Gear Review: SIT American Roots Monel Acoustic Guitar Strings Offer Warm Vintage Tone
Monel strings are known for giving a warm, rich sound that highlights a more even, natural guitar tone while offering natural corrosion resistance.
Greg Olwell
Greg Olwell is Acoustic Guitar's editor-at-large. He plays upright bass in several bands in the San Francisco Bay Area and also enjoys playing ukulele and guitar.
Guitar Review: Recording King Limited Edition Dirty 30s Deluxe Single 0 Offers Lots of Vintage Vibe for the Price
The Recording King Dirty 30s Deluxe Single 0 guitar shares the same woods and electronics as its Dirty 30s Series 11 counterparts, but with a few key differences.
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Great Acoustics: Gurian’s 1973 S3B3H Incorporates Luxurious Nylon-Stringed Guitar Elements
This steel-string incorporates elements from the luthier's nylon-string background, such as the combination of an ebony fretboard and a rosewood bridge.
Gear Review: Collings 001 14-Fret Acoustic Guitar
It sure makes gratifying sounds while in the driver’s seat, but all of the 001’s good qualities shine even brighter from the audience’s perspective:
Personalized Inlays: Working Pieces of Art
For many players, these personalized inlays are not about having a flashy stage guitar, but about adding embellishments that makes a guitar their guitar.
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Great Acoustics: Bukka White’s 1933 National Duolian
For much of his career, White played this 1933 National Duolian, serial number C7094, which he called “Hard Rock.”
Gear Review: Preston Thompson 000-14SBA
Carrying on the work of company founder and namesake Preston K. Thompson, who died April 11, 2019, the small cadre of builders at Preston Thompson Guitars, in Sisters, Oregon, is one of those teams that’s capable of delivering extraordinarily crafted steel-strings time and again, and this Thompson 000-14SBA is one of those fine instruments.
Beyond Flattops: The Magic of Resonator Guitars
In the past 20 years, the resonator guitar has seen a reawakening as builders continuing to refine the basic concept that’s nearly 100 years old.
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Beyond Flattops: The Magic of Resonator, Baritone, and Archtop Guitars
The wide tonal palette of acoustic guitars includes archtop, resonator, and baritone colors. Here's more about the history, makers, and players of these instruments.
Great Acoustics: Yasmin Williams’ Skytop Grand Concert
This unique Eric Weigeshoff-built instrument is as individual as the music Yasmin Williams creates with it.
Top Gear: The Best Acoustic Guitars & Accessories of 2019
This was a year in which we saw the results of several large makers looking to the future of the guitar and daring to do something different.
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Gear Review: B&G Guitars Caletta
B&G throws in some of its own ideas to create an instrument that is a more of an individual interpretation than any kind of replica.
New Gear: Eastman DT30D
Eastman’s Double Top series is among the first to use the boutique-maker idea of a double top—a soundboard incorporating two outer wooden layers over a synthetic core, for enhanced sound and responsiveness—in a production steel-string guitar model.
Great Acoustics: Shelley Park Modèle Elan 12
The Modèle Elan 12 is based on Maccaferri’s original Modèle Jazz guitar, a 12-fret design from the early 1930s.
Makers & Shakers: A Visit With Eric Schoenberg
“I’ve always been ‘the OM guy,’” says Eric Schoenberg, from his shop in the tiny enclave of Tiburon, California, just north of San Francisco.
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Gear Review: Lâg Tramontane HyVibe 10
A collaboration between two French companies, the Lâg Tramontane HyVibe, turns the guitar’s body into a speaker that can add several different effects to your acoustic tone, loop, metronome, and interact with a smartphone app for even greater control of the preamp’s parameters.
Great Acoustics: Ca. 1927 National Style 1 Tricones
These two Nationals display age and use in a way that museum curators treasure. These guitars were meant to be used, and their accumulated wear and patina reveal a lot about the lives they have led and the people who have played them.
Gear Review: G7th Performance 3 Capo
A clever new accessory from G7th, the Performance 3 capo, has a feature that sets it apart from anything else out there: namely the company’s “adaptive radius technology” (ART).
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Gear Review: Guild F-512 Maple 12-string
In standard tuning, this guitar was great for cranking out my inner jukebox of classic-rock riffs from the ’70s and ’80s.
Gear Review: PRS SE Angelus A60E
No matter how I played the Angelus, it delivered a nicely proportioned sound, with a spanky top end layered over a controlled bass and midrange. The low end wasn’t cavernous or boomy, which helped it feel balanced across the frequency range, especially useful for fingerstyle parts on open tunings and easy to control through a loud amp.
Gear Review: Fender American Acoustasonic Telecaster
he player who ends up favoring the Fender Acoustasonic Telecaster is anybody’s guess, but it’s likely to be a musician who places a priority on functional, accessible tools. It’s certainly going to find an audience among those who need acoustic and electric tones at the ready and value the Acoustasonic’s looks and high level of comfort.
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Gear Review: GrooveTech Acoustic Guitar Tech Kit
Guitars can use a little care from time to time, and the GrooveTech Acoustic Guitar Tech Kit covers all of the essentials.
Beyond Rosewood: 12 Mid-Priced Alt-Wood Guitars
Our pitch to makers was simple: Send us a guitar that uses no rosewood and has a real-world cost of $500–$1,500. Since some makers have many models that qualify, we limited each brand to one guitar of any shape or size, with or without electronics or a cutaway. Laminated and solid woods were okay, but no composites such as carbon fiber (that’s a roundup for another time). What you’ll see over the following pages are a dozen acoustic guitars, presented alphabetically, that show off some of the delightful choices available in this popular price range.
Gear Review: Genzler Acoustic Array Mini
After setting up shop in a garage in Phoenix, Arizona, in the early 1980s, Jeff Genzler, a professional musician and electronics enthusiast, did much to advance the art of bass amplification with his state-of-the-art class-D solid-state amps. With the introduction…
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Great Acoustics: 1925 Weissenborn Style 4
The Weissenborn Style 4 is the high-water mark of the acoustic steel-string guitar for lap-style playing. The 1925 example seen here features an all-koa body and a hollow, square neck that contributes to the guitar’s volume and tone.