Honest Reviews & Expert Advice for UK Musicians
Somewhere between a Telecaster’s snap and an archtop’s woolly warmth sits the sound most blues players are actually chasing — and it lives inside a semi-hollow. Pick up almost any classic blues record from the mid-1960s onward and there’s a decent chance a semi-hollow guitar is doing the talking, because the design solves a problem … Read more
Somewhere between the boomy, feedback-prone archtop and the clinical snap of a solid body sits the semi-hollow — jazz’s great compromise, and honestly, its best-kept secret. A semi-hollow electric guitar is a hollow-bodied instrument with a solid centre block running through the middle, and that block is doing more work than most players ever give … Read more
Somewhere between the twangy honesty of a fully hollow archtop and the blunt-force reliability of a solid body sits the best semi-hollow guitar for your particular ears — and working out which one that is can feel like being asked to pick a favourite child. What is a semi-hollow guitar? In short: an electric guitar … Read more
Somewhere in every guitarist’s life, there’s a moment standing in a shop, staring at two single-cutaway shapes that look almost identical, wondering why one costs the same as a second-hand car and the other costs about the same as a second-hand bicycle. That’s the Epiphone vs Gibson Les Paul dilemma in a nutshell, and it … Read more
Here’s the thing about walking into a guitar shop looking for the best Epiphone Les Paul: every single one on the wall looks like it wants to be picked up. Same silhouette, same single-cutaway swagger, same promise of Slash-in-your-bedroom tone. But underneath that familiar shape sits a genuinely wide spread of build quality, hardware and … Read more
There’s a reason nearly every blues guitarist worth their salt has owned a Stratocaster at some point in their playing life. That in-between quack, the way a single coil breaks up just so when you dig in, the way the whole guitar seems built for bending strings and telling stories — it’s no accident. A … Read more
Somewhere in a guitar shop right now, someone is standing between two identical-looking guitars, squinting at the headstock logo like it’s going to whisper the answer. Fender vs Squier Stratocaster is one of those debates that sounds simple until you actually try to answer it — because “which is better” depends entirely on who’s asking … Read more
Ask ten guitarists what the best Squier Stratocaster is and you’ll get eleven answers, half a dozen strong opinions about neck profiles, and at least one heated debate about whether “budget” and “brilliant” can ever share a sentence. They can. That’s the whole point of this guide. Squier has spent over four decades building the … Read more
Ask ten guitarists which electric guitar they’d grab if the house was on fire, and at least six will say a Stratocaster. There’s a reason that double-cutaway silhouette has outlived disco, grunge, and three separate decades of “is the guitar dead?” think-pieces: it just works. The best Fender Stratocaster for you, though, depends enormously on … Read more
There’s a particular kind of dread that hits about four songs into a set, right when your guitar decides the G string has had enough for the evening. A gigging electric guitar is, in the simplest terms, an instrument built to survive repeated load-ins, temperature swings, sweaty stage lights and three sets a night without … Read more