I've kept a keen eye on affordable wireless systems since the late ’90s, when I first decided to go cable-free. The latest entry is Fishman’s look-ma-no-cables debut, the AirLock Wireless GT. It’s an appealing and compact system. There’s a 3.5" x 2.5" receiver that plugs directly into a pedalboard or amp and a 3" x 2" transmitter that plugs into your guitar jack, so size-wise it’s comparable to Line 6’s G30. Like that device, it also has cable tone settings, with positions that replicate the effect the capacitance of 3-meter, 5-meter, and 10-meter cables have on a guitar’s sound.
The kit comes in an 8" x 5" x 3" molded carrying case that includes a Y charging cable to juice up the transmitter and receiver via a single USB out, and a USB data cable. A 5-minute charge gets you two hours of playing time, but a full charge can last for 9 to 10 hours, according to Fishman. There is also a USB power supply that's sold separately, plus the GT can take a barrel pin connector for more permanent pedalboard installs. That’s a lot of options for power.
The transmitter also has a switch to combat frequency interference, with low, medium, and high settings. The higher each setting goes, the higher the latency, but, again according to Fishman, the maximum latency is only 4.9ms, which is, essentially, undiscernible. I certainly could not detect any while I played.
Firing up the AirLock Wireless GT was effortless. The devices are pre-paired and connected instantly every time. The transmitter and receiver also felt very secure when plugged into the inputs of my guitar and my pedalboard, and both devices feature the sam articulating plug, so it’s easy to plug securely into a variety of input-jack styles.
True Tone
Where the AirLock really shines is fidelity, and the cable tone settings are a big part of this device’s overall sonic picture. I loved how sparkling and alive my guitar sounded with the cable tone set at 3 meters: harmonically rich and vibrant in a way my current wireless setup doesn't quite achieve. Honestly, I felt the Wireless GT’s interior circuitry improved my natural tone. With the setting at 5 meters, I heard some loss of high end more like what I’m used to in cost-efficient wireless units. But I also find the resulting darkness and midrange focus appealing, since I typically shoot for a warm, burnished, mid-focused sound. At 10 meters, there was a bit too much detail loss for my tastes, but as always with guitar tones, each individual player’s preferences will out.
The hitch for me was range. While Fishman promises 120 feet under what it refers to as “spin range” conditions (essentially taking a spin around the venue while playing with a lot of energy) and promises that “line-of-sight” is not required, I experienced some dropouts walking just two rooms away from the receiver in my home. When I wandered outside the sound became intermittent at about 50 feet. Granted, there was a wall with a window and a door between me and the receiver, but I’ve gone well over 100 feet off stage in a club and outside into the street, with the signal sustained through a brick wall with glass windows and a door, with my current wireless, which falls in the same price range. Your results may vary.
The Verdict
While my experience with the AirLock Wireless GT’s range didn’t match Fishman’s testimonial, the unit’s price, sound quality, ease of use, and small size is wildly appealing, and I would not hesitate to use it on a large stage or in a space where line of sight is not an issue. As a result, I would urge guitarists looking to play untethered take it for a literal spin themselves.
PG contributor Tom Butwin dives into five clever, gig-ready tuner options—some you’ve seen, and at least one you haven’t. From strobe accuracy to metronome mashups and strap-mounted stealth, these tools might just make tuning fun again.
KORG Pitchstrap is the world’s first strap-mounted tuner and features a state-of-the-art technology that allows the tuner to detect the pitch of the guitar or bass from the strap’s vibrations.
The StroboClip HDC features a high-definition, color backlight display, rechargeable battery and over 65 Sweetened Tunings. With tuning accuracy of 0.1 cents, the StroboClip HDC is the ultimate clip-on tuner.
The latest Cherub Pix Tune (WST-915Li) offers 16 vibrant display modes, allowing users to customize their tuning experience to match their own styles. There are 5 meter styles, 3 animal cartoon styles, 2 sports styles, and 6 user customizable styles. You can conveniently upload your boot-up animation and tuning display pictures through the accompanying APPs. With its engaging visuals, tuning has never been this enjoyable!
The Taylor Beacon combines a tuner, metronome, timer, and flashlight in one compact device, offering five tuning modes, 12 time signatures, and up to 100 minutes of practice timer.
This year PG landed some elsuive white whales (TOOL, Pantera & Jack White), revisited some revamped setups (Jason Isbell, Foo Fighters & Kingfish), and got introduced to some unusual gear (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Plus, the hosts share their favorite moments from the last 52 episodes before dropping a few coins into the wishing well for 2025 Rundown guests.
The legendary punk band are in the middle of an enormous multi-anniversary tour, celebrating both Dookie and American Idiot. Check out how bassist Mike Dirnt and guitarist Jason White tuned their road rigs to cover decades of sounds.
PG contributor Tom Butwin details RAB Audio GSRS – a studio racking system purpose-built for guitarists looking to declutter, customize, and elevate their creative space. Whether you’re a pedal enthusiast or amp collector, RAB Audio has a solution for your recording setup.
Matt Sweeney (far left) knew that if he got his friends Stephen Malkmus (second from left), Emmett Kelly (second from right), and Jim White (far right) in a casual recording environment, the four of them could make something awesome together.
The two musicians and songwriters have been part of the same cohort since Malkmus’ band Pavement took off in the early 1990s. Pavement went the way of indie-rock royalty, defining an entire new generation of slightly left-of-center guitar music. Sweeney slugged it out for years inbands like Chavez and Zwan, that never reached those levels of influence. Still, he was an indispensable sideman and in-demand collaborator. But it wasn’t until just before the pandemic that the two friends recorded together, on Malkmus’ solo acoustic record, Traditional Techniques. It went well—really well.
So when Sweeney suggested they get together again, Malkmus was game. But this time, Sweeney invited some friends. He knew the guitarist Emmett Kelly from their time playing with Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and the two developed a bond over a mutual aesthetic sensibility on the guitar. And Kelly played in a duo called the Double with drummer Jim White, another serial collaborator best known for his instrumental Australian group Dirty Three. So, White and Kelly got invites. (It turned out that Malkmus was a fan of Kelly’s lo-fi weirdo-folk project Cairo Gang.)
The Hard Quartet - "Earth Hater" Official Music Video
They all met up at Strange Weather, a Brooklyn studio where Sweeney was working. The studio was on its deathbed: The buildings on either side of it had been demolished, and it was slated for the same fate to prep the way for a new condo build. The owner and house engineer, Daniel Schlett, was depressed. Sweeney figured some fun, no-stakes sessions—committed to the studio’s original vision of total artistic freakness—were called for. “The idea was like, ‘Let’s go and try recording, everybody bring songs and we’ll see what happens, and if it sucks, we don’t care because it’ll just be a nice thing to do in this beautiful studio that’s going away,’” he explains.
When the foursome initially met at Strange Weather in early summer 2023, there were no plans and no expectations. Over a year later, we have the Hard Quartet and their self-titled debut record, an epic, 15-song double LP that captures the spirit of adventure, imagination, and unedited, base instinct that unites the four musicians. When time came to pick a name for the project, Malkmus suggested they use the word “band” or “quartet.” “Matt was just immediately like, ‘Hard Quartet, because we’re hard as fuck,’” laughs Kelly.
“Finding phrases that make it sound not boring is the basic idea: simple things with twists.” —Stephen Malkmus
Sweeney’s boldness, in both the band name and in pulling all the players together, is perhaps the key to all of this. “Matt’s always confident, or at least he likes to pretend he is, in a good way,” says Malkmus. “He knows that’s how music should be sometimes. Most people that make music actually are confident or they wouldn’t do it. They like their own music and they’re confident it’s good, and then they have to kind of act. They’re also needful and worried that people won’t like it, and want people to like it but also think that it’s good.”
The Hard Quartet is heavily indebted to ’90s indie and alternative rock, but the 15-track double LP dips into Americana, country, and weirder territories, too.
Maybe Sweeney was being tongue-in-cheek, but more likely, it’s just the honesty of a group of musicians who can’t be bothered to affect an air of deep reasoning or artsy symbolism. Though, Hard Quartet isn’t terribly hard music. It moseys through different guitar-based genres, most of it fairly lo-fi and garage-ish. There’s plenty of Pavement-leaning indie-rock, charged with clever wordplay, edge-of-breakup chording, and general slacker charisma. There’s a certain Guided by Voices sensibility to it all, too; the feeling that guitar rock doesn’t need to be perfect or cohesive or together to be good.
Songs on Hard Quartet shamble along loosely between movements and moods, and often, they sort of dogleg and fall apart after wanky outros, just like the end of an in-person jam. Opener “Chrome Mess” is a thrashing, dark, noisy piece of indie-grunge, followed by the quirky, fuzzy alternative of lead single “Earth Hater” and its nursery-rhyme chorus. “Rio’s Song” is like a gentler, college-rock rendition of T. Rex, featuring Sweeney pulling off a Marc Bolan vocal character. Another Sweeney-led joint, “Killed by Death,” is driven by White’s snare-roll shuffle and plucky Americana guitars. The back-to-back of “Six Deaf Rats” into “Action for Military Boys,” both with Malkmus on lead vocals, pull the record into more borderless, atypical grounds. Hard Quartet feels deeply, profoundly artistic not in production or complexity, but via a feeling of total artistic freedom and intuition.
“It’s not magic, it’s actually just work and saying, ‘Do it again.’” —Stephen Malkmus
“When you’re doing a first thing, it’s not so bad to go simple,” says Malkmus. “Like, you know, to have these adherents of the Velvet Underground and the Stones. These songs are like, I wouldn’t say simple, they’re complexly simple to give us some credit.”
Malkmus has been watching a YouTuber who switches between two chords on piano while playing nearly limitless inversions of each chord. “He takes the mystery away from things that I do that I think are really clever or something,” he continues. “At any rate, that’s what we’re doing too. But pianos somehow have less magic because you can’t bend the notes too much. It’s all math, almost. Of course there’s feel and there’s going off the grid, but with the guitar sometimes it feels more magical. Those real simple little moves you make with the bending of the strings. It’s chops and it’s also ideas, creativity. Finding phrases that make it sound not boring is the basic idea: Simple things with twists.”
Stephen Malkmus's Gear
Stephen Malkmus, performing here with his band the Jicks in 2018, has known Matt Sweeney since the beginning of Pavement. After he invited Sweeney to play on his 2020 acoustic record, Sweeney had the idea to take things a step further.
Malkmus likes to dig around for different voicings, but he prefers to do his digging by feel. “What you don’t know is a good thing,” he says. “Too much knowledge, I think it can hurt you at that early time instead of just being sort of primitive.”
The four members of Hard Quartet share a “musical language,” according to Malkmus, which made it easy to create without much structure to their initial sessions at Strange Weather. “I don’t think any of us wanted to spend the whole time saying, ‘It goes like this,’” says Malkmus. “We just kind of wanted to start messing around, having fun.”
“There’s a throughline in everything I like, that is this aspect of harshness, or bloodiness. Things need to be bloody for me to like them.” —Emmett Kelly
Part of the three guitarists’ shared language on the instrument is a passion for wonky sounds. Kelly explains the aesthetic in-depth: “We really connect on things sounding like shit, kind of. I love the sound of the guitar when it sounds like it’s about to die or it’s broken. We love this music that’s like fucked up and damaged, like the rawest, most screwed-up thing. There’s a throughline in everything I like, that is this aspect of harshness, or bloodiness. Things need to be bloody for me to like them. We just want to sound fucked up and terrible, but it’s gotta sound really good, you know what I mean? You pass through this pain threshold, and that’s when you start to hear all these beautiful, weird harmonic things, especially with a damaged amp or a really insane overdrive or fuzz. You just start to hear aspects of harmonic series come shooting out in really interesting ways. Sometimes you’ll hear phantom notes, things that ring-modulate the sound a little bit.” One time in a studio, Kelly’s friend pointed out a pedal that he said was the least useful pedal of all time. “I immediately went home and bought one,” says Kelly. “I mean, none of this shit’s useful. Should we be plumbers?”
Matt Sweeney's Gear
Matt Sweeney and Emmett Kelly became close friends while on tour with Will Oldham. Here, they flank Oldham on a tour supporting 2022’s Superwolves.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
Guitars
1958 Martin 000-18, strung with flatwounds
Vintage Fender Esquire
Vintage Gibson ES-335TD
1970 Martin dreadnought acoustic
Amps
Austen Hooks Bell and Howell Filmosound amp
Effects
Blackstrap Electrik Co. fuzz pedal
Hard Quartet’s debut record is also shaped by the fact that none of the players brought their own gear to the studio; Malkmus, Kelly, and Sweeney all opted to use whatever guitars, amps, and pedals were kicking around at Strange Weather, and later at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, where Sweeney secured the group a few days of extra sessions. A late-’50s Fender Jazzmaster, ’60s Gibson Explorer, vintage Höfner Verithin, 1958 Martin 000-18, Squier Bass VI, and purple Guild S-100 were among the tools used to create Hard Quartet. Malkmus says he didn’t even want to bring his own guitars. “I like to use new shit all the time,” he says. “It’s just fun to hear the little tonal differences. I don’t really have a sound. I just want to try new things and I’m not afraid to do that. And we all know it’s in your hands.”
“I don’t even feel like it’s a guitar record, but obviously that’s all we fucking know how to play.” —Matt Sweeney
“I’ve gone through the whole gamut of identity crises with guitar and I’ve gotten to a point where I really just want something that won’t break if I check it on an airplane,” Kelly says. His main guitar is a 1988 Japan-made Fender Stratocaster, with the middle pickup removed and a TBX circuit instead of the traditional tone control. Kelly is skeptical of too much attention put on gear. “There’s a lot of artifice in music and gear and it all seems to be related to this whole kind of like, rehashing, redoing; sort of like the AI conversation,” he says. “It’s like, just play fucking music. It doesn’t matter.”
The three guitarists often played through one of Sweeney’s amps, built by amp tech Austen Hooks and housed inside an old Bell and Howell Filmosound projector. But it was mostly a matter of convenience—the amp was simply ready at hand. “I think me and Steve are similar in that when you’re making the thing, you’re not thinking about the gear,” says Sweeney. “You’re grateful that there’s stuff there that you can pick up and play.”
Emmett Kelly's Gear
Hard Quartet (from left: Kelly, Sweeney, Malkmus, and White) bonded over an affinity for deliciously crappy guitar tones. Their debut record is a treasure trove of lo-fi 6-string sounds.
Photo by Atiba Jefferson
Guitars and Basses
1988 Japan-made Fender Stratocaster with middle pickup removed and TBX tone circuit
Fender ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb with added master volume
Peavey Roadmaster with 2x12 cabinet
1950s Supro
Ampeg B12XT
Effects
Crowther Double Hotcake
Crowther Prunes & Custard
Death By Audio Octave Clang
Fredric Effects Verzerrer
Strings & Picks
La Bella Pure Vintage (.011–0.50)
La Bella Silk & Steel
La Bella Bass VI Stainless Flats
Given the players’ combined ethos, it’s not really a surprise to learn that they rarely, if ever, discussed who would play what instrument on any given song. Leads were improvised and swapped at random, and the bass guitar was passed around from song to song. Some songs and parts would come together quickly; others required massaging. Having to plug away at something doesn’t make it any less valuable than an instant hit, says Malkmus. “It’s not magic,” he says. “It’s actually just work and saying, ‘Do it again.’”
The equal-footing, collaborative nature of the Hard Quartet has been a bright spot for Kelly, who was getting burnt out on the emotional anxiety and tension of being a bandleader. With Malkmus, Sweeney, and White, there are combined decades of camaraderie that equate to an open, trusting ease. “It’s probably safe to say that the Hard Quartet is about the continual relationship between each two people,” says Kelly. “Everyone had a strong connection with each other in some way so that new relationships could then develop.”
In the end, Sweeney’s little jam experiment has paid off. “I’m happy with what we did on it guitar-wise, and that’s because we played together,” says Sweeney. “I don’t even feel like it’s a guitar record, but obviously that’s all we fucking know how to play.”
YouTube It
The Hard Quartet have a ’90s-style, apartment-stoop jam in this video for the Sweeney-fronted, alt-rock-meets-alt-country tune, “Rio’s Song.”
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