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Pedal Review – Brut(e) Dewitte Wired – Add huge sounds to your pedalboard
Wednesday, 07 March 2018
Nicolas Dewitte has been designing and producing pedals under the brand Dewitte Wired since 2004, the pedal model Brut(e) represents the synthesis of all experiments to propose a pedal with huge sounds on your pedalboard. Note that the pedal is presented as a preamp that is to say that it can of course work in
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Guitar Review – Origin P90 hum-cancelling – Tony Girault luthier
Friday, 23 February 2018
The luthier Tony Girault continues to develop his range of guitar around his form Origin with a new classy model. See for yourself: we have a beautiful flamed maple top, a beautiful walnut body and a roasted maple neck. Plus this instrument features the all-new P90 hum-canceling pickups from Tony's design. www.giraultguitars.com Guitar Review -
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Guitar amp mic shootout – Shure SM57, SM58 and Koch loadbox LB-120 II
Monday, 19 February 2018
Miking up the sound of a guitar amp is an art in its own right where generations of sound engineers and home studio adepts continue to struggle to get the right sound. Since The Guitar Channel has a showroom in Paris, I experiment more and more with different sound recording methods for the recording of
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P90 pickup shootout: 1 guitar, 3 pickups from Girault, Häussel, Dreamsongs
Sunday, 21 January 2018
The idea of the P90 Shootout is simple: compare 3 P90 pickups on the same guitar. So the luthier Tony Girault came to the showroom with one of his Louisiane model guitar to make the P90 pickup swaps and yours truly served as a test pilot to make videos in the 3 configurations. The 3
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Guitar Review – Halfbreed Springer model by Springer Guitars
Wednesday, 22 November 2017
Back in September, The Guitar Channel proposed you to listen to a guitar only using the audio file of the review. The objective was to use more our ears than our eyes to evaluate the sound. The suspens is over, now is the time to reveal the mystery guitar! It's a guitar hand built by
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Xotic (xotic.us) is a brand highly known for its boost pedals and its overdrives in the forefront of which we find the BB Preamp which pursues an endless career on many pedals around the world. The Xotic Soul Driven is a signature overdrive pedal designed for the musician Allen Hinds. Xotic Soul Driven signature Allen Hinds
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The Martin 000-15SM that you will discover in this review is my personal guitar which I acquired to return to playing the steel string acoustic guitar to regain the taste of pure sound without artifice. At C.F. Martin, the reference 000 designates the shape of the body, the figure 15 indicates that the guitar is
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Guitar review – Sorcerer 62 MJS Guitars – Luthier Godefroy Maruejouls
Friday, 08 September 2017
Godefroy Maruejouls is a French luthier who has been building high quality guitars, acoustic or electric. Last time we reviewed one of his acoustic instrument, this time this is an electric guitar called the Sorcerer 62. Video review of the Sorcerer 62 Audio version of the review For those into audio, here's the podcast version
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In order to change from the usual format of guitar review, here's a new idea: you will find below the audio recording of a guitar reviewed on The Guitar Channel, the goal is to guess which guitar or at least which kind of guitar it is!
Review setup
Path: guitar > jack > Kelt V-Twin amp > Shure SM-58 > Tascam DR-70D
No equalization applied or reverv or anythyng: just the dry signal coming from the SM-58
The settings on the amp were the sam throughout the review
Any idea about the guitar?
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Gear Review – The Seymour Duncan Mag Mic system for acoustic guitar
Friday, 16 June 2017
The Mag Mic system from Seymour Duncan is a solution that is seen more and more often in the instruments of pro musicians. So recently Adam Miller came to the Backstage showroom for a Guitar in Hand interview with his guitar made by the luthier Jeff Traugott which is equipped with this system, same for Shai
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Pedal Review Strymon Sunset, double overdrive/boost Swiss army knife
Friday, 02 June 2017
Here's the Sunset, the latest effort from Strymon to attack the analog kingdom of overdrive and boost pedals. After the Riverside also reviewed on The Guitar Channel, this new double pedal propose another angle with 6 types of overdrive and boost, 3 per sides of the pedal, that you can combine. In fact you can have A going into B, B going into A or both running in parallel.
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A nice shred machine in video review with this Soul Renegade built by the French luthier Benoît Guilbert.
Soul Renegade video review
Until the next interview, keep on playing the guitar!
Pierre.
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The compressor is an effect that is always a bit intimidating because of the number of parameters often: attack time, release time, compression ratio, output volume, etc. That's why Alexandre Ernandez, the designer of Anasounds, made the choice with this Lazy Comp pedal to propose a compressor with ... one button!
The parameter controlled by this single button is the percentage of mixing between direct sound and compressed sound.
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Here is in review a new exceptional guitar, the Unicorn Classic model built in the Finnish luthier Juha Ruokangas workshop. It is an instrument that was kindly lent me by a backstager (thank you David!). Given the very small number of guitars made by Juha and his team, it was an unexpected opportunity to test a guitar of this caliber.
We are indeed here in the super high-end realm. The price of this model with the options included in this specific instrument (superb table, gold hardware, etc.) requires a budget of about 9 500 €.
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Joe Walsh Double Classic from Analog Alien review: overdrive/compressor
Wednesday, 03 May 2017
Analog Alien (www.analogalien.com) is an American brand of boutique pedal that offers a range of products with a very original look and a beautiful palette of sounds. After the Rumble Seat (reviewed in this article) The Guitar Channel offers you to discover another cool pedal built by the Napoli brothers, the Joe Walsh Double Classic.
As its name implies it was developed for the legendary guitar player from The Eagles: Joe Walsh.
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Telecaster pickups shootout – Lollar Pickups vs Dreamsongs Pickups
Tuesday, 04 April 2017
Here is shootout of two sets of Telecaster pickups, one from Dreamsongs Pickups (www.dreamsongspickups.com) with the Classic Blues-Rock reference from Italy and one from Lollar Pickups (www.lollarguitars.com) from the US with the 52 T reference.
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Luthier Guitar Review: Oniric from Franfret (Spain)
Wednesday, 29 March 2017
Francisco Rodriguez is a Spanish luthier The Guitar Channel interviewed during the Holy Grail Guitar Show.
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Pedal Review – Rumble Seat from Analog Alien: overdrive/delay/reverb in 1 unit!
Friday, 17 March 2017
Analog Alien (www.analogalien.com) is an American brand of boutique pedal that offers a range of products with a very original look and a beautiful palette of sounds.
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Mojo Classic Ruokangas Guitars review – A Telecaster coming from Finland
Wednesday, 15 March 2017
Juha Ruokangas is a Finnish luthier well known on The Guitar Channel since he has been the subject of several interviews and has also animated a series of luthier chronicles. Juha (pronounced Yu-A) manufactures with a small team of luthiers instruments of very high quality entirely by hand, without the help of CNC (ie without Computer Numeric Control machine).
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Riverside Strymon overdrive pedal review – Powerhouse tone machine
Wednesday, 08 March 2017
Until now Strymon proposed mainly pedals in the delay and modulation field, with the Riverside they are now getting in the overdrive business.
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"The Burst" is a guitar made by the luthier Mikaël Springer as a tribute to the mythical Les Paul Standard 1959 by Gibson.
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Finally a Jazz guitar reviewed on The Guitar Channel! Yes, everything happens. Here is the D'Angelico model EX-SS in a very standard configuration: archtop type guitar with two humbuckers.
D'Angelico EX-SS video review
Audio version of the video available in the podcast:
Photo album
What I enjoyed the most
The sounds
The built quality
The confort of playing
What I enjoyed the least
Too much gold hardware!
Conclusion
For a budget of around $1,500, the EX-SS offers a very good guitar that should delight the fans of Jazz and Blues.
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One of the important announcements of NAMM 2017 was the release of a new John Mayer 100W all tube amp by PRS. As a media The Guitar Channel was invited to the press conference. Usually I am not very fan of the exercise of the press conference as it is usually limited to basically reading a press release or pretty much so.
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Alteratio Tocxic Instruments – Guitar Review of the Mad Max Explorer?
Friday, 06 January 2017
Here's an unusual instrument for a review, the Alteratio model from Tocxic Instruments. It's designed and built in France by a small team of passionate people. This might as well be the Explorer type guitar that Mad Max would use.
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Feedback from Joris, a backstager who reviewed
the Bellwether Walrus Audio delay pedal
during a Backstage Gear Tour
Hello fellow guitar players,
Thanks to a Backstage Gear Tour, I had the pleasure to test at home the Bellwether, a delay pedal from the American boutique builder Walrus Audio (reviewed by The Guitar Channel in this article). Here's a video which will hopefully inspire you to test this pedal.
Joris video review
My feedback
Overall, the sound is very warm with a slight dark side on my gear. The Tone setting is well thought out to adjust the tone of the effect.
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As promised in the article documenting the installation of the Häussel Pickups in my PRS McCarty, here's the pickup shootout between the stock PRS McCarty pickups and the set of 59 pickups from Häussel Pickups.
Pickup Shootout: PRS McCarty vs Häussel 59
I tried as much as possible to cover the same kind of guitar playing throughout the test: with the fingers only, with a pick, light and heavy riffing, etc.
Conditions of the test
Guitar: 2005 PRS McCarty
Strings: no change of strings to keep this parameter the same between both recordings
Sound: Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface
Types
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Häussel Pickups installation in a PRS McCarty
Saturday, 26 November 2016
The German pickups Häussel Pickups equip many high-end European luthiers, Nik Huber, Ruokangas and Springer to name only those three. It was necessary that The Guitar Channel studied more on those pickups.
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Walrus Audio Bellwether – An excellent delay pedal full of possibilities
Monday, 21 November 2016
Walrus Audio offers, with the Bellwether, a very complete analog sound delay pedal offering a delay with many possible settings. In addition to the conventional time, level and tone settings, you can activate and set a modulation and decide the subdivision in time, not to mention the tap tempo button (to determine the delay time) and the possibilities with external connections.
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The XTomp Hotone pedal is a brand new pedal that has recently come on the market with an innovative concept: the ability to load an effect (or a couple of effects) on the pedal to make it sound like a reverb / delay, Chorus / reverb, overdrive, etc. The proposed catalog is very extensive and contains just about all the great classics of the analog pedal you can think of.
The effects are loaded on the pedal using an iOS / Android app that communicates in Bluetooth with the pedal.
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In 2014 I had the opportunity to meet Harry Häussel (Haussel Pickups - www.haeussel.com) at the Holy Grail Guitar Show (see interview below). Harry is a renowned manufacturer of electric guitar pickups whose products are used by Ruokangas, Nik Huber and Springer.
At each major guitar event like the Musikmesse or the Holy Grail, Harry was present and we always took time to discuss.
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