A stripped-down, solid workhorse for those about to rock.
Simple, comfortable-feeling and well-built guitar that looks, plays, and sounds damn fine.
Neck pickup loyalists—you’re outta luck!
$1,799
Dunable Cyclops
dunableguitars.com
[Updated 12/19/22]
The prophet Dirty Harry Callahan once said, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” The same can be said for some guitars. But sometimes design limitations define a guitar’s purpose—or at least suggest the best sonic or stylistic routes to travel.
The Dunable Cyclops is such a guitar—it’s a one-pickup model that borrows the name of the single-eyed giants from Greek mythology. Like those giants, this instrument is a simple creature that nonetheless merits serious reckoning. And as a steak-and-‘taters road or studio machine, the Cyclops measures up.
- First section, tone pot full up; second section, tone pot half back. Carr Vincent amp: volume at 2; treble, mid, and bass at noon; reverb at 3; drive at 3.5.
- Starts with tone put rolled full back and sweeps up to full on. Carr Vincent amp: volume at 5; treble at 10, mid boost on at 10, bass at noon; reverb at 3; drive at 10. Origin Effect Cali76 compressor.
Beautifully Basic
Our test guitar is as solid and handsome as it is basic, clocking in at about 8 pounds with a mahogany body (swamp ash is also available), a 22-fret, African mahogany 25.5”-scale set neck, and an ebony fretboard (also available in rosewood or maple). The bound neck has a comfortable and fast C-profile, and the jumbo Jescar frets are as smooth as a shaved baby goat. The 18:1 Grover Sta-Tite tuners feel solid and turn evenly. A Schaller Tune-o-matic bridge and trapeze tailpiece—chosen, presumably, to get the most natural string tone—hold things down at the aft end of the instrument.
The Cyclops’ headstock has a smartly angled cut with a mid-peak and a volute where it joins the neck to strengthen that vulnerable spot. The controls are simple: a volume dial and a tone dial that would look comfortable on an old toaster oven. The white-black-white-trimmed black pickguard lends a simple elegance. And the body—with a beveled lower cutaway providing easy access to all the frets—has a cool, raw look. The surface is sanded just enough to leave an almost topographical texture, which is sealed by a thin satin-poly topcoat. And oh yeah! The guitar arrived in an Access hardshell case with a set of Schaller strap lock pegs tucked inside. Bonus!
Hold-the-Phone Tone
Even before plugging in, the Cyclops got on my good side thanks to its solid feel and flawless setup. Action is low and comfy—no fret buzz or ill-defined notes. Bending notes and shaking chords is easy. The tone and volume pots feel slick and are easy to adjust on the fly. And once plugged in, tones are crisp and arresting across the board, and not at all piercing, even with the tone pot turned full up. All guitars should come out of the box this ready to gig.
Dunable’s own Slugwolf bridge humbucker is a beast with just the right amount of hair. At 13.8k, the Slugwolf’s output is hot but not uncontrollable. This single hummer has excellent dynamic response and it’s easy to roll back the howl—or bump it up—with the volume pot. According to Dunable, the alnico 5-style pickup uses 43-gauge wire to allow more turns on the double slug bobbins to increase the magnetic field, resulting in slightly thicker mids and treble response that steers clear of shrillness. Those qualities were audible, whether I played through a vintage Supro combo, an old 50-watt Marshall Super Lead, or a Carr Vincent.
For pure, warm, and edgy rock tone, the Cyclops is extremely satisfying. Even with the tone pot rolled back, there’s plenty of articulation in notes and chords. It lived up to my expectations at a rehearsal, cutting through in the small space like a samurai sword. Looking for a dirty slide tone with lots of sustain, I stomped on my Archer overdrive and rolled the tone pot to about midway, then trimmed the guitar volume with another slight pot adjustment. Notes hung in the air with minimal coaxing, ripe with gritty character. And let’s face it: with only two controls onboard, there’s not a lot of ways to go wrong if you buy into this Dunable’s sound and playability—which I do.
The Verdict
Look—I’m usually a neck pickup guy, but I definitely see eye-to-eye with this Cyclops. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) I’d happily invite this monocular monster to any rock, blues, or improv performance—mellow or aggro. It’s not cheap at $1,799 for a guitar with just a bridge humbucker, but it sounds great, feels durable and comfortable, is well constructed, plays like buttah, and looks stripped-down cool. That’s a lot to love.
Review Demo - Dunable Cyclops
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
Paul Reed Smith shaping a guitar neck in his original Annapolis, Maryland garret shop.
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.
Billy Strings has become one of the biggest drawing guitar players out on the road these days. His music brings bluegrass fans and jam band scenes together, landing him on some of the biggest stages around. Your 100 Guitarists hosts have brought in guitarist Jon Stickley to help them work out their differences—one of us is a jammer and the other … is not.
Stickley goes way back with Billy, spotting his talent early in the young guitarist’s career. The two have worked together since, and recently, when Billy had to dip out of his own festival as his wife headed to the hospital to deliver their baby, it was Stickley who was called to jump on stage and fill in at last minute notice. Stickley recounts the story of not only getting on stage, but strapping on Strings’ guitar, plugging into his space station, and taking off with Billy’s band.
We called the right guitarist to guide us through, navigating Strings’ work, the way he brings together influences from genres outside bluegrass, and what makes him a guitarist you need to know.
This episode is sponsored by Grace Design.
Learn more at https://gracedesign.com.
Warren Haynes has unveiled the Million Voices Whisper 2025 Tour in support of his new solo album.
The 9-date run will launch February 7th in Knoxville, and the Warren Haynes Band will travel throughout the Midwest and Northeast, stopping in such cities as Huntsville, Toledo, Des Moines, and Burlington before wrapping February 22nd in Buffalo. See below for all dates and details.
Fan Club presale tickets will be available starting Wednesday, November 20th at 10am local time with local presales beginning Thursday, November 21st at 10am local time and the general on sale commencing Friday, November 22nd at 10am local time. $1 from every ticket sold for the winter tour will be donated to assist with hurricane relief.
A limited number of specially curated fan packages will also be available for the Million Voices Whisper 2025 Tour. Packages include one Ultimate Guitar Player Package per show, featuring a Les Paul Standard 60s Plain Top guitar in Sparkling Burgundy to be played and signed by Warren, meet & greet with a photo with Warren, soundcheck access, premium reserved seats, and more, and the Guitar Player Package, which includes an autographed Gibson Les Paul Standard Pickguard, a set of custom Warren Haynes guitar picks in collector box, a Dunlop guitar slide, and set of GHS strings (items as used by Warren), plus soundcheck, priority access, and more.
Visit www.warrenhaynes.net for all ticketing and VIP information and to purchase.
Performing alongside Haynes (vocals, guitar) will be the current, all-star lineup of the Warren Haynes Band: longtime drummer Terence Higgins (of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band), Gov’t Mule bassist Kevin Scott, Matt Slocum on keys, and Greg Osby on sax.
Just released November 1stvia Fantasy Records, Million Voices Whisper – Warren’s first solo album in almost a decade and fourth solo collection in his esteemed career catalog – debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Blues Albums Chart and also entered the Americana/Folk Albums chart at #3, Current Rock Albums chart at #5, and Top Current Albums Sales chart at #29. Already hailed as his best album yet, the 11-song collection of soulful blues-rock, produced by Haynes and recorded at Power Station New England, includes the singles “This Life As We Know It” and “Day of Reckoning” featuring Lukas Nelson and Jamey Johnson as well as guest appearances from Warren’s Allman Brothers Band bandmate and longtime friend Derek Trucks on multiple tracks including “Real Real Love,” a song whose lyrics were initially started by Gregg Allman that Haynes finished to honor his friend. Million Voices Whisper is available digitally and on CD, 2-LP vinyl set, and a deluxe CD version with four bonus songs.
This Sunday, November 24th, Haynes, a native of Asheville, and Dave Matthews Band will host “SOULSHINE,” a benefit concert to aid relief and recovery efforts in Western North Carolina and Florida in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, at Madison Square Garden. The sold-0ut, all-star event – featuring performances from DMB, Warren Haynes Band, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, and Goose along with very special guests Trey Anastasio, Mavis Staples, Robert Randolph, Joe Russo, Trombone Shorty, Susan Tedeschi,and Derek Trucks – will now be available worldwide via a free live stream hosted on YouTube. Produced by Volta Media and sponsored by Cisco Systems, the concert will be streamed live on Sunday from 7:00-11:00 pm ET on the official event website SOULSHINEMSG.COM. Net proceeds will go to the SOULSHINE Concert Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, which will benefit Habitat for Humanity’s 2024 Hurricane Recovery fund and will also support a variety of non-profits on the ground in North Carolina and Florida. Visit SOULSHINEMSG.COM to learn more or make a donation.
Following “SOULSHINE,” Haynes will wrap the year with Gov’t Mule’s annual New Year’s Run – December 28th at College Street Music Hall in New Haven, Connecticut, and December 30th and 31st at The Beacon Theatre in New York City – and then launch 2025 with his annual concert-cation experience Island Exodus 15 in Jamaica from January 19-23 before heading out on the road for the Million Voices Whisper 2025 Tour.
For more information, please visit warrenhaynes.net.
WARREN HAYNES TOUR DATES
Gov’t Mule – New Year’s Run
December 28 – New Haven, CT @ College Street Music Hall
December 30 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
December 31 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
Island Exodus 15
Featuring Gov’t Mule, Warren Haynes, Drive-By Truckers, Karina Rykman & Big Sugar
January 19-23, 2025 – Runaway Bay, Jamaica @ Jewel Paradise Cove Resort
Million Voices Whisper Tour 2025
February 7 – Knoxville, TN @ Bijou Theatre
February 8 – Huntsville, AL @ Mars Music Hall
February 11 – Toledo, OH @ Stranahan Theater
February 13 – Northfield, OH @ MGM Northfield Park – Center Stage
February 14 – Carmel, IN @ The Palladium
February 15 – West Des Moines, IA @ Val Air Ballroom
February 20 – Burlington, VT @ The Flynn
February 21 – Concord, NH @ Chubb Theatre
February 22 – Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom
April 5 – Columbia, SC @ Township Auditorium (rescheduled from 9/28)
Gov’t Mule – Festival Appearances
March 6-8 – Live Oak, FL @ Suwannee Amp Jam #1 (on sale 11/21)
July 23-27 – Floyd County, VA @ FloydFest 25~Aurora
Warren Haynes Band – European Festival Appearance
July 6 – Sperken, Austria @ Castle Clam