I spent the weekend testing the best guitar gear of the year at The Guitar Show in Birmingham – these are the 9 hottest products you can buy right now

I’ve been visiting The Guitar Show for the last few years now, and it’s great to see how much it’s growing year on year. This year was a sold-out affair on the Saturday, and easily the busiest I’ve ever seen it, with guitarists from all over the UK descending on a quiet industrial estate south of Birmingham to check out the latest gear.

From electric guitars, both mass-produced and handmade, to vintage instruments costing over £50,000, there was a huge selection of instruments on offer to try and buy, as well as plenty of other gear like pedals, guitar amps, recording gear, and accessories. It’s a great way to get an overview of what’s going to come out in the year, as well as getting hands-on with instruments as a way of trying them before buying.

As someone who regularly reviews guitar gear, I love going to the Guitar Show to sample a wide range of gear quickly, picking out stuff for our reviews and buying guides. This year, I tried more things than I can remember, but these are the 9 bits of gear that stood out to me.

Boss XS-100

It’s not aiming to break the stranglehold the Digitech Whammy has on the world of pitch shifting, but the Boss XS-100 Poly Shifter wants to tread its own path, offering artifact and glitch-free octave, harmony, and drop tuning effects. It’s slimmer than the Whammy, takes an opposing color with its blue finish, and adds a small screen for deeper level settings tweaking.

I found the tracking to be really quite good, playing it through an all Boss pedalboard with the Boss IR-2 at the end of the signal chain. It responded really nicely to all my chords and licks, tracking impeccably no matter what I threw at it. The dual ‘tune down’ and ‘effect’ footswitches are really handy too, giving you more control over sweeping with the treadle or just quickly dropping your guitar by a certain interval.

Line 6 Helix Stadium XL

The next generation of Line 6’s flagship amp modeler, the Helix portion of the Guitar Show attracted many admirers alongside myself. There were several stations available to try this new modeler, and they were full most of the time I was there. The XL version has all of the features, including scribble strips, an expression pedal, and four effects loops.

Jumping onto the Stadium XL armed with an HSS Pacifica guitar, the first thing I noticed is the gigantic screen. It feels like it dominates the pedal as a whole, immediately drawing the eye with its high-resolution graphics. It doesn’t take me long to start tweaking stuff, though, dragging and dropping using the touch screen, changing presets, and adjusting parameters in a very intuitive way.

It sounds incredible too, delivering some sumptuous amp and effects tones when played through headphones. I spent a good amount of time cycling through the presets that covered everything from Fender-style cleans to saturated high-gain metal tones. It’s an amazing bit of kit, and I can see why people are tipping it as one of the best multi-effects pedals of 2026.

Line 6 Helix Stadium XL Floor demo: 5 things we love (and some we don’t) - YouTube

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Old Blood Noise Endeavors Black Fountain

As a big fan of OBNE, I was keen to try out some of their fresh offerings at the show. Despite immediately going for the recently released ‘Parting’ pedal, it was the Black Fountain that stole the show for me. It’s an oil can delay pedal, a less usual sound we typically come across, marrying the analog, modulated delay sound with an almost rotary effect.

There were a bunch of different pedals on the pedalboard I was sampling, but the syrupy delay tones of the Black Fountain immediately caught my ear. The ability to independently mix the wet and dry signals I found to be super useful, and the stereo functionality means you can create some really stellar sounds. Messing around with the different timings of each delay in the stereo field means you can put together some really complex, pulsating tones that are quite unlike any other delay pedal I've tried.

Manson 007

As seen recently in that Bond-inspired photo shoot, the Manson 007 takes all of the crazy modifications Matt Bellamy of Muse has made to his guitar and puts them all in one place. It’s got three pickups with humbucker, P-90, and Sustainiac, a built-in Fuzz Factory, a MIDI controller strip, FL Wah, a kill switch, and a piezo pickup in the bridge. It’s a crazy instrument to hold, that’s for sure.

I spent the first five minutes with this guitar just working out which switches do what. Playing it through the Neural DSP Quad Cortex, once I got to grips with where everything was, it was easy to get saturated fuzz tones, infinitely sustaining leads, and control the Digitech Whammy at my feet using the MIDI strip. My only wish was that I had my time with it, but there was a queue of guitarists wanting to try it out, and I’m not one to hog the ball.

Blackstar Beam Solo

I’ve already reviewed the Blackstar Beam Solo, but I still think it’s one of the best guitar headphone amps around right now and is worthy of mention here. I’ve recommended it to a couple of friends attending the show who needed a cheap practice solution, and it remains one of my favorites.

Simply put, it sounds incredible, and at the end of the day, that’s the single defining factor for any piece of guitar gear you purchase. I love the built-in tuner that uses the ‘lightbeam’ system for quick tune-ups, which is great if you don’t like using a smartphone alongside your guitar, and although it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as others, the quality of the amp modeling means it stands above the rest for me.

Baum Guitars Wingman 2026

One stand that caught my attention, and that of many other guitarists, was the Baum Guitars. I’d heard of them before via my social algorithm, but seeing them in person made me immediately want to pick one up. They’re distinctive enough to be appealing to those looking for something different, but not so far away from the norm we’re used to seeing that traditionalists will be put off.

Honestly, the Baum Guitars Wingman 2026 stole the show for me. As soon as I started playing it, I felt immediately comfortable, able to replicate my favorite current licks and riffs despite it being a totally new guitar to me. Baum’s own Goldsound mini humbuckers offered a really unique sound that’s not quite a single coil pickup, not quite a P-90, and not quite a humbucker.

Death by Audio Crossover Fuzz

I got to try quite a few Death By Audio pedals at the show, but the Crossover Fuzz was the one that stuck with me. It’s yet another fuzz pedal, but it splits the high and low frequencies so you can effect them independently. You can also split them into stereo signals for further processing, opening up some interesting options for those who want to get creative.

At its heart, though, I found plenty of great fuzz sounds, from classic to modern. The ability to tweak the drive and tone levels on the lower and high frequencies might sound complicated, but it actually makes it surprisingly simple to pull out some sweet tones from lightly saturated to all-out destruction.

JBL Bandbox Solo

I reviewed the Bandbox Trio recently for Guitar World, but it’s the smaller sibling in the JBL Bandbox Solo that’s won me over. With all these AI-enabled contraptions everywhere you look, I wasn’t particularly enamored to see yet another LLM-assisted bit of music gear. I was wrong though.

As well as being a fantastic little amp modeler, the Bandbox Solo has a tool quite unlike any other with its stem splitter. It allows you to remove the guitars from any of your favorite songs while streaming from your phone, and play along with the built-in tones or your own modeler. It works scarily well, and it can remove vocals and drums too if you like. For playing along with your favorite songs, nothing does it better, quicker, or more easily than this.

Noisy Hammer

One of the best things about going to any guitar show is that you encounter brands beyond those that our algorithms serve us. One such brand I encountered at the show was a small custom guitar amp and cabinet company called Noisy Hammer. The stunning-looking wood cabinets immediately caught my eye, and I just had to try one out.

Playing through the Juno 5W amp and a matching 1x12 cabinet, I was mightily impressed with a sound that matched the fantastic good looks of the cabs. These are some stock offerings available at the website, but a lot of their work is custom cabs, grille cloths, and amp refurbishment, well worth checking out if you’re tired of black Tolex.