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GALLERY: Guitar Heroes - Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York

Guitars from D’Angelico, D’Aquisto, Monteleone, and Italian craftsmen featured in The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes Exhibit. Photos courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

DуAngelico Teardrop New Yorker Model, 1957
The Teardrop New Yorker was a commissioned piece by musician Pete Girardi of the Teardrops. The famous shape quickly became a collectorsу piece. James DуAquisto and John Monteleone have both been commissioned to attempt the form. All three iterations of the Teardrop are on display together for the first time at this exhibit.

These pedals are designed with fast response times, versatile routing options, and durable construction.

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Dave Friedman evolves the Marshall Super Lead template with a 50-watt thumper that adds tone-shaping flex on top of the Plex.

Bright switches add flexibility. Master volume sounds good at lower levels. Switchable built-in Variac.

No effects loop. Priced at upper end of plexi modern reproduction market

$2,799

Friedman Plex Head
friedmanamplification.com

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The first entry in Friedman Amplification’s much-anticipated Vintage Collection is the Plex, a painstakingly crafted homage to Dave Friedman’s own 1968 JMP Super Lead plexi—the archetype and foundation on which the entireFriedman lineup is based.

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This "Multi-Generational Time Reflection Device" offers three delay modes in one pedal with six presets, tap-tempo, and user-assignable expression control.

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When he’s on the West Coast, Jim Campilongo feels something like a stranger in his own home. His latest record pays tribute to the city he misses when he’s there, and the one where he built most of his career.

Photo by Joe Ferrucci

The San Francisco-born roots-rock guitarist feels like an East Coaster at heart, and his latest, She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show, might be his most rocking, fitting homage to the Big Apple.

When Jim Campilongo phones in with Premier Guitar, it’s from his home in the Bay Area—the same place where he first picked up the guitar in the 1970s, began playing shows with local groups some years later and, eventually, launched his recording career in the 1990s. Over the subsequent decades, he established himself as one of the instrument’s foremost creatives, building a catalog of primarily instrumental albums that encompass a dazzling array of styles—rock, jazz, roots, Western swing, classical, experimental—all informed by his inventive, flexible and never-predictable playing, mostly on a Fender Telecaster plugged direct into an amp.

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