Breedlove’s new USA-made travel-sized companion guitar is taking center stage.
Small-bodied acoustic guitars inhabit a unique place in the world of 6-strings. For some, they are the secret weapon that gives their music a unique character. Unfortunately, other guitarists consider them starter guitars, toys, or a compromised design that is only good for travel. We firmly belong to the former category, believing these guitars can be as fine as any other acoustic-guitar body shape. Their usefulness as travel acoustics and beginner guitars is just one more reason to love them.
Lately, we’re happy to have seen a shift in guitarists' perspectives on these acoustics. It's not uncommon to see major artists toting their favorite small-bodied guitars on massive stages around the world. They don’t need a small guitar for convenience’s sake. They love the tone, which, due to their typically brighter sound, can sit exceptional well in live or studio mixes.
With that in mind, we wanted to take a deeper look at small-bodied acoustic guitars’ history, present, and future. We’ll discuss where they came from, who they’re suitable for, and why now is the perfect time for Breedlove to release high-end, small-bodied USA-made masterpieces, like the Premier Companion E Red Cedar-Brazilian LTD, alongside a collection of Custom Shop stunners.
The Small-Bodied Acoustic Guitar: A Quick History
There are a handful of genuinely iconic acoustic guitar body shapes, each famous for a different reason. The dreadnought offers an outstanding balance of power, low end, and clarity. Orchestra models are incredibly versatile. And it’s hard to beat a jumbo for rhythmic punch.
Those shapes deserve all the recognition they enjoy. But smaller shapes shouldn’t fall under the radar. Robert Johnson’s L-1 launched much of the blues—and therefore, much of modern, popular music—into mainstream culture. Singer-songwriting icon Joan Baez has her own signature Martin 0-45. Nick Drake even put his Guild M-20 on the cover of his 1971 album, Bryter Layter. But it’s still a niche instrument. And you can’t mention small-bodied acoustic guitars without discussing the parlor shape.
The Parlor Acoustic Guitar
The parlor is the quintessential small-bodied acoustic guitar shape. Its compact dimensions and elongated lines are more closely related to the first steel-string acoustic guitars than any other popular shape today. Like many modern, smaller guitars, it got its good looks by putting convenience first, gaining its notoriety as the centerpiece of at-home family entertainment. Before TVs, smartphones, video games, and streaming, families would gather in their parlors (hence the name) while Mom or Dad played and sang for the family.
The guitar’s diminutive size made it perfect for storing out of the way until needed. These original parlors were quality musical instruments with a beautiful voice. That voice and the parlor’s convenient size continue to inspire all the small-bodied acoustic guitars made today.
The Benefits of Small-Bodied Acoustic Guitars
We’ll get into the tone of small-bodied guitars in a bit, especially when we discuss our latest addition to the design. Still, we need to consider the pragmatic benefits of owning one of these acoustics.
Travel Acoustic Guitars
One of the parlor acoustic’s key features was its ability to stay out of the way. That quality is more important than ever these days. Whether cramming in a band van, camping/overlanding, or fighting for overhead storage on a flight, a great, small travel guitar is worth its weight in gold. It’s a big reason we designed our Companion models. They’re easy to carry, small enough to store, and are still premium acoustic guitars that we’re proud to put our name on.
Ideal for Guitarists with Smaller Hands
Diversity is one of the most beautiful things about humans. This, of course, also goes for guitarists and means that different guitarists have different preferences for the guitars they play. Many beginning players, children, and anyone who finds full-size acoustics cumbersome flock to small-bodied acoustic guitars. Designs like our Concertina are ideal for these players as they offer a full-scale length while being easier to play, more comfortable against your body, and feature an accessible, inviting neck profile.
The Tone of Small-Bodied Acoustic Guitars
The above benefits are fantastic reasons to choose a smaller guitar. However, the size can still bring a stigma that these guitars are cheap, beginner guitars that always require tonal compromise. It simply isn’t true, and, increasingly, guitarists embrace the small-bodied design these days strictly for tonal purposes.
Excellent small-bodied acoustics, like parlors, the famed L-1, and our Concertina and Companion models, sing with a deep, rich tone, crystalline highs, and a signature midrange that’s positively addicting. It is perfect for the rootsy tones of Robert Johnson’s delta blues, and it sits beautifully in a full band mix while offering the folksy character many singer-songwriters crave.
Premier Companion E Red Cedar-Brazilian LTD
We want the world to know more about these beautiful, compact instruments and to demonstrate how inspiring they can be. The new Breedlove Premier Companion E Red Cedar-Brazilian LTD is our realization of that goal. Crafted from the finest materials, we spared no expense in offering guitarists a small-bodied acoustic guitar with impeccable quality only matched by its aesthetic and sonic elegance.
The first thing you’ll notice about the guitar is its beautiful, all-solid Brazilian rosewood back and sides. This exceedingly rare tonewood is famous for its sustain, bell-like response, powerful low end, and string-to-string definition. Though rarely seen on modern, smaller guitars, it is a crucial element that makes this Companion pure magic. We top the Brazilian rosewood with a solid red cedar soundboard to add crisp note articulation and a warm balance. Leaning on our proprietary Sound Optimization process, every piece of the tonewood is hand-shaped, tweaked, and analyzed multiple times through the build process to ensure precise frequency response and perfect tone. If there are still guitarists who overlook small-bodied acoustic guitars, the Premier Companion E Red Cedar-Brazilian LTD will change their minds.
Oregon Companion CE Myrtlewood-Myrtlewood
Myrtlewood, while native to Oregon’s Pacific coast, might just be the most “exotic” of all tonewoods, capturing the deep bass of rosewood, the pure warmth of mahogany and the sweet, glassy treble of maple in one exquisite, visually enchanting package enhanced by a gloss finish. This sustainable acoustic-electric is much more than just a travel guitar.
“Anyone could make a travel-size guitar,” said Breedlove Wood Management & Product Development Manager Angela Christensen. “Our goal was to give the Companion an even more captivating voice while maintaining its size, shape, and overall feel. We also wanted it to handle any playing style you throw at it.”
Oregon Companion Stormy Night CE Myrtlewood-Myrtlewood
The Oregon Companion Stormy Night CE is a stunning acoustic guitar that will accompany you throughout your musical journey. Crafted in Bend, Oregon, this guitar does our hometown proud, boasting a solid top, back, and sides of beautiful Myrtlewood. The Companion’s smaller body makes it perfect when you’re on the go and still offers surprising warmth and low-end power.
It comes with L.R. Baggs electronics, taking its full-size tone to the stage. The Oregon Companion Stormy Night CE also features our Stormy Night finish, giving this guitar a deep, enchanting aesthetic that needs to be experienced in person.
The Big Picture on Small-Bodied Guitars
Small-bodied acoustics have been a guitar design mainstay since the beginning. Often relegated to cheap but convenient alternatives, we don’t think they’ve received the respect they deserve. The design can exude stunning sonic character that larger designs can’t match. Our Premier Companion E Red Cedar-Brazilian LTD proves that.
Whether you’re looking for a fantastic travel/beginner guitar or yearn for premium tone in a compact package, we highly recommend you check out the Premier Companion E Red Cedar-Brazilian LTD or one of our other Companion or Concertina models. They’re all premium instruments that showcase Breedlove’s commitment to quality and tone.
- Breedlove Guitars Unveils the Breedlove Stage Exotic Series ›
- Inside Breedlove’s New Thinline Acoustic Guitar Series ›
- Breedlove Premier Auditorium Rosewood Review ›
LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Socolow
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Socolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Socolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Socolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Socolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Socolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Socolow's Gear
Socolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos”Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero”Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”
Warm Audio, the leading manufacturer of faithful recreations of legendary recording gear and guitar pedals, today announces the release of two new pedals. Introducing the WA-C1 Chorus Vibrato, a faithful recreation of the most celebrated chorus in guitar pedal history with a 100% analog preamp and additional no-compromise features for exploring legendary modulated tones. Additionally, Warm Audio is releasing the Pedal76, an all-analog, transformer-balanced FET compressor pedal that accurately reproduces one of the fastest and most powerful studio compressors of all time known for ultra-responsive dynamic control with rich analog tone. The WA-C1 Chorus Vibrato (MSRP $189 | 219 € inc.VAT | £189 inc. VAT) and Pedal76 (MSRP $269 | 299 € inc. VAT | £259 inc. VAT) are available at launch at authorized retailers worldwide.
“This launch is exciting and unique for us. We’ve applied the Warm Formula to deliver the OG ofbold chorus sounds and we’re thrilled to authentically bring that tone back to pedalboards. Additionally, we’re leveraging our 10-year expertise in 76-style studio compression to create a compressor pedal that not only delivers premium studio performance but is loaded with additional features & controls to make it a heavy-hitter in its own right,” said Bryce Young, founder & president of Warm Audio. “The WA-C1 Chorus Vibrato not only brings back that iconic, lush chorus sound and rich, three-dimensional vibrato, but the high-quality preamp inside delivers pure, all-analog tone that just can’t be replicated by digital emulations.”
Young continues, “With Pedal76, we’re excited to bring the high-quality circuit and premium components of our WA76 studio compressor to pedalboards for controlling dynamics on stage without squashing character. With the added features and stage-friendly circuit, we’ve ensured that Pedal76 plays nice with both your rig and a live sound mixing board, while providing additional boost as needed. We’ve intentionally designed Pedal76 to be the ultimate all-analog compressor pedal for guitarists and bass players.”
WA-C1 Chorus Vibrato
The WA-C1 is built upon a true-to-original circuit design and a premium, 100% analog preamp that lives up to the demand for ultra-responsiveness on stage. Matched to the renowned original, the all-analog preamp features level control that adds bite, depth, and even some natural compression to guitar tones, even in bypass mode. The chorus setting features separate depth and rate controls to expand beyond the limitations of vintage units while preserving the legendary tone. These separate controls (vs. the vintage “intensity” control) allow for adjusting depth and rate independently to dial in more depth and slower rates for even richer chorus tones. Just like the vintage units, the WA-C1 delivers lush midrange depth and detail associated with proper Bucket Brigade Device analog chorus pedals and has a stereo output. When it’s time to add true wobble, the vibrato section of the WA-C1 is authentic to the original pedal delivering added speed and bounce to the tone. Leveraging a modern BBD chip recreation with other premium components and boutique build quality, the WA-C1 is carefully clocked to match the depth and rate of the original pedal to reproduce the detail expected from the most sought-after vintage pieces.
While maintaining true-to-original tones, the WA-C1 delivers some modern upgrades to the experience. The WA-C1 features a selectable impedance on the back panel to select between the vintage input impedance of 50k ohm and a 1.1M Hi-Z setting that allows players to compensate for higher impedance of guitars vs. keyboards and to add clarity to the high-end on guitars, if desired. This switch also works in bypass mode to maintain clarity. To deliver the appropriate voltage associated with the original, the WA-C1 is supported internally with a dualDC-DC voltage converter to deliver robust power when using a standard external 9V power supply. The WA-C1 adds a flashing LED for effect monitoring, showing which setting is engaged along with the rate of the modulation.
Introducing WA-C1 | Stereo Chorus & Vibrato Pedal With Depth & Rate Controls - YouTube
Pedal76
For over 10 years, Warm Audio has been building a premium, award-winning 76-style studio compressor, the WA76. With expertise in building this circuit and knowing what drives the sought-after tone of the most coveted dynamic control, Warm Audio now delivers truly professional, full-feature compression for the pedalboard. Pedal76 features a custom CineMagtransformer that is spec’d to duplicate the performance and tone of the studio units in a pedalboard-friendly format. Premium capacitors, resistors, and transistors round out a circuit that cuts no corners in delivering an authentic studio experience on stage. The added harmonic depth from the FET circuit and rich tone preservation from the custom transformer blend perfectly to recreate the ultimate compressor for guitar and bass players. Pedal76 features Attack & Release, Ratio, and Input controls, critical for taming unwanted changes in volume on stage. Pedal76 also has added features optimized for live performances including an external switch for true and buffered bypass operation, ensuring the compressor plays nice in your rig. Switches for input sensitivity, ground/lift, pad engagement and high/low gain modes (both for DI operation) provide added utility at gigs or in the studio. The separate balanced (DI) out also sends proper signal to the mixer or live recording rig, with the high gain mode adding grit and rich transformer tone.
For more information, please visit warmaudio.com.