Hello, and welcome to Guitar World’s gear round-up, your one-stop-shop for keeping up to date with what’s been happening in the big wide world of guitar gear over the past seven days.
From new electric guitars to amp modeler updates, the guitar industry is never short of fresh releases, and it can sometimes be hard to stay abreast of every new launch that may be of interest to you.
To make things a little easier, we’ve put together an essential must-read guide that will cover the major releases, the boutique drops, and everything in between.
Article continues belowThis week is – mostly – all about the guitars. Amps are conspicuous by their absence, but then with a $16,999 signature guitar for one of rock's most influential and charismatic players just launched, maybe that hand-wired combo amp you've had your eye on can wait until next pay day.
Charvel Standard Series SD2
In a hot minute we are going to arrive at one of the most expensive high-end electric guitars to have been released this year, a serious instrument for the collector with a serious bank balance. But let us first of all dispel the notion that you need deep pockets to get a serious instrument in 2026.
Take Charvel’s Standard Series SD models, San Dimas Style 2 hot-rodded T-styles that retail for $569.
While some concessions have been made to economic realities, with nyatoh bodies and necks, and amaranth fingerboards not the kinds of tone woods Charvel would expend upon its Pro Mod or MIJ series guitars, the Standard Series nonetheless presents players with a super-shreddable platform for hard-rock, metal guitar, jazz-fusion, or that steroid punk-country project you’ve been meaning to get off the ground.
These arrive in Satin Gray and Gloss Black finishes, have an air of the old Joe Duplantier signature models, and feature a pair of high-output humbuckers. What makes them so impressive is the fact we have locking tuners, a “Speed” neck that’s been oiled to make it extra tactile – and, yes, speedy – and that compound radius fingerboard (12” to 16”) has rolled edges for a primo feel.
The toothpaste-style Charvel logo looks good in black on that licensed Telecaster headstock. Also worth noting: these have a 25.1” scale length, so it fits in between the classic Fender and Gibson dimensions.
For more details, head over to Charvel.
Gibson Michael Schenker 1971 Flying V Collector’s Edition
Gibson keeps the high-end replicas of iconic rock guitars coming. Just last month, we had the stunning recreation of Mick Ronson’s Bowie-era 1968 Les Paul Custom, this month, it’s Michael Schenker’s black-and-white “Medallion-era” 1971 Flying V.
We say that this is Schenker’s Flying V, but nowadays this guitar – the one the German virtuoso used to tracked UFO classics such as Doctor Doctor and Rock Bottom – is now residing in Kirk Hammett of Metallica’s collection.
Perhaps Gibson would be so good as to give Schenker one of these 50 Collector’s Edition doppelgängers. They really do look the same, with 3D scans used to recreate the exact dimensions of the guitar, from the small-style V headstock to the neck – not to mention all the dings and battle-scars. The Murphy Lab has been doing Murphy Lab things again.
It will be interesting to get up close with these and give them a try; will we be able to see the original Cherry Red finish underneath the black-and-white paint job? Famously, Schenker had this refinished when he was – briefly – back with the Scorpions.
Elsewhere, you’ve got the T-Top humbuckers, the white skirted knobs… It’s a special instrument.
At $16,999, it’s no cheap date, but then this is the guitar that Hammett describes as a “religious relic”.
“It represents so much of my youth and all the travails I went through in just trying to learn how to play guitar and be a great improviser and soloist like Michael Schenker,” he says, in an extract published in the Gibson Gazette. “I spent so much time as a teenager just staring at this guitar on the back of UFO’s Force It album.
“There’s a picture of Michael Schenker playing this very guitar – it’s red, you can see the medallion – and I used to stare at the guitar and go, ‘I need to get a Flying V.’ Little did I know that, decades later, I would have the very Flying V that I was staring at.”
See Gibson for more details
Fender 75th Anniversary Telecaster Collection
On behalf of everyone at Guitar World, may I take this opportunity to wish the Fender Telecaster a very happy birthday, as the world’s first mass-produced solidbody electric turns the big seven five.
It’s a landmark year, so of course Fender had something special in mind to celebrate it – five limited-edition models that present us with the full sweep of Tele evolution.
The old-school Tele heads might plump for the Vintera Road Worn 1951 take on the O.G. Blackguard models, which come with boom-chicka-boom country sounds guaranteed.
But there’s gold no matter which way you turn, quite literally with the American Ultra II 75th Anniversary Telecaster, which comes in a truly magnificent Liquid Gold metallic finish, and is a guitar which Trey Hensley says might just be “the best dang guitar I’ve ever had the chance to plug into an amp”.
Of course, there’s the American Professional Classic Cabronita with its TV Jones pickups and cut-down pickguard. There’s the American Professional Custom Telecaster for those who want a bit of bling (gold hardware) and fancy wood (figured maple top).
Last but not least is a guitar that actually makes us think of a 75th Anniversary Telecaster – as in, the sparkly one that was launched a few years back to mark Fender’s Diamond Anniversary – and that is this Player II model in Diamond Dust Sparkle.
At $1,099, it is the most affordable of this collection, and yet you could see Taylor Swift rocking something like this during her next mega-stadium tour (that pearloid pickguard? Wowzers!).
Pop over to Fender for more on these.
Gretsch Electromatic Premier Jet
Gretsch does a really good job of servicing its heritage and finding ways of quietly modernizing its range of semi and fully hollowbodied electric guitars, bestowing them with player-friendly appointments and all that jazz.
But don’t mistake a care over its history for a lack of imagination, or the fear to do something really different when the occasion calls for it – like refreshing its iconic single-cut into something that high-gain players might gravitate to, and, what the heck, giving it a high-performance makeover too.
The Electromatic Premier Jet is a very different Gretsch guitar. It comes with a 10” to 14” compound radius ebony fingerboard as standard, Sphera Twin Six high-output humbuckers, Luminlay glow-in-the-dark side markers, and an onboard Lumen Filter which tightens its low-end response.
Accessed via a push/pull function on the tone pot, said filter tightens up your low-end for percussive high-gain shenanigans. And yet, look at them.
This is still the Jet we know and love, pretty much, one for playing Beatles standards, some rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, and perhaps after a few cans of Monster Energy you could tune this mother down and work through your Periphery tab book. Remember: Gretsch is not a genre.
Banana Effects Quimera
And now for something completely different, the Quimera, from Banana Effects, an actual synthesizer in a pedal, equipped with everything you need to take your tone through the wormhole.
In the engine room, the Quimera deploys a super-powerful ARM Cortex -M7 processor to give us polyphonic tracking as it re-synthesizes whatever it is you are playing in real time, with “near-zero” latency. The Quimera tracks your signal every 5ms, performs its analysis and then sends that pitch and envelope data to the synth engine and the oscillators have at it.
Now, we are talking about this in the context of electric guitar but Banana Effects says this will work just the thing with bass guitar, too, and, if you’re brave enough, your vocals. The tracking is so quick that it’s apparently like standing just over four meters from your amp.
There is a whole bunch of other features, not least that this pedal affords you a lot of control over the synth. A non-exhaustive list of which would include a sensitivity control, transposer, pitch quantize, glide/portamento and a note-level compressor.
Okay, words... Word fail me. Listen to how it sounds above and find out more over at Banana Effects.
Harley Benton TE-52 Tremolo Series
There are no prizes for guessing where these smart Harley Benton guitars took their inspiration from. The Tremolo series presents us with three T-styles, in three fairly classic aesthetics, and factory mods them with a Bigsby-style vibrato unit for added vintage mojo.
These look the part. The TE-52 Tremolo NA is the one for the traditionalists, and not least because if its natural finish and the black single-ply pickguard. Here, the body is American ash, the fingerboard caramelized maple, while the Lake Placid Blue TE-62CC and the black double-bound Custom-style TE-62DB have basswood bodies with laurel fingerboards.
Elsewhere, it’s bolt-on caramelized maple necks with roseacer skunk stripes, Kluson-style tuners, a pair of Roswell TEA Alnico-5 vintage TE-style single-coils at the neck and bridge positions, with the controls mounted on the metal plate.
The price for these is, of course, ridiculous. Available exclusively via Thomann, one should set you back about 230 bucks. Madness. You can check out more at Harley Benton.
Teaching Machines FuzzBillion
It is hard to find an overdrive or distortion pedal that does something different, or that fuzz pedal that is truly unlike any other. They are out there. But you have to look, and, in some instances, be prepared to pay for them, like with Teaching Machines weird, brilliant FuzzBillion.
This pedal, which will cost the best part of 500 bucks, is an all-analogue funhouse of distortion, drive and fuzz, all of which is not so much dialed in but programmed via 11 wheels that cycle through nine different positions to give guitarists (or bassists, synth players, et cetera) tones ranging from an op-amp boost, to silicon and germanium fuzz, gated sounds, LED clipping, and this is designed to make full use of the cornucopia of components under the hood.
This is for the maximalist player who wants options. Those 11 wheels feed into each other; it’s like one big interconnected eco-system of distortion, which can yield, literally, billions of different sounds. It is a code-breaker for those bored with regular distortions. But with no presets, you are going to have to jot those numbers down (the manual has space for this, though surely taking a picture with your phone might be easier).
If you’re the kind of player who can’t remember their phone number, it’s maybe not for you. But if you’re a STEM grad who is up for calculating infinity on a drive pedal, head over to Teaching Machines for more.
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