
Fluence, Fishman’s first line of electric guitar pickups, marks a radical departure from the traditional technology.
I highly recommend having a conversation with Ritchie Fliegler. Fliegler, a guitar industry vet boasting lengthy tenures at both Fender and Marshall, is psyched about his new collaboration with Larry Fishman. That project can—correction, will—change the way you think about electric guitar pickups.
My initial “pre-interview” with Fliegler lasted almost two hours. We discussed everything from aerospace technology to Lionel trains, from Hendrix’s association with Marshall to why no one considers the New York Philharmonic to be a cover band. And somehow it all seemed relevant. Within days I was on my way to Massachusetts to meet with the team at Fishman.
We’re accustomed to hearing about “the next new thing” in pickups every time NAMM season comes around. What the Fishman team has concocted is not a new sound. Quite the opposite: It’s a way to consistently and accurately recreate the sounds of the world’s best pickups.
Pickups: A Black Art?
Pickup winding can be something of a black art. No matter the manufacturer or the person doing the winding, one pickup can sound different from the next. Even with consistent production methods, there are such wild card factors as inconsistency in the raw materials used by the manufacturer.
Guitars, too, are also full of uncontrollable variables. For one thing, they’re made from trees, and trees vary. So do wood-drying conditions, shaping techniques, manufacturing and assembly methods, and the design of the metal and plastic parts we attach to that wood.
But for all of us electric guitar huggers, sound eventually comes down to that critical point where a vibrating string excites a pickup magnet. The invisible events that occur in that instant are responsible for all the things we love about pickups—and many of the things that frustrate us.
The sound coming from a vintage ’54 Stratocaster pickup or a ’57 PAF humbucker can be magical. But according to Larry Fishman, that “magic” is precisely why his company sidestepped electric guitar pickups for its first 34 years: “Too much voodoo,” he says. Fishman felt he could match the performance of existing electric guitar pickups, but not bring anything new to the party—until now.
About 18 months ago Fishman and his team started thinking about magnetic pickups in a bold unique new way. The result is a new pickup line: Fluence.
A New Path to Old Sounds
Understanding what’s unique about Fluence requires an understanding of how traditional pickups work—and don’t work. Like beloved family members, pickups have their faults. But as anyone associated with Fluence will tell you, this is not a story focused on bashing traditional pickups. Rather, it’s a love story about preserving the best qualities of great pickups without their associated problems, and at a reasonable cost.
Layers of printed coils awaiting magnets. The small rings are “vias” that electrically connect the layers.
A bit of pickup history: In the early 1930s, George Beauchamp applied for a patent on an odd looking guitar-like instrument that included a “pickup.” (The patent uses the variations “pickup,” “pick–up” and “pick up” interchangeably.) His invention was the now-famous Rickenbacker “Frying Pan,” which hosted the first guitar pickup. (To acquire the patent, Adolph Rickenbacker had to send Hawaiian guitarist Sol Hoopii to Washington to demonstrate Beauchamp’s invention, proving to U.S. Patent Office examiners that it worked.)
While there have been thousands of pickup variations and refinements over the last 80 years, most of today’s magnetic guitar pickups aren’t all that different from Beauchamp’s invention. In a conventional pickup, a continuous length of copper wire is wound thousands of times around a bobbin or coil former, surrounding the magnet or magnets. (The wire doesn’t short itself out because the copper strand is coated with a thin layer of insulating material.)
Fluence, however, is based on the notion that coils can be applied rather than wound. Like traces on a circuit board, concentric spirals of “coil” can be printed. Picture, for example, a racetrack- shaped printed circuit board the size of a Stratocaster pickup, with an opening in its center reserved for magnets. One board can hold one spiral, and because it’s printed, each copy is perfectly consistent. The next step involves stacking multiple layers of printed coils and interconnecting them until “pickup” ability is reached. It’s a technique used in the aerospace and telecommunications industries, though it’s never been applied to guitars.
Fishman uses a “shuttle” system to swap pickups instantly.
Perfect Copies
The team had many variables to experiment with: the thickness of each trace, the number of windings, the number and thickness of the layers. But the variables were all controllable—and perfectly reproducible.
Here’s what they came up with after untold iterations: Stack 48 layers on top of each other, add a spacer to provide a gap, and stack another 48 layers below, but with reversed coil direction to cancel hum. Perfectly matched halves perfectly cancel hum. The gap prevents unwanted communication between the upper and lower stacks.
A critical but elusive consideration was the flux properties of the magnets. That’s where Fishman’s Ching-Yu Lin, Ph.D., came in. Lin knew little about guitars before joining Fishman several years ago, but much about acoustic engineering. He set about measuring and visually mapping the magnetic properties of the best-sounding pickups.
Pickups, as you probably know, employ magnets of different materials (alnico 2, alnico 5, ceramic, etc.) and different shapes (bar magnets in humbuckers, magnetic pole pieces in most Fender pickups, and so forth). But the magnets themselves can vary from batch to batch, and sometimes the attractive qualities of a particular pickups result from environmental changes to the magnets after the pickups were manufactured.
Lin set about measuring and visually mapping the magnetic properties of the best-sounding pickups the team could find. The magnetic fields of different pickups produce distinct magnetic maps, so Lin created 3-D visualizations of the fields in order to study each pickup’s unique magnetic fingerprint and create a tangible “magnet goal.”
How to control the variations in the magnets’ properties? Supercharge the magnets, and then de-magnetize them in a controlled way.
From Notes to Voltage
A science class refresher on how a pickup turns guitar playing into voltage: The vibrating metal string excites the pickup’s magnetic field, which causes a matching vibrating current in the copper coil. To make this happen, of course, the string must be within the area of magnetic pull. But the fact that the string is within the magnetic field also affects the eddy currents causing the pull, as well as the vibration of the string itself. The interactions can become far more complex than you might suppose.From Flat to Flavorful
The magnetic properties of a pickup aren’t simply matters of tone and frequency. The interaction between the vibrating string and the magnetic field greatly affects the physical dynamics. The Fluence team’s goal was to also replicate the physical string-and-magnet interaction, informed by Lin’s magnet maps.
Simply positioning magnets in the center of those printed circuit racetracks yields a perfectly flat-sounding pickup. That’s not a tone most players seek, but it’s a perfect platform for replicating the character of different pickups.
With traditional pickups, changing one parameter alters others. For example, adding additional winds increases output and lows, but sacrifices highs. Take Strat pickups: A vintage ’54 pickup has more sparkle than a modern, overwound “Texas”-style pickup with its fatter, more bottom-heavy sound. The new technology permits designers to address those variables with less hard-to-control interactivity.
By starting with a perfectly flat pickup, and then filtering some frequencies while boosting others, the team can “image” the sound of various pickups, tweaking as they see fit. For instance, they can match a hot output of the overwound Strat pickup without sacrificing the high end of the vintage model.
Selectively altering a pickup’s frequency response is old news at Fishman—they’ve done it countless times with their under-saddle piezo pickups. But an exciting new wrinkle of Fluence technology is the possibility of combining multiple profiles in a single pickup. Instead of having to choose between vintage and modern Strat pickups, for example, players could access a switch allowing them to change profiles on the fly. The switch can reside on a standard push/pull pot, so both pickup and pot can be added as a completely reversible modification to most guitars.
Once the printed coils are assembled and the magnets matched, the preamp filters and boosts the signal
to match the curves shown here.
Fluence Benefits
Perfectly consistent and reproducible “printed” coils. A way to replicate the pull of the magnets based on ideal pickups. Accurate and consistent ways to control frequency response. The ability to choose between multiple pickup profiles. It’s impressive—but there’s more.
As mentioned, hum has been eliminated, even from single-coil pickups. The usual method of creating hum-free single-coil pickups—“stacking” two coils—inevitably causes high-end loss. But Fluence can eliminate hum while retaining the original single-coil sound, thanks to filtering and boosting within the preamp.
There are other advantages: A guitar’s volume control and the instrument cable can attenuate high-end frequencies. (In fact, draw a schematic showing a pickup, a volume control, and an instrument cable, and you have a perfect diagram of a tone control.) The instrument cable carries a capacitance—the longer the cable, the higher the capacitance and the greater the high-end loss. That’s not a problem with Fluence, because the pickup connects to a preamp, which acts as a buffer. Tone-wise, what you hear with the volume set to 10 is the same as what you hear when it’s dialed down to 2, only louder. A 10-foot cable sounds identical to a 100-foot cable. Want to use a 100-foot cable with your guitar volume set at 2? No problem.
Ching-Yu’s magnetic “fingerprint” of a particularly great-sounding hot Texas-style Strat pickup. The magnetic pull affects not the just the tone, but the physical dynamics of the string/magnet interaction.
Better Batteries
So it all sounds promising, right? Well, there’s one potential issue: To replicate the sounds of various pickups, Fluence requires a preamp for filtering and gain. And preamps require batteries.
The Fluence team was well aware that most guitarists prefer passive pickups (including all the team members). A battery can be a deal breaker for many players.
The team concluded that the things guitarists dislike most about batteries are their brief lifespans, the hassle and cost of changing them, and the need to carry spares. Their solution was to make the Fluence battery rechargeable via a standard mini-USB plug. The battery runs for 250 hours on a single two-and-a-half hour charge. Unplugging the instrument cable turns Fluence off, conserving juice. (The “off” feature means you may have to replace your existing output jack with a stereo jack.) With a 250-hour charge, you could forget to unplug your guitar, go away for a week, and still have three continuous days of non-stop playing before recharging.
This is what Ritchie Fliegler, Larry Fishman, and the rest of the team are especially excited about.
Fluence: The First Generation
Fluence pickups, single-coil and humbucker versions.
Fishman will unveil its Fluence pickup line at the 2014 Winter NAMM show. There are five initial models, each capable of two contrasting sound images:
· Strat-sized (single width): Voice 1 = vintage single-coil. Voice 2 = hot “Texas” single-coil.· Classic Humbucker (neck position): Voice 1 = vintage PAF. Voice 2 = clean, airy chime.
· Classic Humbucker (bridge position): Voice 1 = vintage PAF. Voice 2 = classic hot rod.
· Modern Humbucker Alnico (neck position): Voice 1 = modern active metal. Voice 2 = crisp, clean, and fluid.
· Modern Humbucker Ceramic (bridge position): Voice 1 = modern active metal. Voice 2 = classic hot rod.
A Fluence Test-Drive
I spent an afternoon auditioning the Fluence system. The Fishman team created modified guitars that allowed us to plug in different pickups from the back. (Using the same guitar means that tonal differences are strictly attributable to the pickups—a super-fun experiment in itself.)
We played single-coil and humbucker versions of the Fluence pickups using a Stratocaster and Les Paul, respectively, switching between classic Marshall and Fender amps. Rob Ketch at Fishman took charge first, putting the pickups through their paces. The guitars sounded absolutely great, and consistent at every volume setting.
My turn came next. I had a difficult time putting the guitars down, gushing over every note. Within minutes I was completely caught up in the enthusiasm. It was a tonal love-fest.
However, as Martin Mull once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” The next step will be for guitarists to audition Fluence pickups themselves. I’m looking forward to hearing their reactions, as is, of course, everyone on the Fishman team.
All members of the Fishman team emphasize that they are not rethinking the way pickups should sound, though they are reimagining the way pickups are manufactured in pursuit of that sound. “Our goal,” says Larry Fishman, “is to drive all amplifiers to happiness.”
Ritchie Fliegler admitted in our first conversation that he wouldn’t remove the original pickups from his ’54 Stratocaster anytime soon—that would be blasphemy! But he says he’s excited that many of us can get that sound in our guitars and reap additional sonic benefits—and then get back to making music.
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A rig meant to inspire! That’s Jerry Garcia with his Doug Irwin-built Tiger guitar, in front of his Twin Reverb + McIntosh + JBL amp rig.
Three decades after the final Grateful Dead performance, Jerry Garcia’s sound continues to cast a long shadow. Guitarists Jeff Mattson of Dark Star Orchestra, Tom Hamilton of JRAD, and Bella Rayne explain how they interpret Garcia’s legacy musically and with their gear.
“I met Jerry Garcia once, in 1992, at the bar at the Ritz Carlton in New York,” Dark Star Orchestra guitarist Jeff Mattson tells me over the phone. Nearly sixty-seven years old, Mattson is one of the longest-running members of the Grateful Dead tribute band scene, which encompasses hundreds of groups worldwide. The guitarist is old enough to have lived through most of the arc ofthe actual Grateful Dead’s career. As a young teen, he first absorbed their music by borrowing their seminal records, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, brand new then, from his local library to spin on his turntable. Around that same moment, he started studying jazz guitar. Between 1973 and 1995, Mattson saw the Dead play live hundreds of times, formed the landmark jam bandZen Tricksters, and later stepped into theJerry Garcia lead guitarist role with the Dark Star Orchestra (DSO), one of the leading Dead tribute acts.
“At the bar, I didn’t even tellGarcia I was a guitar player,” Mattson explains. “I had just heard him play the new song ‘Days Between’ and I told him how excited I was by it, and he told me he was excited too. It wasn’t that long of a conversation, but I got to shake his hand and tell him how much his music meant to me. It’s a very sweet memory.”
The Grateful Dead’s final studio album was 1989’sBuilt to Last, and that title was prophetic. From 1965 to 1995, the band combined psychedelic rock with folk, blues, country, jazz, and even touches of prog rock and funk, placing a premium on improvisation and pushing into their own unique musical spaces. Along the way, they earned a reputation that placed them among the greatest American bands in rock ’n’ roll history—to many, the ultimate. Although no one member was more important than another, the heart and soul of the ensemble was Garcia. After his death in 1995, the surviving members retired the name the Grateful Dead.
“I think Jerry Garcia was the most creative guitarist of the 20th century because he had the widest ears and the sharpest instincts,” opines historian, author, and official Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally, over the phone. “What we see after his death are the Deadheads coming to terms with his passing but indicating that it’s the music that was most important to them. And who plays the music now becomes simply a matter of taste.”
Dark Star Orchestra guitarist Jeff Mattson, seen here with Garcia’s Alligator Stratocaster (yes, the real one).
Photo by Susana Millman
This year marks 30 years since Garcia’s passing and 60 years since the band formed in the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, the guitarist’s musical vocabulary and unique, personal tone manifests in new generations of players. Perhaps the most visible of these musicians is John Mayer, anointed as Garcia’s “replacement” in Dead and Co. But dozens of others, like Mattson, Tom Hamilton Jr., and a young new artist named Bella Rayne, strive to keep the Dead alive.
The first few Grateful Dead tribute bands began emerging in local dive bars by the late ’70s. More than mere cover bands, these groups devoted themselves entirely to playing the Dead. A few of these early groups eventually toured the country, playing in college towns, ski resorts, and small theatres across the United States. Mattson started one on Long Island, New York. He tells me, “The first band I was in that played exclusively Grateful Dead was Wild Oats. It was 1977, and we played local bars. Then, in 1979, I joined a band called the Volunteers. We also played almost exclusively the Grateful Dead, and that was a much more professional outfit—we had a good PA and lights and a truck, the whole nine yards.” The Volunteers eventually morphed into the Zen Tricksters.
Garcia’s death turbocharged the Dead tribute band landscape. Fanbases grew, and some bands reached the point where big-time agents booked them into blue-chip venues like Red Rocks and the Beacon Theatre. Summer festivals devoted to these bands evolved.
“The first band I was in that played exclusively Grateful Dead was Wild Oats. It was 1977, and we played local bars.” —Jeff Mattson
Dark Star Orchestra launched in 1997, and they do something particular, taking an individual show from somewhere out of Grateful Dead history and recreating that evening’s setlist. It’s musically and sonically challenging. They try to use era-specific gear, so on any given night, they may be playing through recreations of the Grateful Dead’s backline from 1971 or 1981, for example. It all depends on the show they choose to present. Mattson joined DSO as its lead guitar player in 2009.
Something else significant happened after Jerry died: The remaining living members of the Grateful Dead and other musicians from Garcia’s inner circle embraced the tribute scene, inviting musicians steeped in their music to step up and sit in with them. For Mattson, it’s meant playing over the years with all the core members of the band, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart, plus former members Donna Jean Godchaux, who sang in the band from 1971 to 1979, and Tom Constanten, who played keyboards with the Dead from 1968 to 1970.
Tom Hamilton’s Lotto custom built had a Doug Irwin-inspired upper horn.
In the newest post-Garcia tribute bands, many guitar players aren’t old enough to have seen Garcia perform live—or if they did, it was towards the end of his life and career. One of those guys sitting today at the top of the Garcia pyramid, along with Mattson, is Tom Hamilton Jr. Growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, Hamilton saw Garcia play live only three times. Early on, he was influenced by Stevie Ray Vaughan, but Hamilton’s older brother, who was also a guitar player, loved the Dead and Garcia. “My brother wanted to play like Jerry,” he recalls, “so he roped me in because he needed me to play ‘Bob Weir’ and be his rhythm guitar sidekick.” Eventually, Hamilton leaned more into the Jerry role himself. “Then I spent my entire twenties trying to develop my own voice as a songwriter and as a guitar player. And I did,” Hamilton says. “And during that time, I met Joe Russo. He was not so much into the Dead then, but he knew I was.”
A drummer from Brooklyn, by about 2006, Russo found himself collaborating on projects with members of Phish and Ween. That put him on the radar of Lesh and Weir, who invited Russo to be a part of their post-Dead project Furthur in 2009. (And on guitar, they chose DSO founding member John Kadlecik, opening that role up for Mattson.)
“When Joe played in Furthur, he got under the hood of the Grateful Dead’s music and started to understand how special it was,” Hamilton points out. “After Furthur wound down, we decided to form JRAD. We weren’t trying to do something academic, not some note-for-note recreation. We were coming at it through the pure joy of the songs, and the fact that the five of us in JRAD were improvisers ourselves.”
“We were coming at it through the pure joy of the songs, and the fact that the five of us in JRAD were improvisers ourselves.” —Tom Hamilton Jr.
Today, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (JRAD) is considered to be one of the premier Grateful Dead tribute bands. They formed in 2013, with Hamilton and Scott Metzger as the band’s guitar frontline, with Hamilton handling Garcia’s vocal roles. Eventually, Hamilton, too, found himself jamming onstage with the ever-evolving Phil Lesh and Friends. That, of course, further enmeshed him in the scene, and in 2015, he started a band with Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann calledBilly and the Kids.
Now, there’s a new kid on the block, literally. Bella Rayne recently turned 18 and grew up in Mendocino, California. Her parents were into the Dead, but even they were too young to have really followed the original band around the country. At her age, they were big into Phish. By the pandemic, Bella started embracing the guitar out of boredom, woodshedding while social distancing in quarantine. She explains, “Like any other teen, I was bored out of my mind looking for anything to do.” Rummaging through her garage, she came across her mom’s old Strat. “At the time, I was really into ’90s Seattle grunge. I put new strings on the Strat, and then I tried to teach myself Pearl Jam songs, and I learned how to play them by watching YouTube videos. Then, I started posting videos of my journey online as I became more serious about it. I hit a point where I knew it would be my thing. The next thing I knew, one of the Bay Area Dead bands [China Dolls] reached out to me and asked me to sit in. I thought, ‘no way.’“My parents are huge Deadheads,” she continues. “That’s theirthing. I grew up with the Dead being pushed on me my whole life. But I ended up going, and it’s just been this awesome spiral ever since.” Bella calls her current Dead-related project Bella Rayne and Friends, and she, too, has been recognized not only by the new generation of Garcia players in the Dead tribute bands, but also by Melvin Seals, the Hammond organist who played for years in theJerry Garcia Band. “I was hired to just sit-in for a couple of numbers withMelvin and his JGB band,” she recalls, “and we were having so much fun he said to me, ‘Why don’t you just sit in for the whole second set.’ It was an amazing night.”Bella Rayne with her Alligator-inspired Strat, with a JGB Cats Under the Starssticker on the body.
Photo by Sean Reiter
Jerry Garcia played many different guitars. But for those guitarists wanting to emulate Garcia’s tone, the focus is on four instruments in particular. One is a1955 Fender Stratocaster known as “Alligator,” which Garcia had heavily modified and began playing in 1971. The other three guitars were hand built in Northern California by luthier Doug Irwin: Wolf, Tiger, and Rosebud. Garcia introduced them in 1973, 1979, and 1989, respectively. Sometimes, in a jam-band version of being knighted by the Excalibur sword, a chosen member of this next generation of Dead players is handed one of Garcia’s personal guitars to play onstage for a few songs or even an entire set.
Although they started their journeys at different times and in separate ways, Mattson, Hamilton, and Rayne all have “knighthood” in common. Rayne remembers, “In March of 2024, I was sitting in one night with anall-girl Dead tribute band called the China Dolls, and no one had told me that Jerry’s actual 1955 Strat, Alligator, was there that evening. My friend [roots musician] Alex Jordan handed me the guitar unannounced. It’s something I’ll never forget.”What’s it like to strap on one of Jerry Garcia’s iconic instruments? Tom Hamilton recalls, “It wasRed Rocks in 2017, and I played with Bob Weir, Melvin Seals, and JGB at a tribute show for Jerry’s 75th birthday. I got to play both Wolf and Tiger that night. I was in my head with it for about one song, but then you sort of have a job to do. But I do recall that we were playing the song ‘Deal.’ I have a [DigiTech] Whammy pedal that has a two-octave pitch raise on it, real high gain that gives me a lot of sustain, and it’s a trick I use that really peaks a jam. That night, while I am doing it, I had the thought of, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I am doing this trick of mine on Garcia’s guitar.’ Jerry would have thought what I was doing was the greatest thing in the world or the absolute worst, but either way, I’m cool with it!”
“I was sitting in one night with an all-girl Dead tribute band called the China Dolls, and no one had told me that Jerry’s actual 1955 Strat, Alligator, was there that evening. My friend [roots musician] Alex Jordan handed me the guitar unannounced. It’s something I’ll never forget.” —Bella Rayne
Jeff Mattson has played Alligator, Wolf, Garcia’s Travis Bean 500, and his Martin D-28. He sums it up this way: “I used to have posters up in my childhood bedroom of Garcia playing his Alligator guitar. I would stare at those images all the time. And sowhen I got a chance to play it and plug it in, suddenly there were those distinctive tones. Those guitars of his all have a certain mojo. It’s so great to play those guitars that you have to stop in the moment and remind yourself to take a mental picture, so it doesn’t just fly by. It’s just a tremendous pleasure and an honor. I never imagined I would get to play four of Jerry Garcia’s guitars.”
With young people like Bella Rayne dedicating herself at the tender age of 18 to keeping the Dead’s music going, it feels like what the band called their “long strange trip” will keep rolling down the tracks and far over the horizon. “People will be listening to the Grateful Dead in one hundred years the same way they will be listening to John Coltrane, too,” predicts McNally. “Improvisational music is like jumping off a cliff. Sometimes you fly, and sometimes you land on the rocks. When you take that risk, there’s an opportunity for magic to happen. And that will always appeal to a certain segment of people who don’t want predictability in the music they listen to. The Grateful Dead is for people who want complete craziness in their music—sometimes leading to disaster and oftentimes leading to something wonderful. It’s music for people who want to be surprised.”
Taylor Guitars, one of the world’s leading acoustic guitar brands, has teamed up with Sony Pictures Consumer Products and HBO®to unveil a replica of the acoustic guitar featured in the award-winning HBO Original series The Last of Us, which is now streaming its second season on Max. This collaboration brings fans and musicians alike an exact replica of the guitar Joel gives Ellie in the critically acclaimed show.
Taylor’s The Last of Us Replica 314c guitar is based on its best-selling 300 Series and features Taylor’s most popular body style, the Grand Auditorium. Crafted with Taylor’s hallmark playability, pro-level sound and refined workmanship, the guitar showcases a visual aesthetic that matches the guitar featured in the series.
For fans of the show, the guitar’s most recognizable design element is a custom moth inlay at the third fret. The guitar also features a Tobacco Sunburst top finish and grained ivoroid accents, along with a satin-finish body and neck, creating a vintage, well-worn aesthetic that fits seamlessly into the gritty post-pandemic world Joel and Ellie inhabit.
This acoustic-only model features a solid Sitka spruce top and solid sapele back and sides, delivering a clear, warm, balanced voice with appealing midrange presence — an ideal sonic tool for storytelling through song. Additional appointments include grained ivoroid body binding, grained ivoroid fretboard inlays that include the moth and large dot position markers, and a custom double-ring rosette also in grained ivoroid. The Grand Auditorium body features a Venetian cutaway for easy access to upper-register notes. Each guitar comes with a Taylor-built deluxe hardshell case to ensure safe transport, whether across the country or across the quarantine zone.
Built for the Journey Ahead
“The Last of Us is a story of resilience, connection and finding beauty amid harsh realities — themes that resonate with the emotional expression a Taylor guitar offers players,” says Tim O’Brien, Vice President of Marketing at Taylor Guitars. “We’re honored to collaborate with HBO and Sony Pictures Consumer Products to bring this iconic instrument to fans and players alike.”
Availability and Ordering
The Taylor x The Last of Us Replica guitar is available for purchase now via TaylorGuitars.comand select authorized Taylor dealers. Orders are built on demand in Taylor’s Southern California factory, with an expected delivery time of 6–10 weeks. Due to the nature of this release, quantities are limited.
Whether you’re a musician, collector or a devoted fan of the series, this guitar offers a one-of-a kind connection to the legacy of Joel, Ellie and the enduring spirit of survival.
At its core is GTRS’ upgraded G151 intelligent system, offering 128 onboard effects, MNRS amp and cab sims, and even 17 guitar emulations—exclusive to this model. Everything is controlled via the eye-catching Super Knob, which changes color to match your preset, as well as through the Bluetooth-connectible GTRS app.
GTRS’ W902 features select tonewoods and construction: an alder body, poplar burl top, and a sleek bolt-on 5-piece neck made from roasted flame maple and rosewood, with satin natural finish and a rosewood fingerboard. The fanned fret design features 24 white copper frets and a stainless zero fret. A pair of GTRS Alnico V pickups and an HL-II bridge deliver a resonant tone, made particularly versatile thanks to the 5-way tone switch and tone knob.
The W902 offers a truly innovative choice for tech-savvy guitarists. Its features include a wireless transmitter, OTG recording, an 80-second looper, metronomes, and a drum machine, the app-supported guitar boasts up to 12 hours of playtime on a single charge (9 hours with the wireless transmitter in use).
The W902 is an upgraded version of the original W900 Intelligent Guitar, and the W902 most notably features an upgraded GTRS Intelligent Processor System, the G151, which even offers upgrades over the GTRS SL810's recently announced G150 system. The G151 system comes with a staggering 128 effects pre-installed, along with 10 of both MOOER's in-house MNRS amp and cabinet simulation profiles. Exclusive to the W902, the G151 system even includes 17 guitar simulation effects, allowing guitarists to emulate the tonal resonance of some of their favorite guitars.
To activate and browse through presets within the G151 system, which can be connected via Bluetooth 5.0, guitarists can use the guitar's Super Knob, which lights up in different LED colors depending on which preset is activated. Of course, users are able to get stuck into and edit the effects chains of presets through the GTRS app, enabling them to craft their own favorites through their mobile device. The guitar still functions without the G151 system; the Super Knob just needs to be turned off, and the W902 is usable as a regular electric guitar.
Within the GTRS app, there is even an 80-second looper, 10 metronomes, and 40 drum machine grooves built in, providing users with an all-in-one suite for guitar practice and composition. This is especially the case when combined with the W902's OTG-recording support, enabling on-the-go recording without the need for a hardware recording setup.
The W902 comes bundled with a GTRS Deluxe gig bag, three guitar wrenches, a USB 3.0 cable for charging, and a user manual. The guitar even contains a wireless transmitter and an integrated 4000mAh Li-ion battery, providing up to 12 hours of continuous use (9 hours with the transmitter in use), allowing users to enjoy the G151 system through headphones or an amplifier.
Guitarists who want to experiment further with the W902’s technology can connect the intelligent system to the GTRS GWF4 wireless footswitch, which is ideal for switching between presets in live scenarios when control through a mobile device isn't practical.
GTRS W902 Guitar construction features:
- Alder Body, 5-Piece Selected Roasted Flame Maple and Rosewood Neck with Satin Natural Finish (C-Shape)
- Bolt-on neck, 25-1/2" scale length, with dual action steel truss rod
- Rosewood fingerboard, 12” radius, 24 white copper (0 fret stainless) fanned frets
- Built-in wireless transmitter
- Super Knob, Volume Control Knob, and Tone Knob, 3-way tone-selection switch
- GLB-P1 Li-ion Battery (4000mAh, up to 12 hours of continuous use, 9 hours with the wireless transmitter in use)
- USB port for charging and OTG recording
- GTRS Deluxe gig bag, 3 guitar wrenches
GTRS G151 Intelligent Guitar System features:
- GTRS G151 Intelligent Processing System (and GTRS App)
- 128 effects, 10 MNRS amp (GNR) and cabinet (GIR) simulation models
- 17 guitar simulations
- 80-second looper, 40 drum machine grooves, 10 metronomes
- Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity
- GTRS GWF4 wireless footswitch support (sold separately)
The GTRS W902 is now available worldwide. For more information visit www.gtrs.tech.
Detail of Ted’s 1997 National resonator tricone.
What instruments should you bring to an acoustic performance? These days, with sonic innovations and the shifting definition of just what an acoustic performance is, anything goes.
I believe it was Shakespeare who wrote: “To unplug, or not to unplug, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of acoustic purists, or to take thy electric guitar in hand to navigate the sea of solo performing.”
Four-hundred-and-twenty-four years later, many of us still sometimes face the dilemma of good William when it comes to playing solo gigs. In a stripped-down setting, where it’s just us and our songs, do we opt to play an acoustic instrument, which might seem more fitting—or at least more common, in the folksinger/troubadour tradition—or do we bring a comfy electric for accompaniment?
For me, and likely many of you, it depends. If I’m playing one or two songs in a coffeehouse-like atmosphere, I’m likely to bring an acoustic. But if I’m doing a quick solo pop up, say, as a buffer between bands in a rock room, I’m bringing my electric. And when I’m doing a solo concert, where I’ll be stretching out for at least an hour, it’s a hybrid rig. I’ll bring my battered old Guild D25C, a National tricone resonator, and my faithful Zuzu electric with coil-splitting, and likely my gig pedalboard, or at least a digital delay. And each guitar is in a different tuning. Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts motto states. (For the record, I never made it past Webelos.)
My point is, the definition of the “acoustic” or “coffeehouse” performance has changed. Sure, there are still a few Alan Lomax types out there who will complain that an electric guitar or band is too loud, but they are the last vestiges of the folk police. And, well, acoustic guitar amplification is so good these days that I’ve been at shows where each strum of a flattop box has threatened to take my head off. My band Coyote Motel even plays Nashville’s hallowed songwriter room the Bluebird Café as a fully electric five-piece. What’s key, besides a smart, flexible sound engineer, is controlling volume, and with a Cali76 compressor or an MXR Duke of Tone, I can get the drive and sustain I need at a low level.
“My point is, the definition of the ‘acoustic’ or ‘coffeehouse’ performance has changed.”
So, today I think the instruments that are right for “acoustic” gigs are whatever makes you happiest. Left to my own devices, I like my Guild for songs that have a strong basis in folk or country writing, my National for blues and slide, and my electric for whenever I feel like adding a little sonic sauce or showing off a bit, since I have a fluid fingerpicking hand that can add some flash to accompaniment and solos. It’s really a matter of what instrument or instruments make you most comfortable because we should all be happy and comfortable onstage—whether that stage is in an arena or theater, a club or coffeehouse, or a church basement.
At this point, with instruments like Fender’s Acoustasonic line, or piezo-equipped models from Godin, PRS, and others, and the innovative L.R. Baggs AEG-1, it’s worth considering just what exactly makes a guitar acoustic. Is it sound? In which case there’s a wide-open playing field. Or is it a variation on the classic open-bodied instrument that uses a soundhole to move air? And if we arrive at the same end, do the means matter? There is excellent craftsmanship available today throughout the entire guitar spectrum, including foreign-built models, so maybe we can finally put the concerns of Shakespeare to rest and accept that “acoustic” has simply come to mean “low volume.”
Another reason I’m thinking out loud about this is because this is our annual acoustic issue. And so we’re featuring Jason Isbell, on the heels of his solo acoustic album, a piece on how acoustic guitars do their work authored by none other than Lloyd Baggs, and Andy Fairweather Low, whose new solo album—and illustrious career—includes exceptional acoustic performances. If you’re not familiar with his work, and you are, even if you don’t know it, he was the gent sitting next to Clapton for the historic 1992 Unplugged concert—and lots more. There are also reviews of new instruments from Taylor, Martin, and Godin that fit the classic acoustic profile, so dig in, and to heck with the slings and arrows!