Music is the universal language
“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” - Luke 2:14
General Interest
Never been to the Sphere in Vegas? If you’re a Metallica fan, you soon might
Rumours suggest that Metallica might be the next big band to launch a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere venue.
The sphere, which opened in 2023 and cost over two billion to build, has a capacity of 20,000 people and is home to the world’s largest LED screen. Its exterior hosts 580,000 sq feet of LEDs and is bright enough to be seen from space.
Since opening, it has hosted residencies from artists like U2, Dead & Company, and The Eagles. Now, according to Vital Vegas, sources say that Metallica are ready to “ink a deal” with the Sphere for their turn.
The outlet says it is “hearing Metallica could play [the] Sphere in the fall of 2026, but specifics haven’t been confirmed or announced yet”. However, the band does have some M72 world tour dates scheduled for the end of the year, which kick off in Australia on 1 November.
Interestingly, Metallica’s Kirk Hammett has previously shown interest in performing at the sphere, and it certainly would be a great fit for the band, offering the ability to pull off a show like never before thanks to the venue’s all-encompassing screen. Just take a look at the visuals U2’s former stint below:
Last year, John Mayer spoke of Dead & Company’s residency there, and said the venue has “established overnight a new big league” of bands who have the vision and budget to take advantage of its unique, immersive space.
He told the LA Times, “I think what we all love is that there’s finally once again a live-music space race. There’s the social-media space race, the podcast space race, the AI [artificial intelligence] space race. But live music pretty much stayed the same for such a long time.”
We will provide any further information on these rumours as we get it. In the meantime, you can view the official scheduled dates for the rest of Metallica’s M72 world tour via their website.
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“I paid $2,800 for it at a vintage dealer. Now, I think the guitar would be worth six figures”: What was Elliot Easton’s greatest gear find? The Cars legend reveals all – and argues that today’s players have never had it better
“It’s the wide range of voices that impresses. Old or new, these are far from one-trick ponies”: PJD Carey Classic review
Why have we forgotten the greatest female guitar heroes? The pioneering women who shaped guitar history
In the early 1920s, amongst the gospel community in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, a six-year-old girl was busy mastering a strange yet intriguing musical instrument. There were strings on it which, when plucked, each sounded higher than the last, and she found that picking and strumming them beneath the swing of the gospel choir added a new dimension to the music that she couldn’t yet grasp.
As the years rolled on and the girl started touring church conventions with her mother, she learned more about this enthralling thing called the guitar. Practice taught her that combining certain elements from gospel music like call and response patterns and complex rhythms with the guitar’s charismatic twang created a new kind of music that was unfamiliar.
It had the usual energy and chord progressions that gospel music was known for, but this time there was an infectious back-and-forth groove driven chiefly by the guitar. By the time the late 1930s came around, people were enchanted by her music. She’d secured a spot at a rising nightclub in New York City, The Cotton Plant, and was soon enough signed with Decca Records.
The girl’s name was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Her astounding ability to popularise the guitar and stitch it together with scraps of gospel music and blues had never been seen before, and it’s widely credited for birthing what’s now known as rock ‘n’ roll.
But if she’s at least partially responsible for inventing one of the most popular musical genres to ever exist (and aptly nicknamed the “Godmother of Rock and Roll”) why don’t more people know and recognise her and the influence she’s had on the entire industry?
Moving The Needle
While there’s undoubtedly been a greater appreciation of Tharpe in guitar circles in recent years, she and those like her rarely get the same level of plaudits as their male contemporaries.
Even when they do get some credit in popular culture, it’s often as part of a wider male-centric storyline. For example, it was great to see Yola powerfully embody Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis movie, but she was still part of someone else’s story, not her own.
“The biggest underlying issue is that women guitarists are facing intersectionality,” says Dr Freya Jarman, a researcher in the Department of Music at the University of Liverpool. “Their femaleness gets superseded by maleness. It’s absolutely perfect for somebody like Elvis to come along and blast Rosetta Tharpe’s story out of the water. As women, they get sidelined by people like him, or Muddy Waters, or Chuck Berry.”
Intersectionality is the framework put in place to describe discrimination experienced by someone because of their race, gender, sex, class, sexuality or ability. Because of misogyny, and in some cases racism charged by the Jim Crow laws, women like Tharpe, Memphis Minnie, Elizabeth Cotten and even Mary Ford – a wonderful and influential guitar player in her own right who regularly gets pigeonholed as ‘Les Paul’s wife’ – don’t get the recognition they deserve today.
“There’s a massive scale power dynamic in which whiteness and maleness trumps lots of other things,” continues Jarman. “You do find lots of black men on those lists [of famous rock and blues guitarists] as well, like Prince or Jimi Hendrix. But there’s perhaps a kind of fetishization of blackness, especially when it comes to the blues, because there’s a sort of authenticity about it. But there’s never been a long and strong tradition of women electric guitarists in particular.”
Breaking Stereotypes
There’s an argument against intersectionality that bases itself around the famous female singers of the 20th century who receive much admiration and recognition today. The likes of these women include Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Peggy Lee and so on.
But they’re all largely famous for their voices (long-considered an emotional instrument or window to the soul, therefore coded as appropriate for women) if not for their piano playing or songwriting, so was there something fundamentally incompatible about women and the guitar during the last century?
“There’s a lot of policing of women’s bodies around certain instruments,” says Jarman. “There’s all kinds of questions around class and race and appropriate femininity, and it puts huge pressure on women.
“The physicality of the guitar is an interesting thing for a number of reasons,” they continue. “One is the sheer practicality of playing a guitar when you’ve got boobs – there are even guitar companies that specialize in making guitars for the female frame. But there’s a lot to say about how we stereotype some instruments as appropriate for one gender over another. Many of the things that people have said about the electric guitar and women are the same things that people used to say in the early 19th century about the violin and women.
“Today, we consider the violin to be a really feminine instrument – if you look at the string sections of major orchestras, they’re full of women. But people used to say it’s physically inappropriate, or it makes women look awkward when they play the violin. Things started shifting one day for a lot of social reasons and, 150 years later, we’ve forgotten that it was ever like that. So, I do wonder whether there’s hope for the guitar and for women in the future.”
Kerri Layton, guitarist and Memphis Minnie superfan, feels frustrated at the lack of recognition for female guitarists, especially after some like Memphis Minnie publicised the Delta blues by demonstrating enviable fingerpicking techniques.
“It feels like she’s in danger of being forgotten by music culture,” says Layton, who’s also a singer-songwriter and founder of coaching business, Dixiebird Music. Active from the 1920s to the 1950s, Memphis Minnie was revered for being a passionate storyteller, coupling the electric guitar with her original songs that turned heads for showcasing her stentorian voice and masterful fingerpicking licks. She had such skill that people claimed she performed “like a man”.
“To be honest, I don’t understand where the competition comes from,” continues Layton. “Even though it’s a competitive industry, musicians are inherently extremely supportive of each other, and I feel like it’s an industry-created problem. Female musicians have their own challenges which are different to men’s, but I’m over the separation of it all.”
The Pioneers
One of the countless challenges women have faced throughout history is the ideology that invention and pioneering belongs to men. For centuries, what makes someone masculine is their ability to hunt and gather and find new ways to make a living for themselves and for their family. Women have typically been expected to look after and preserve what men have given them – a house, a living and even their children.
So, when you expand that theory, having a woman create something new like a whole musical genre or another way of playing an instrument doesn’t fit the frame. Even in today’s age, this ideology is buried too deep into society, so we reject and ignore anything that goes against it without sometimes realising.
What’s abundantly clear, though, is that every female guitarist to make their mark on the music industry has touched listeners in a uniquely profound way, much like Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Albert King and the rest of the rock and blues gods have done themselves.
“I feel like I’ve met [Memphis Minnie] in song,” says Layton. “I felt like her lyrics spoke to me because her songs were really for independent women. Her songs had such strong lyrics. But maybe the narrative has been diluted over time. That sense of authenticity – that she really lived in her music – has been lost today.”
However, perhaps there’s hope yet. Beneath the pomp and explosive adoration smothering Elvis is a little boy who grew up in his own gospel community. Back in 1953, at 18 years old, he walked through the doors of Sun Studios with just the guitar he got for his 11th birthday. He was inexperienced and shy, but he’d heard the strange, exhilarating music Sister Rosetta Tharpe had been making.
“Elvis loved Sister Rosetta,” Gordon Stoker, who worked as a vocalist with both Tharpe and Presley admitted in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. “That’s what really attracted Elvis: her pickin’. He liked her singing, but he liked that pickin’ first – because it was so different.”
If you know where to look for it, you’ll find these women and their impact everywhere. Elvis made his own sound that day and shot to fame, never coming down again, but those who inspired him, although ignored for some time, will always be the same.
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New Dual Channel Stereo Looper Pedal
PRS Guitars Releases Two of Its Most Popular Pickups for Sale as Stand-Alone Parts
PRS Guitars today announced that their renowned 58/15 LT and 85/15 pickups are now available aftermarket from authorized PRS dealers and directly through the PRS West Street East online store.
PRS 58/15 LT (“low turn”) pickups are vintage-inspired pickups with exceptional clarity. Designed to capture the sweetness of vintage single coils and the warmth of late 1950’s humbuckers, these pickups are lively and open with focused midrange and balanced treble and bass.
PRS 85/15 pickups bring modern and vintage pickup design together to deliver exceptional clarity and extended high and low end. With balanced full-spectrum clarity, PRS 85/15’s are perfect for modern players driving a pedalboard and have enough character to deliver when plugging straight into an amp.
The music industry continues to take notice of PRS pickup designs. When describing the 58/15 LT pickups, guitar content creator Sean Daniel recently said, “The balance of PRS pickups is probably my favorite part. They’re warm and bright at the same time … there’s a distinction between the frequency bands that you get with the PRS stuff that is awesome.”
Earlier this summer, PRS also introduced new apparel, hats and lifestyle offerings, along with a range of parts now available for individual purchase. The popular PRS Rechargeable Clip-On Headstock Tuner has also been updated to charge via USB-c for more convenience. As always, you can find genuine PRS accessories at any Authorized PRS Dealer and, in the USA, online in the PRS West Street East accessories store.
“This summer’s accessory releases include options for everyone from the casual player to pro musicians who use our gear on stages worldwide. We are especially excited to offer our 85/15 and 58/15 LT humbucking pickups for sale as a pair or as individual options,” said PRS Guitars Director of Marketing, Judy Schaefer.
PRS Guitars continues its schedule of launching new products each month in 2025. Stay tuned to see new gear and 40th Anniversary limited-edition guitars throughout the year. For all of the latest news, click www.prsguitars.com/40 and follow @prsguitars on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, X, and YouTube.
It’s Time To Crash Your Component Stash!
Does the uncertainty of tariffs provide an opportunity for builders who’ve been collecting vintage, rare, and favorite electronics to turn them into cool, premium pedals?
I’ve been thinking recently about the state of electronic components as it pertains to imports and tariffs. Now, before you get turned off, this will be from a manufacturing perspective and not a political one. This is actually in line with my very first article about supply-chain issues, from the March 2022 issue.
I feel pretty confident saying that most of us pedal manufacturers are collectors and enjoyers of components—especially vintage and rare ones. Quite possibly to the extent that it encroaches on pack-rat behavior. I’m no Analog Man, but I have personally accrued components for a variety of reasons: discontinued models, overstock, vintage coolness, and even wishful thinking. These components typically sit dormant, patiently waiting for their chance to be called up to the big show, all the while looking on from the sidelines as standard production components rule the roost.
So, how do these components play a role in the conversation as it pertains to tariffs? Well, as we monitor the rollercoaster that is import tariffs on foreign goods, it makes me think about looking internally. Now, that’s not me subtly implying a “make the stuff in America” ideology. It’s more about taking stock of the component collections already here and creating what we can with what we have. It’s the practice of creating when working within limitations—the antithesis of option paralysis. When you’re given limitations, it often breeds creativity in a healthy and productive way.
Up until a few years ago, I had been collecting a bin of special parts. This bin ranges from cool transistors to germanium diodes to bags of my personal favorites, tropical-fish capacitors. These are caps that I scrub through internet marketplaces to procure. They aren’t prominent in any current products, but for me they fall into that aforementioned “wishful thinking” or “one of these days” categories. It’s the equivalent of a hutch or cabinetry to accommodate a fine china collection—those plates you never use because your mom was saving them for special occasions, and now they’re yours.
As much as I appreciate the idea of a special occasion, that concept can lead to an idea or project being placed on the back burner indefinitely—shades of the saying “perfect is the enemy of done.” There may never be an occasion that is deemed special enough. Let’s also remember that we are the givers of value and one person’s mundane is another’s special occasion.
“When you’re given limitations, it often breeds creativity in a healthy and productive way.”
You’ve probably heard enough philosophical cork-sniffery from me for one article, so let’s get back to pedals and components! Now the joy for these components is not just the province of builders; it’s also often important to players. To reference Analog Man again, when looking at ordering options for a Sun Face fuzz from their website, I was presented with 18 transistor options. This helps corroborate the idea that players get on the same nerd level as builders. Both share a joy for these little electronic components. Choosing your pedal-to-be’s transistors is the same thing as your friend that’s a car nut ordering custom parts from a small body shop.
Creativity is something I would categorize as an unstoppable force. Much like how Dr. Ian Malcolm said “life finds a way” in Jurassic Park, I say creativity demands an outlet. Suppression is futile. So let’s bring it back to those fancy dinner plates in the hutch. They’re screaming to be used and not just left on a trajectory of an unfulfilled future.
The thought of this unfulfilled future is something that sticks in my head. It makes me take that image of plates and replace it with that bin of components. That, compounded with import difficulties, leads me to more aggressively entertain the idea of moving forward with that bin of parts and bring something fun to life. Perhaps these tariffs are the catalyst us pack rats need; perhaps we’re ready to take that fine china out of the hutch.
Manson’s new Mikey Demus signature model is designed for drop tunings and heavy riffing
[Editor’s note: Manson Guitar Works is part of Vista Musical Instruments which, like Guitar.com, is part of the Caldecott Music Group.]
Manson Guitar Works has teamed up with Skindred’s Mikey Demus for the release of a new signature model, the MD-3.
The reggae metal guitarist’s new axe is based on Manson’s classic MA profile guitar and has been “extensively updated” for this third iteration. It takes into account Demus’ playing style, providing a neck carve that allows for “effortless chordal work”, and a revised profile shape designed for heavy riffing in drop tunings.
- READ MORE: Redbeard Effects Bearded Vulture review – the last heavy distortion pedal you’ll ever need?
The MD-3 has a lightweight obeche body, roasted maple neck and rosewood fingerboard, a dual-action stainless-steel truss-rod that allows the guitar to be set precisely for whatever style the player chooses, and a custom dual humbucker pickup set selected with Demus’ tonal range in mind.
The Benchmark humbucker in the neck is described as providing “warm, full-bodied tone” thanks to classic Alnico II magnets with 7.5k output, while the Manson MD Custom bridge pickup, exclusive to the new MD-3, has been given a “full-throated” boost to nearly 14k of output due to additional winds and ceramic magnets.
Image: Manson Guitar Works
The guitar comes in either Dry Satin Black or Atomic Tangerine. The Black version sports a Wildcat Orange scratchplate, with the Tangerine providing a contrasting black plate. Both versions feature Demus’ signature on the rear of the headstock.
Each also hosts a Gotoh bridge, tailpiece and machine heads, but the Black features has a blend of hardware finishes: its machine heads are black, while its bridge and tailpiece come in nickel.
Both guitars also have two volume controls, two tone controls, and push/pull switching for series or parallel tone operation, plus a three-way toggle switch. And, lefties rejoice: there’s no upcharge on the left-handed version of the MD-3.
Check out the guitar in action with Demus below:
The Dry Satin Black MD-3 is priced at £1999, while the Atomic Tangerine version is £2099. Find out more via Manson Guitar Works.
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“I’d saved up $2,000 just from busking and playing gigs and asking my grandparents for money at Christmas”: Molly Tuttle reminisces on her first Martin – and how it ended up in Arizona's Musical Instrument Museum
“Introduces several highly requested features”: Neural DSP answers players’ prayers with new Nano Cortex update
Al Nesbitt & the Alchemy Drop Latest Single “The Lost Night” as Part of “Live in Seattle” EP
Trending instrumental guitarist Al Nesbitt and his all-star band deliver their newest track to fans everywhere.
The band announced its latest independently-released single is an original composition penned by Nesbitt that includes memorable melodies—all captured and mixed byGrammy award recipient, Steve Smith. An all-new music video accompanies the single and can be found on the band’s YouTube Channel.
Nesbitt comments, “Steve’s work has been just beautiful. Everything has its own space in the mix, but each track becomes very cohesive and big when it needs to be.
”The legendary “Fretless Monster” Tony Franklin of The Firm, Blue Murder, Kenny WayneSheppard, David Gilmour and Kate Bush fame provides world class bass lines with his signatureFender Fretless Precision Bass.
Completing the rhythm section is ace studio drummer, Curt Bisquera. Kirkee B as he is also known, has played with notable artists including Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, Elton John and ChrisIsaak. Bisquera and Franklin lock in a solid foundation for Nesbitt’s nylon string solos and hooks.
Keyboardist extraordinaire, Jonathan Sindelman completes the four-piece ensemble and has contributed to the music of GooGoosh, Alan White Band, Furious Bongos, Element Band. Sindelman’s impressive solos are featured throughout the “The Lost Night” as well as the “Live in Seattle” EP.
Follow Al Nesbitt and the Alchemy on Facebook and Instagram. “Live in Seattle” including “TheLost Night” and first single “Room 53” can be streamed on Spotify.
Marty Stuart: Outside of Nashville and Into the Cosmos
In the pantheon of popular country music artists, Marty Stuart has always been both an anomaly in Nashville and one of the genre’s biggest champions. How else to define the man who scored a 1992 hit with “Now That’s Country,” a twangy paean to the virtues of a simple rural life, while the same year humorously eschewing the Nashville signifier of the day, the cowboy hat, on his No Hats Tour with Travis Tritt?
Meanwhile, behind the scenes he was quietly amassing the largest known private collection of country music memorabilia in the world—which, of course, includes more than a few cowboy hats alongside rhinestone-studded Nudie suits, handwritten song lyrics, classic musical instruments, and a century’s worth of ephemera.
And despite earning bulletproof bonafides by serving as a sideman to country-music pillars Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash, tours of duty that occupied more than a dozen years and turned him from a teenage prodigy to a touted major-label artist, his interests outside of Nashville have become a large part of his musical life.
On his first full album of instrumental songs, the new 20-tune collection Space Junk, recorded with his longtime co-conspirators the Fabulous Superlatives, Stuart shows exactly why he was never fully Nashville’s guy in the first place. “In my original record collection, there were several records by the Ventures and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass,” Stuart says of his adventurous early musical loves, both of which left a sizable sonic imprint on Space Junk.
In the ’60s, instrumental groups were common on the charts, and Floyd Cramer’s wordless 1960 hit, “Last Date” was a mainstay in Stuart’s childhood home in Philadelphia, Mississippi, alongside the bluegrass he was devouring and quickly mastering. “Instrumentals were just part of the language that I grew up listening to,” he says.
Marty Stuart’s Gear
Guitars
1954 Fender Telecaster with B-bender (“Clarence”)
1956 Gretsch 6120
1967 Fender Kingman (Nashville tuning)
1939 Martin D-45
Amps
Fender Deluxe with power boost mod
Strings and Picks
D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Wound, various gauges (electric)
D’Addario Phosphor Bronze, various gauges (acoustic)
Fender medium tortoise shell picks
Kenny Vaughan’s Gear
Guitars
RS Guitarworks Kenny Vaughan model
Fender Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster
1961 Fender Jazzmaster
1999 Martin HD-28
1983 Fender Squire Stratocaster
1993 Rickenbacker 360/12V64
Amps
Fender Princeton
Marshall JMP PA20
“The minute I stepped out of chasing one record or one style of record down two streets in Nashville and got back into being a world-class musical citizen rather than just being a hit-chasing hillbilly, it opened up the sky.”
With a lifetime’s worth of musical range already percolating, Stuart entered the trade himself at age 12 as a mandolinist in the employ of bluegrass pioneer Flatt. Instrumental flair was part of the set in those days, encouraged by the marquee names themselves. “Everybody knew that Johnny Cash was a star and Lester was a star, but there was a turn every night where everybody had their moment,” Stuart says. He took the experience as training, and the Superlatives—guitarist Kenny Vaughan, multi-instrumentalist Chris Scruggs and drummer Harry Stinson—have carried on the tradition from day one. “Everybody can step up and run the show without breaking a sweat, and it spoils me to pieces to have people like that around me.”
Stuart has made a habit of being an enthusiastic collaborator. When his solo recording career took off with his 1989 album, Hillbilly Rock, the first in a three-album run of Gold-certified records, he followed it by co-writing the Grammy-winning “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin,’” which he and Tritt recorded together in 1991. The duo repeated the trick on “This One’s Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)” the next year.
But after pursuing hits, Stuart aimed for another level of expression and storytelling with The Pilgrim, an ambitious concept album built around a love-triangle narrative. While the project was one of his least commercially successful endeavors, it marked the arrival of a new regimen for Stuart. “The minute I stepped out of chasing one record or one style of record down two streets in Nashville [a reference to the city’s home of industry, Music Row] and got back into being a world-class musical citizen rather than just being a hit-chasing hillbilly, it opened up the sky,” he says.
What pulled him out of the morass was scoring All the Pretty Horses, the 2000 film adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, which he credits with teaching him about painting without words. “The visual and the sonic worlds have to dance together,” he says. “It all comes down to whether it moves somebody or it doesn’t. It comes from the heart or it doesn't.”
When Stuart assembled the Fabulous Superlatives to back him on the 2003 album Country Music, he found the band that could fully express his vision of a boundless group rooted in country but willing to explore the outer limits of their sonic tapestry. To wit, Space Junk wasn’t conceived in a conventional series of studio sessions. Rather, it shows how deeply down the rabbit hole the band members were willing to go from the jump.
“We really didn’t set out to write an instrumental record,” Stuart explains. “We just kept making up songs that made us smile and we enjoyed playing on stage. It turned us back into kids with our first Fender guitars, and that’s the truth.”
The songs on Space Junk predate both 2023’s cosmic country-rock Altitude—recorded after backing the Sweetheart of the Rodeo 50th anniversary tour with the Byrds’ Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn—and 2017’s trippy, high-desert hallucination Way Out West. Informed by his childhood influences, many of which he shares with his bandmates in the Fabulous Superlatives, Space Junk cracks open the cinematic sweep of Stuart’s musical universe.
Opening the album with a reverb-rattled surf lick, “The Graveyard” begins the immersion into the group’s interplanetary soundscape. Stuart gets out further with the mindbending leads on “Bat Patrol” and pulls high drama into the wide-open Western skies of “All the Pretty Horses.”
“I get up and see what [the guitar] has to say that day, and it’s always wonderful to learn a new lick or a new chord that actually works somewhere,” he says. “Songs are what bring those things about easily for me.”
“We just kept making up songs that made us smile and we enjoyed playing on stage. It turned us back into kids with our first Fender guitars.”
The Vaughan-penned tunes “The Surfing Cowboy” and “The Ballad of the Lonely Surfer” are opposite sides of the same coin. Although both are rooted in Ventures-style surf music, the latter is built around a tremulous chord progression and melody while the former is an upbeat tune with bright, Byrdsian passages bookending leads by Vaughan and Stuart, who played a 1967 Fender Kingman in Nashville tuning. Stinson and Scruggs also contributed songs to the project, with Scruggs playing the prominent pedal steel on closer “Waltz of the Waves” and lead guitar on “Slipnote Serenade,” both of which he wrote, and Stinson writing and arranging strings on the title track.
“The thing I admire about this record is that it’s really melodic in a world where there’s a thousand notes a minute flying at you from the hottest guitar players in the world,” Stuart says. “And trust me, everybody on this bandstand can slay you with 1,000 notes a minute. But something that shows a lot of wisdom and a lot of maturity as a player is air, and there’s a lot of air on this record, and the melodies are hummable.”
Irony is a certified guitar slinger who owns a vast collection of country-music artifacts but only keeps “a couple of acoustics” at his home, like the pre-war Martin D-28 with “a real skinny neck that sounds like a cannon” that Stuart often picks up. His only amplified rig around the house isn’t even for a guitar. It’s a Buck Trent electric banjo and Sho-Bud amplifier.
Among his storied collection are Johnny Cash’s personal gloss-black Martin D-35, A.P. Carter’s 1936 Martin 000-28, a rosewood Fender Telecaster owned by Pops Staples and given to Stuart by daughters Mavis and Yvonne Staples, and guitars that once belonged to Carl Perkins, Charley Pride, and Merle Haggard. But while Stuart, one of Nashville’s great sidemen-turned-stars, may own an army of guitars, he only used a handful of his workhorses to make Space Junk. Arguably, the most historic guitar he owns is the one most associated with him now, the 1954 Fender Telecaster modified by Gene Parsons and Clarence White with the first B-bender.
“Every time I pick it up, there’s something to learn,” he says, “and that guitar still knows a hell of a lot more about me than I know about it. But I love playing it; I love the sound of it. I love the way it feels. But to tell you the truth, every time I think I’ve really got something going on, I hear some tape or some record that Clarence played on. Then, ‘No, back to the woodshed.’ It’s amazing to think that he died when he was 29 years old and he really had it on the run.”
Stuart also used a 1958 Gretsch 6120 hollowbody and a 1939 Martin D-45 to complement Vaughan’s RS Guitarworks signature model, a 1983 Squier Strat, a ’61 Jazzmaster, and a Mike Campbell signature model Telecaster.
“My rig is as straight ahead as Willie Nelson’s rig or Bill Monroe’s mandolin,” Stuart says. “I have a silverface Deluxe amp, and it has a power boost on it and an EQ that I couldn’t operate if my life depended on it.” For Stuart, the magic is in the guitars themselves. “If you plug that Clarence White guitar into any amp on planet Earth, it’s still gonna sound great. If you plug that Gretsch 6120 into any amp on planet Earth, it’s still gonna sound great. My sound is those guitars.”
Now in his sixth decade as a professional musician, his formerly black mane a shock of textured grays, Stuart is still reliably inclined to zag when the industry zigs. Having a band of virtuoso players on his side helps when he’s ready to make his next move.
“Being a part of this band, there’s nowhere they can’t go, legitimately,” he says. “If you can think it up, it can get played here. It makes the world a whole lot more interesting.”
YouTube It
Marty Stuart and Kenny Vaughan tear it up in a vintage appearance on Late Night with David Letterman.
Kenny Vaughan—Stuart’s 6-String Foil
Longtime Superlative sideman Kenny Vaughan isn’t your typical country guy who geeked on the Nashville sound as a kid. But on exploratory records like Space Junk, where versatility and imagination are part of the gig, his background has been a boon.
“I grew up listening to jazz [and took lessons from Bill Frisell], and then I got into Frank Zappa records and all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with country music,” he says. Yet, Vaughan developed a soft spot for honky-tonk tunes during his childhood in the late ’50s and early ’60s. “I’ll never forget the first time I heard Ernest Tubb. My head exploded. I was like, ‘This guy is from outer space.’”
By the time he picked up a guitar, the AM radio airwaves were awash in instrumental music. “They would always play an instrumental right before the news report at the top of the hour, so you’d hear ‘Rumble’ by Link Wray or ‘Walk Don’t Run’ by the Ventures,” he says. His first performance was a neighborhood recitation of surf tunes with other local kids, and later, when he formed a band of his own, they would open shows with the Ventures’ “Cruel Sea.”
Vaughan took his own circuitous route to Nashville, arriving in 1990 just as the hat acts—superstars like Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson—rose to prominence. He eventually found his place in the rowdier rooms of Lower Broadway and toured with Lucinda Williams before hooking up with Stuart in 2002. For more than two decades now, Vaughan and his Fabulous Superlatives bandmates have built up a mutual trust working within Stuart’s expansive musical landscape.
“Everybody in the band brings a lifetime of in-the-studio experience to the table, so when we work up tunes it’s pretty easy to fall into playing the right parts,” he says. “Every song is different, and rarely will we use the same starting point.”
The songs on Space Junk are a case study in how the group functions. All four musicians contributed songs and collaborated across its 20 tracks, and no one was uptight about taking cues from the others. On a few occasions, when Vaughan dialed up the “stratosphere tuning” made famous by Jimmy Bryant—a 12-string-specific configuration in which the doubling strings are tuned up a third instead of an octave—Stuart, with his encyclopedic knowledge of country-music instrumentation, was there to help guide his parts.
“Marty helped me work out the solos, because none of the notes were where they’re supposed to be,” he says. “When you play that tuning, you have to relearn the neck and compose your solo. I’d sit in the control room, and he’s sitting right next to me and saying, ‘No, play this.’ It was done on the fly, but he kind of produced me.”
Challenges sometimes came from his own tunes, like “Malibu Dawn,” which uses polychords. “I heard it in my head,” he says, “and I took a couple of days to work it out to where I could present it to the guys and walk them through the whole idea.” The band learned and mastered the tune, then put it on tape. “Some tracks play themselves, and boom, it’s done,” he says. “Others take a lot of work.”
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John Bohlinger’s Last Call: Do Aliens Dream of Electric Guitars?
Is music the galactic language? Our columnist contemplates breaking down even the most far-out barriers with the power of song.
In the 2015 animated film Home, the heroine, voiced by Rihanna, plays Rihanna’s “Dancing in the Dark” for Oh, an affable alien whose tribe, the Boov, have overtaken the world. Oh hates the song, claiming it’s “not even music.” Yet, as the beat hits, his body betrays him, twitching and gyrating to the groove. Oh cries, “You have tricked me into listening to a debilitating sonic weapon. I am not in control of my own extremities!” It’s a cartoon, sure, but it nails a truth: Music, whether you’re human or Boov, grabs you by the soul—or at least the hips.
Play the first few bars of Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good” or AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” and bodies move—doesn’t matter if it’s Tokyo, Nashville, or a yurt in Mongolia. This is not an exclusively human response. We can see both domesticated and wild animals move to music. Even plants, without the benefit of ears or a nervous system, respond to music.
So if music is the international language of Earth, what about beyond our planet? Just a few years ago, if you admitted you believed in alien life, the general public would act like you were crazy. But in these James-Webb-Telescope, Space-Force days, most agree that there is probably a whole lot outside of our little rock. That being established, one has to ask: Will life forms outside our world dig “Bohemian Rhapsody?”
Here’s the rub: Space is silent. Sound needs a medium—air, water, something—in which to travel. Space is a vacuum, so your Marshall stack’s wail dies before it leaves the stratosphere. But sound isn’t totally absent out there. In rare spots, like plasma clouds or planetary atmospheres, vibrations can carry. But even if the vibrations carry, is there anything or anyone there, and do they have ears?
Humans hear sound through ears tuned to 20–20,000 Hz, but some theorize aliens might sense sound differently—not through ears but via skin, picking up vibrations like a cosmic bass drop. That’s not much of a stretch when you consider that plants in lab experiments respond to music via cells called mechanoreceptors, growing faster when serenaded with Mozart. If ferns can vibe, why not E.T.?
Still, there’s no proof aliens have music or the brains to make it. Their sensory organs might be so alien that our 440 Hz-tuned melodies sound like static. Imagine a species evolved in a vacuum, communicating through light pulses like fireflies or electric fields like sharks. Or, if aliens have mastered sound waves to move pyramids or carve Petra in Jordan (as some fringe theories suggest), they might scoff at our use of music to shake our asses rather than build complex architecture.“If ferns can vibe, why not E.T.?”
But here’s where it gets wild. Sound might not just be vibes—it could carry mass. A 2019 Scientific American article dropped a mind-bender: Phonons, the particles of sound, may have a tiny negative mass, like a hydrogen atom. In water, these phonons fall upward against gravity at a measly 1 degree over 15 kilometers. It’s barely measurable, but it hints at sound’s untapped power. If aliens use sonic waves to teleport (as abduction stories claim), time travel, or levitate stones, our Spotify playlists might seem like cave paintings to their sonic tech.
Yet, primitive or not, music hits us where it counts. It’s emotional, instinctual, universal. When Oh dances despite himself, it’s a reminder that music bypasses the brain and goes straight for the gut. That’s why we’ve sent it to the stars with the Voyager Golden Records, launched in 1977 with Voyager 1. Curated by Carl Sagan, it’s two copies of a gold-plated LP carrying Earth’s greatest hits: Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Bulgarian folk music, Senegalese percussion, even whale songs. Sagan called it a “bottle into the cosmic ocean,” a hopeful bet that advanced aliens might spin it and get us. In 2008, NASA beamed the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” toward Polaris at 186,000 miles per second. Yoko Ono called it the dawn of interplanetary communication. And Vangelis’ Mythodea soundtracked NASA’s 2001 Mars mission, because nothing says cosmic like a synth symphony.
So, are we naive to think music’s our galactic handshake? Maybe. Aliens might hear “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and think it’s a distress signal. Or they might have no concept of melody, their culture built on silent pulses we can’t fathom. But I’m with Sagan—there’s hope in the attempt. Music’s our best shot because it’s us at our rawest: joy, pain, love, all distilled into a riff or a chord. If aliens don’t get that, they’re missing out.
Maybe music’s not the galactic language—maybe it’s just ours. But if it makes us dance, cry, or feel alive, that’s enough. Here’s to the last call, when the amps are off, but the song’s still ringing in your bones. Raise a glass to the hope that somewhere, out there, an alien’s tapping its foot.
Peter Frampton and the Best Long Solo of the ’70s | 100 Guitarists Podcast
You already know about Peter Frampton’s use of the Talk Box and the wild success of Frampton Comes Alive. On this episode of 100 Guitarists, we’re celebrating those things, but we’re also getting into all the stuff that made Frampton so great, from Humble Pie to his Simpsons cameo. His smashing success often overshadows some of the other fun facts about his life, like how he once played in a band managed by Bill Wyman, or his long friendship—and musical collaboration—with David Bowie.
Our very own Jason Shadrick tells the story of the time he played Frampton’s famous Les Paul and how that guitar got its very own standing ovation.
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“A bittersweet moment”: case maker Hiscox marks closure of UK factory after 40 years – but the brand will live on
2025 has been a bittersweet year for Hiscox Cases. After celebrating 40 years of craftsmanship, the company’s UK factory has been forced to close its doors.
While the news was shared in a statement back in May, yesterday marked the official end of Hiscox Cases’ UK production. “After 40 years of craftsmanship, care, and commitment, we want to thank every single member of our team – past and present – for helping build a brand trusted by musicians around the world,” the team shares in a Facebook post.
The farewell was complete with a photo of the team posing outside of the company’s Cannock factory. “While this chapter comes to a close, a new one begins,” the post notes.
Despite the unfortunate closure of its Staffordshire home, this wont be the end of Hiscox Cases. In fact, the post goes on to discuss RUF Technologies, a Polish brand that has acquired the company. “We’re working closely with RUF Technologies to ensure a smooth transition, and Hiscox Cases will soon be available once again — with the same dedication to quality that’s defined us for decades. Thank you for being part of our story. Here’s to what comes next.”
A bittersweet moment outside the Hiscox Cases factory on our final day of production in the UK.After 40 years of…
Posted by Hiscox Cases on Sunday, July 27, 2025
The acquisition has also been confirmed on the Hiscox Cases website. An announcement promises that production transfer will “guarantee the same brand, designs, quality and ongoing supply”, and Hiscox Cases Poland will resume shipping “popular models” throughout September, while “less-requested models will be produced to order” and will come in early 2026.
Hiscox Cases first announced that it would be shutting up shop back in May, before news of any acquisition was on the horizon. The news was shared in a statement on their website, noting that the “landscape for manufacturing here in the UK has become ever increasingly problematic since the COVID pandemic”.
“We have faced severe challenging issues with every aspect of the process from raw materials to shop floor staff availability to massively rising costs of production,” founder Brynn Hiscox said. “The compound issues are now so great we have regrettably reached the conclusion that it is no longer possible for us to remain a viable manufacturing business here in the UK.”
“As a luthier, all those years ago, I made my first guitar case specifically for my own use for my own guitars,” he reflected. “I never planned or even imagined that demand for my design would be so great that we have made more than 700,000 cases in the last 40 years. I suppose all good things eventually come to an end.”
“There is nothing more that I can say other than thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your business over the last 40 years.”
The post “A bittersweet moment”: case maker Hiscox marks closure of UK factory after 40 years – but the brand will live on appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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