakes implicit in most of these stories are that our time is always running out. The decades that we spend just keeping our heads above water foreclose a lot of possibility, the kind promised in the brash harmonica whine and piano strokes that open “Thunder Road” like an outstretched hand, or in the wild, determined sprint of “Born to Run.” If we could live forever, there’d be no urgency to our toils. But we don’t.
Springsteen has long has the ability to turn a sold-out arena into a space as intimate as a small rock club.
Photo by Rob DeMartin
Bruce has never shied away from these realities. Take “Atlantic City,” with its unambiguous chorus: “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.” (Then, of course, an inkling of hope: “Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”) Springsteen used those phrases on Nebraska to tell the story of a working person twisted and cornered into despair and desperation, but on All Hallows Eve, as the band rocked through their electrified arrangement of the track, it was hard not to hear them outside of their context, too, as some of the plainest yet most potent words in rock ’n’ roll.
In Montreal, like on the rest of this tour, Bruce guided us through a lifecycle of music and emotion, framed around signposts that underlined our impermanence. In “Letter to You,” he gestured forcefully, his face tight and rippled with passion, an old man recapping the past 50 years of his creative life and his relationship to listeners in one song. “Nightshift,” the well-placed Commodores tune featured on his 2022 covers record, and “Last Man Standing,” were opportunities to mourn Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, his E Street comrades who went before him, but also his bandmates in his first group, the Castiles. It all came to a head in the night’s elegiac closer, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” performed solo by Bruce with his acoustic guitar: “Go, and I’ll see you in my dreams,” he calls
I’m still trying to put my finger on exactly why the show felt so important. I’ve circled around it here, but I’m sure I haven’t quite hit on the heart of the matter. Perhaps it’s that, as we’re battered by worsening crises and cornered by impossible costs of living, songs about people trying desperately to feel alive and get free sound especially loud and helpful. Or it could be that having one of our favorite artists acknowledge his mortality, and ours, is like having a weight lifted: Now that it’s out in the open, we can live properly and honestly.
None of us know for sure what’s up around the bend, just out of sight. It could be something amazing; it could be nothing at all. Whatever it is, we’re in it together, and we’ll all get there in our time. Until then, no matter how bad things get, we’ll always have rock ’n’ roll.
Less-corpulent, Big Muff-style tones that cut in many colors.
Unique, less-bossy take on the Big Muff sound that trades excess fat for articulation. Nice build at a nice price.
Some Big Muff heads may miss the bass and silky smooth edges.
$149
Evil Eye FX Warg
evileyefx.com
Membership in the Cult of Big Muff is an endless source of good times. Archaeologically minded circuit-tracers can explore many versions and mutations. Tone obsessives can argue the merits of fizzier or fatter tone signatures. The Ace Tone FM-3 is one of the less famous branches on the Big Muff evolutionary tree, but one that every true Big Muff devotee should know. It came out around 1971 and it was among the first in a line of often-imaginative Japanese takes on the circuit.
Evil Eye Warg Fuzz - MAIN by premierguitar
Listen to Evil Eye Warg Fuzz - MAIN by premierguitar #np on #SoundCloudEvil Eye’s Warg Fuzz marks another generation in this evolution. It uses the FM-3 as a design foundation and inspiration, and shares many of its tone characteristics. It’s most overtly a buzzier, less bass-hefty take on the V1 “Triangle” Big Muff, which serves as the FM-3 design’s launch pad. But the Warg also adds a midrange boost switch that makes the pedal better suited to mixes and environments where a little extra presence serves the musical setting.
Close Cousins
If you look at schematics for a V1 Big Muff and an Ace Tone FM-3 (minus its largely superfluous “boost” circuit) side by side, you’ll see a near-mirror image. But the small differences are significant. On the Ace Tone and Evil Eye Warg, the volume pot is positioned before the output gain stage rather than after, as it is on a Big Muff. A few filter and feedback capacitor values are smaller than those on the Big Muff, and there are a few extra resistors and an extra capacitor. Those changes aside, the two circuits would be hard to differentiate at a glance. But as we’ll hear, the audible differences are often profound.
Though Evil Eye was careful to replicate the Ace Tone circuit as closely as possible, the company added a second path for reshaping the output in the form of the “scooped and flat” toggle. Big Muffs are generally pretty scooped in the midrange, which is one of the breed’s distinguishing qualities, no matter the version. But that doesn’t keep newer manufacturers, like EarthQuaker and Stomp Under Foot, to name a few, from building Big Muff clones that add a midrange boost. Here, a variable boost knob is replaced by the flat-switch setting, which still offers ample tone reshaping utility.
“In a band mix, there’s more contrast with a burly bass.”
Build quality on the Philadelphia-made Warg is very nice. The circuit board is tidy, arranged along four rows of components that make the circuit relatively easy to trace. Input and output jacks as well as the footswitch are mounted to the chassis rather than the circuit board. The footswitch is a soft-relay unit. The pedal also looks bitchin’ (though the namesake wolf beast on the enclosure looks a little slender for a mythical, massive Warg). Given the careful, high-quality execution, the $149 street price is an especially good value.
Less Woof in This Wolf
Situating the Warg alongside any Big Muff makes the sonic family resemblance very clear. For comparison, I used a Sovtek Big Muff as well as really nice Ram’s Head and Triangle Big Muff clones. And while the Triangle is very clearly the closest cousin, in an audible sense, in the mid-scooped setting, the Warg shares a powerful, thick, high-gain profile and feel with all three Big Muff types. Where it’s most pronouncedly different is in its relatively light bottom end. For Big Muff hounds that savor the unique, bassy Big Muff ballast, the difference will probably sound pretty stark. But there’s lots of upside to the Warg’s less fat and sprawling profile. In a band mix, there’s more contrast with a burly bass. It will inhabit a much more individual space in a mix, too, which can open up mixing and arrangement options once you’ve laid down your tracks. And for this Big Muff fan, the less-bass-forward profile meant I could coax thick, grindy tones that were a touch more evocative of mid-to-late-’60s fuzz tonalities and felt less shackled to fat stoner-rock templates or late-Gilmour butter-sustain cliches without sacrificing a Big Muff’s sense of wide-spectrum chord aggression.
In the flat frequency mode, I found that the closest sonic likeness to the Warg was an EarthQuaker Hoof with an enhanced mids setting. The EQD probably offered more range on the traditional, bassy side of the Big Muff spectrum. But almost none of the pedals I tested against the Warg could match the Evil Eye’s high-mid clarity in chording situations and melodic leads.
The Verdict
Ascertaining how the very apparent, but sometimes subtle, differences between Big Muff types and the Evil Eye Warg fit your tone ideals and musical needs will probably take a shootout of your own. But if, like me, you’re a Big Muff user that sometimes wearies of that pedal’s smooth, fat, bluster, Evil Eye’s alternative is attractive and intriguing. It’s a great study in how different the basic Big Muff architecture can sound. And at just less than $150, you don’t have to feel too scared about taking a chance on this very interesting fuzz
When they serendiptiously crossed paths onstage with Phil Lesh & Friends, JD Simo and Luther Dickinson's musical souls spoke to each other. They started jamming together leading them to cut Do The Romp at JD's home studio, combining their appreciation of hill country blues, spirituals, swamp rock, and Afrobeat in a modern grease and grime.
Dickinson has the North Mississippi Allstars and toured with the Black Crowes and John Hiatt, while JD Simo earned his stripes in the Don Kelley Band at Robert's Western World before forging an impressive solo career and working studio magic for Dave Cobb, Jack White, Beyoncé, Chris Isaak, and Baz Luhrmann's Elvis movie.
Individually, JD Simo and Luther Dickinson are building their own legacies as solo artists, sidemen, songwriters, and guitar heroes. Together, they're a creative force to be reckoned with, making their own version of amplified American roots music. On the pair's first collaborative album, Do The Rump, the musicians trade blistering guitar solos, take turns at the microphone, and turn their classic influences — including hill country blues, spirituals, swamp rock, and Afrobeat — into something contemporary, reinterpreting a number of their old-school favorites into eclectic, electrifying anthems.
The partnership began onstage, where Simo and Dickinson first shared the spotlight as touring members of Phil Lesh and Friends. Dickinson had already established himself as co-founder of the Grammy-winning duo North Mississippi Allstars, as well as a celebrated guitarist for acts like Black Crowes and John Hiatt. Similarly, JD Simo had built an audience not only with his solo project, but also as a session musician for Jack White, Beyoncé, Chris Isaak, and Baz Luhrmann's Elvis movie.
You might not be aware of all the precision that goes into building a fine 6-string’s neck, but you can certainly feel it.
I do not consider my first “real” guitar the one where I only made the body. In my mind, an electric guitar maker makes necks with a body attached—not the other way around. (In the acoustic world, the body is a physics converter from hand motion to sound, but that’s a different article for a different month.) To me, the neck is deeply important because it’s the first thing you feel on a guitar to know if you even want to plug it in. As we say at PRS, the neck should feel like “home,” or like an old shirt that’s broken in and is so comfortable you can barely tell it’s on.
A couple articles ago, I talked about things on a guitar you can’t see, but are of the utmost importance to the quality of the instrument. I’d now like to go deeper into some of those unseen details in guitar neck making that make a difference. This list is a small percentage of what’s really going on, so please take each one as an example of the craft.
Gluing in the frets. In my old repair shop, there were several instruments that kept returning after gigs because the frets had again become unlevel. If I took a very flat file and started to level the frets, the volume of the squeaking of the frets as I filed was really loud. I realized that these guitars had never had their frets glued in. It seemed clear that the fretshad to be glued into the slots, so when someone sweats into the instrument at a gig, the frets do not change height. I learned, after interviewing Ted McCarty, that the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo in the ’50s glued the frets in with fish glue. I tried it once. It stunk, and I never used it again. But gluing frets in has been important to me since day one. The glue makes a mold around the teeth of the fretwire to hold the frets in place. Another reason to glue the frets in is that on some ’60s Martins, for example, the frets would lift up on the treble side and the high-E string would get caught underneath the fret. So, glue the frets in or you’re going to have a long-term problem. By the way, using a water-based glue is like adding all the water back to the fretboard that you spent months drying out. I like super glue because it doesn’t have any water in it.
“Terry Kath, the great guitar player from Chicago, once told me, ‘Most guitars won’t play in tune down near the nut, and I search and search for guitars that will.’”
Fret positions. When I was young, there was an article in Guitar Player that described how to calculate fret positions by using the 12th root of two. The number is 1.0594631. And the reason I remember the number is because calculators didn’t have memory at the time, and I had to keep entering the number over and over again. One day, someone came into my shop and said, “I can’t play in tune with the keyboard player when I am playing lines near the nut.” I said, “That’s hard for me to believe, but I’ll check it.” Sure enough, the first few frets were out of tune with the open nut even though I had calculated the 1st frets’ positions perfectly. Turns out the nut needed to be moved so that it would play in tune down there (in the same way you have to adjust the intonation at the bridge end). Terry Kath, the great guitar player from Chicago, once told me, “Most guitars won’t play in tune down near the nut, and I search and search for guitars that will.” Getting the frets, the nut, and the bridge in the right positions is incredibly important. You’d be surprised that this is not always a given.
Neck shape. I was once at Dave’s Guitar Shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in his upstairs guitar museum, and got to compare early ’50s Tele, old Les Paul, and early Strat neck shapes. What was so surprising was how close the neck shapes were, including the thumb round-over (where the side dots are). I was later able to scan a lot of these necks and compare them with a computer, and, damn, they were really close. What was different was the radius of the fretboards. Some of them were more curved than others, and the old Gibsons’ radii were not what the internet says they should be. So, it’s pretty hard to understand from the specs alone how a neck is going to feel in your hands. In my mind, there’s a common shape that your hand feels comfortable with, and then all the extensions that make 7-string guitars, 12-strings, acoustic instruments, and modern Ibanez/flat-radius type instruments are other artforms altogether.
At PRS, we often think of guitars in terms of looks, feel, and sound. If it looks good, you’ll probably pick it up. If it feels good in your hands and rings for a long time when you strum it acoustically, you’ll probably plug it in. If it sounds good plugged in, there’s a good chance you’re hooked.