Welcome to Guitar World’s weekly 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 in the loop with every new launch.
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.
Below you'll find my personal highlights from the week, along with plenty of honorable mentions for the new gear you might have missed. Agree with my picks? Have a highlight of your own? Let us know in the comments.
Kramer 50th Anniversary Collection
There is a certain demographic who will be looking at this new 50th Anniversary Collection from Kramer, seeing the Gibson-owned high-performance electric guitar brand respraying all the hits of its current lineup in a really sweet Gold Metallic finish to mark its jubilee year, and they will acutely feel the passing of time.
Some might wince, suddenly feeling the urge to pick up a more age-appropriate instrument. But what even is that? Embrace the dying of the light. Take that Frying Pan out of your Reverb cart. So what if the premier shred brand of the ‘80s used to watch movies on Betamax – it’s still young at heart. And so are we.
Besides, the Baretta, SM-1, the 84, the Volante, NightSwan, and the Pacer Carrera have never looked better.
These all come with a gig bag and everything you need to split the atom, i.e. super-quick necks, jumbo frets, compound radius fingerboards, plus Kramer Eruption PRO humbuckers and Floyd Rose 1000 Series vibratos. And the price on these is not that bad either, with the range starting from $999.
PRS Jon Jourdan Limited Edition
Jon Jourdan’s new signature guitar is something different from PRS. We're used to seeing a more maximalist approach when it comes to its designs, electrics with an array of switching options to rinse everything out of their pickup configuration. But Jourdan’s day job requires something different.
His signature model is all business; a single-cut with a single pickup, one volume knob, and a wraparound bridge. And that’s it. As six-string lieutenant to Wolfgang Van Halen, touring the world’s enormodomes with Mammoth – not to mention his roles in To Whom it May and Clint Lowery’s solo band – he clearly needs something that you can tune down, crank up, and hit hard. This is the electric guitar as a hammer, albeit, a very expensive hammer.
“At the end of the day, my guitar is a tool. I want it to do exactly what I need it to, so we took out all the ‘extra’ stuff I don’t need,” says Jourdan. “This guitar sounds huge and is incredibly fun to play. There’s something about taking out any unnecessary wiring and removing the neck pickup so its magnets aren’t pulling on the strings that makes it feel alive. I can’t imagine anyone playing this guitar having a bad time.”
Its sole pickup is interesting, a PRS Metal humbucker. That’ll slug the front end of your guitar amp nicely. PRS is releasing these in Platinum and Gunmetal metallic finishes. Each instrument comes with signed backplate. The bad news is that they’re only making 200 of them.
Eventide H9 Gen 2
No one has ever accused the H9 Harmonizer of lacking features or sounds, but Eventide has just made it better anyway, and has done so without increasing the size of the enclosure.
The next-gen H9 is still respectful of your pedalboard real estate, but this time it comes with full ARM processing to make it faster and better, and SIFT processing; and with all of the algorithms from the H9 Max and H90, you now have some 74 sounds to play with.
Some of these are the kinds of sounds you can only really get from Eventide, such as its sui generis PitchFuzz algorithm, which comprises a trio of pitch shifters, delay, and a fuzz-cum-distortion, and there are some on-trend sounds that we’d forecast will play well for the avant-indie and shoegaze soundscaper, with Cosmic Web, Glitch, GrainMod, and Stutter showing us what happens when Eventide embraces the “granular” revolution.
The aforementioned SIFT technology now allows the H9 to run the polyphonic algorithms just as its flagship units do. All of these sounds can be bamboozling, but you’ve got more than a thousand presets to organize them.
As before, you can only run one preset/algorithm at any one time, but these effects contain multitudes. The H9 Gen 2 could be a powerful chameleon to have on your ‘board for wildcard sounds and studio-quality delay and reverb essentials.
Also launched this week…
Knaggs 250th Anniversary Limited run
While most people will resort to a box of fireworks and grill some dogs to celebrate the USA turning the big two-fifty, Joe Knaggs had different ideas, and instead turned his peerless luthierie skills towards a super limited run of Kenai and Severn models that have F-18s and F-16s performing a fly-by on an ebony fingerboard. Spectacular. They're only making 25 of them. Order by the end of July.
For more: Knaggs Guitars
Two Notes Genome 2
This is a good week for updating your digital guitar eco-system, because Two Notes Engineering has just launched Genome 2.0, upgrading its fully integrated amp modeler, effects, and virtual cab engine with some serious new features. Its multi-parametric AmpNet capture tech could be a game-changer.
For more: Two Notes
Gibson Custom Historic Reissue 1959 ES-330 and 1962 ES-330
Playing a nice ES-330 is one of the greatest experiences you can have as a guitar player, and while that hollowbody gives some the fear – what about the feedback? – the P-90 mojo, the resonance, the musicality of the instrument... it's really something. And these two period-correct 1959 and 1962 Historic Reissues look truly exceptional.
For more: Gibson
Winzz WCG370 nylon-string
For $399, this new hybrid nylon-string guitar is a sweet deal. It has a thinline African mahogany body topped with spruce and a flame maple veneer. There's an undersaddle piezo with volume, bass, and treble, and some nice finish options, too.
For more: Winzz Guitars
Harley Benton BLOCK Series bass amps
Portable and configurable, Harley Benton's new BLOCK Series includes 200, 300, 600, and 800-watt Class D bass amp heads, plus a variety of matching cabinets. You don't need us to tell you these are affordable.
For more: Harley Benton
- What's your favorite new gear release of the week? Let us know in the comments below.
