The gear you see at your local store often begins with a manufacturer showing it off to dealers and other industry movers and shakers at a NAMM show. Like other US industries, the musical instruments industry is looking forward to seeing the economy pick back up. In the meantime, a big question mark loomed over the Summer NAMM show in Nashville. In particular, we were wondering—is this a good time to release cool, new gear?
Attendance was down by a quarter from last year. Exhibitor numbers were down as well, with many high-profile vendors choosing to not host a booth, including Fender, Vox, Marshall, PRS and Peavey. The most conspicuous absence was Gibson, a company headquartered in Nashville. But, as NAMM President and CEO Joe Lamond pointed out in his address to the industry, hard economic times can also present opportunities, and many retailers and exhibitors, both new and old, took occasion to look ahead and find opportunities where they could. Most reported having a better show than they expected, and some said it was better than they’d hoped for.
Despite a palpable sense of uncertainty in the months ahead of the show, we did discover plenty of enthusiasm and an overall mood of genuine optimism. Skeptics that we are, we hunted for signs that the general excitement was being exaggerated to gloss over deeper worries, but we saw plenty of business taking place, and of course plenty of cool gear to check out. While there weren’t tons of new products, we found many interesting new things from some of our old friends, and we discovered quite a few new companies willing to make a go of it in a tough market.
 | G&L Guitars Rampage Jerry Cantrell Signature Model–U.S. version While the G&L Jerry Cantrell Signature USA Model won’t be officially released until Winter NAMM 2010, they already had all three Fullerton, CA, hand-built guitars on display at their booth. Built to the specs of the Rampage played by Jerry for years, the guitar will feature a soft maple body, maple neck and an ebony fingerboard on a flat neck with a 25.5” scale. Also, it comes loaded with a Seymour Duncan JB humbucker in the bridge position and a recessed Pro Series Kahler tremolo with a Floyd Rose locking nut. The guitar finishes include Whiskey, Black and Ivory–the finish most associated with Mr. Cantrell. In addition to the USA Signature models, G&L will be producing some competitively priced import Rampage Jerry Cantrell Tribute Series models. MSRP $2660 glguitars.com Watch our booth interview |
 photo by Bob Capazzo | Jason Z. Schroeder Guitars Based in Redding, CA, Schroeder offers several different models and familiar body styles, but the two that caught our eyes and ears were the double-cut Stormy Monday and the single-cut Tweed Top. The Stormy Monday features a 5A quilted maple top, Honduran mahogany body and neck, Brazilian rosewood fingerboard and quilted maple headstock side treatment and backplate. Built upon a Radio Lane prototype, The Tweed Top comes with a tweed top that sits on flamed Eastern maple top complete with a nitrocellulose finish. Also, it comes loaded with Seymour Duncan Antiquities. While Schroeder’s guitars embrace traditional roots, he adds some new flair with breathtaking and heavilycontoured tops, custom-made Schroeder stoptail bridges, stainless steel frets and coil splitting to provide a full range of tones. MSRP–Stormy Monday $4700 MSRP–Tweed Top $4250 schroederguitars.com Watch our booth interview & demo |
 | LSL Instruments 52.5 Aged T-Bones We’re always on the lookout for some spankin’ new/old T-style instruments. At this show, it was LSL Instruments that popped up on our twang radar with their 52.5 Aged T-Bone guitars. Built with either a traditional swamp ash or pine—a super lightweight tonewood—these T-style guitars took us right back to ‘52. Other features on these guitars include a 7.25” radiusmaple fingerboard on a “C” profile maple neck complete with a walnut skunk strip, an old-school Fender or Joe Barden bridge with three brass saddles and LSL custom, handwound vintage-style pickups. To fully produce the vintage look and feel, LSL manually ages all the metal parts and fingerboards, and the guitar edges are hand rounded for a silky-smooth feel and well played appearance. MSRP $1949 lslinstruments.com Watch our booth interview & demo |
 AboveGroundFX AboveGroundFX, a small startup company based out of Chicago, IL, sprang into the effects market in 2008. Now they offer five pedals: the Rebote Delay, Compressor, Venue Reverb, El Grit—n (distortion) and Tone Control. The pedals designed by Francisco Peña all feature similar sleek designs with top loaded input/output jacks to maximize pedalboard room. Sonically, the pedals are designed to enhance your tone, but not muddy it up with noise. The Venue Reverb’s special attention to the dry signal provides a transparent and clean operation. The Rebote Delay uses a digital chip to simulate tape decay and offers echo patterns ranging from slap back to 560ms of delay. MSRP $179–189 abovegroundfx.com |
 | Fryette Amplification Memphis Thirty Combo The ink on Fryette’s prototype Memphis Thirty control panel was still drying when the show launched. The Memphis Thirty 1x12 combo builds upon Fryette’s popular SIG:X clean channel, but that’s where the similarities stop. The new Class-A 30W combo has dual channels (Clean and Drive), Power Shift switching (30W/18W), series/ parallel effects loop, a tube-driven Accutronics spring reverb, and uses a 12AX7, 12AT7, three 12AX7AC, and four EL84 tubes. Other features include a 12” Eminence speaker, specially designed by Fryette, enclosed in a Baltic birch cabinet. The coolest feature of this amp is the ability to change or re-order preamp tubes easily from the front panel—no need for gloves or a cool-down period, because the tubes are housed above a vent that pushes air by means of speaker movement. MSRP $2200 fryette.com Watch our booth interview & demo |
 TV Jones P-90 in Soapbar Mount Known for their hot, rockabilly twangin’ pickups, TV Jones introduces their take on the classic soapbar P-90. These pickups crank out a sound that represents the traditional P-90, but with a classic TV Jones bite. They designed specific pickups for the neck and bridge positions. The bridge pup has thicker highs and more defined lows than what is commonly heard from other P-90s. The neck offers clarity with fullness and is considerably less boomy than regular P-90s. Standard-sized alnico IV bar magnets are used in the neck position, contributing to its clarity and warmth. Larger pole screws are used on both neck and bridge models to help increase inductance. Both versions are available in Black and Cream. MSRP $95 (one pickup) tvjones.com Watch our booth interview & demo |
 | Hanson Guitars Chicago’s Hanson Musical Instruments, which made a name producing modern and vintage-style pickups, is unveiling a new full line of guitars intended to bring quality and cool, retro-inspired designs to working musicians at prices they can afford. The first two models, available in August, recall the Italian electric solidbody aesthetic of the late fifties and early sixties: the Cigno, a set-neck triple P-90 design, and the Firenze, a triple mini-humbucker with bolton neck. The other members of the line, the Gatto with its mahogany body, set-neck and dual Hanson classic humbuckers, and the semi-hollowbody, mini-humbuckerequipped Chicagoan will be available in October. All models are available with either Bigsby vibrato or stop tail piece. MSRP $799–$1160 hansonguitars.com |
 Bob Kilgore’s Harmonic CapoInvented by fingerstyle guitarist Bob Kilgore, the Harmonic Capo is unlike conventional capos. Rather than pressing down on the strings, it barely touches them. It sits on the guitar’s neck with a strap and a pair of adjustable supports, and six adjustable soft rubber pads rest gently on the strings. Place it over a harmonic point and it turns open strings into harmonic tones, opening entirely new possibilities of note combinations and progressions in your playing. What’s more, it won’t prevent you from playing normally above or below it. MSRP $34.95 weaseltrap.com |
 | Electro-Harmonix 22 Caliber Power Amp How’d you like to fit an ass-kicking amplifier into your front pocket? That’s what you can do with the Electro-Harmonix 22 Caliber power amp—it’s the size of a small pedal, no kidding. Okay, technically the power supply (18V 1.66A) is built into a power cord, much like that of a laptop computer, but still—we were knocked out by what the 22 Calliber puts out, poundper- pound. This little beast is 22 watts and very loud. It handles 4, 8, and 16 ohm speaker loads automatically. The 22 Caliber covers a lot ground with just a bright switch and a volume knob. The diminutive amp is expected to cost about $100. MAP $99 ehx.com Watch our booth interview & demo |
 | Olympus LS-11 It’s almost to the point where it’s hard to imagine being a musician and not having a digital recorder. The quality and features keep getting better and the prices keep going down. Olympus rolled out their new LS-11, which is an update to their LS-10. Improvements include 8GB of memory (up from 2GB), the ability to transfer files between the hard drive and an SD card, 23 hours of battery life (up from 14 hours) and a mono feature, handy for recording small size files when you know you’re going to be emailing them. MAP $399 olympusamerica.com Watch our booth interview |
 | Hagstrom Hagstrom has been making guitars again for several years now since taking a 20-year hiatus. Their Ultra Swede has a basswood body with a flamed maple top. The 24.75” scale guitar comes with custom-wound humbuckers and the company’s ultra-thin UltraLux neck. An Ultra Swede with a spalted maple top was shown at NAMM. Also catching our eye was their semi-hollow Viking and a silver sparkle Deluxe F-Tremar with the company’s new Tremar rocker vibrato bridge. Ultra Swede - Street $484 hagstromguitars.com Watch our booth interview |
 | Yamaha NCX and NTX Series Yamaha’s newest nylons are Rodrigo y Gabriella-endorsed and tricked out more like cutaway steel strings. They feature cutaways, A.R.T. transducer-style preamps, and gorgeous appointments. The NCX models are classical-style with a deeper body and a 12 th fret neck joint. The NCX2000FM (pictured) has a Hokkaido Spruce top and flamed maple back and sides. The NTX line has a thinner body and a 14th fret neck joint. yamaha.com/guitars |
Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if you’re not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an “intelligent pitch-changer” that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ’80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. It’s essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is ±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and it’s also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the device’s guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days it’s not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000’s capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymon’s “shimmer” effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what you’ve won!)
“If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.”
But there’s another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. It’s easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which they’re mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isn’t always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offer—and I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, that’s a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions don’t quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) It’s all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists won’t be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations exist—Eventide’s own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhere—and you’ve got the time—fire it up, wait for the distinctive “click” of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
PRS Guitars today released the updated MT 15 and the new Archon Classic amplifiers, along with a larger Archon speaker cabinet. The 15-watt, two-channel Mark Tremonti signature amp MT 15 now features a lead channel overdrive control. An addition to the Archon series, not a replacement, the 50-watt Classic offers a fresh voice by producing retro rock “classic” tones reminiscent of sound permeating the radio four and five decades ago. Now twice the size of the first Archon cabinet, the Archon 4x12 boasts four Celestion V-Type speakers.
MT 15 Amplifier Head
Balancing aggression and articulation, this 15-watt amp supplies both heavy rhythms and clear lead tones. The MT 15 revision builds off the design of the MT 100, bringing the voice of the 100’s overdrive channel into its smaller-format sibling. Updating the model, the lead channel also features a push/pull overdrive control that removes two gain stages to produce vintage, crunchier “mid gain” tones. The clean channel still features a push/pull boost control that adds a touch of overdrive crunch. A half-power switch takes the MT to 7 watts.
“Seven years ago, we released my signature MT 15 amplifier, a compact powerhouse that quickly became a go-to for players seeking both pristine cleans and crushing high-gain tones. In 2023, we took things even further with the MT 100, delivering a full-scale amplifier that carried my signature sound to the next level. That inspired us to find a way to fit the 100's third channel into the 15's lunchbox size,” said Mark Tremonti.
“Today, I’m beyond excited to introduce the next evolution of the MT15, now featuring a push/pull overdrive control on the Lead channel and a half-power switch, giving players even more tonal flexibility to shape their sound with a compact amp. Can’t wait for you all to plug in and experience it!”
Archon Classic Amplifier Head
With a refined gain structure from the original Archon, the Archon Classic’s lead channel offers a wider range of tones colored with gain, especially in the midrange. The clean channel goes from pristine all the way to the edge of breakup. This additional Archon version was developed to be a go-to tool for playing classic rock or pushing the envelope into modern territory. The Archon Classic still features the original’s bright switch, presence and depth controls. PRS continues to stock the Archon in retailers worldwide.
“The Archon Classic is not a re-issue of the original Archon, but a newly voiced circuit with the lead channel excelling in '70s and '80s rock tones and a hotter clean channel able to go into breakup. This is the answer for those wanting an Archon with a hotrod vintage lead channel gain structure without changing preamp tube types, and a juiced- up clean channel without having to use a boost pedal, all wrapped up in a retro-inspired cabinet design,” said PRS Amp Designer Doug Sewell.
Archon 4x12 Cabinet
As in the Archon 1x12 and 2x12, the mega-sized PRS Archon 4x12 speaker cabinet features Celestion V-Type speakers and a closed-back design, delivering power, punch, and tight low end. Also like its smaller brethren, the 4x12 is wrapped in durable black vinyl and adorned with a British-style black knitted-weave grill cloth. The Archon 4x12 is only the second four-speaker cabinet in the PRS lineup, next to the HDRX 4x12.
PRS Guitars continues its schedule of launching new products each month in 2025. Stay tuned to see new gear and 40 th Anniversary limited-edition guitars throughout the year. For all of the latest news, click www.prsguitars.com/40 and follow @prsguitars on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, X, and YouTube.
