Apologies if you’ve emailed us lately and not had a response. It turns-out the latest update to our spam filtering software was a bit too zealous, and emails are going on hold that should come through without problems. What’s next? We’ve lowered the threshold so we are now getting more emails which includes a lot more […]

This photo was taken in New York last July in a shoe shop featuring one of the most Fender-inspired seats we’ve yet seen! Three side-by-side Fender Sidekick amps. 65 watts each, dual channel amps. Let’s hope no one was testing the amps whilst they were changing shoes!… Maybe they were launching a new brand of shoes […]

Competition was very strong to buy anything and everything from the Les Paul estate sale in Los Angeles yesterday and today. Of course Les Paul’s Gibson Les Paul Recording model guitars were the stars, but even this pair of worklamps generously estimated to bring $100 to $150, sold for an amazing $2,750 hammer price! Prices […]

Rather than the usual tradition of watching other people exerting themselves at Wimbledon while sipping a glass of something cool, the summer in Britain has kicked off unusually energetically with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations marking 60 years on the throne. Among the key events of a recent 4 day weekend of celebration was a […]

We’ve had a few emails lately asking us what’s going on: no new instruments on the site, everything’s sold. Are we asleep, is JGG still alive? Well, the answer is yes, we are alive, and not so much asleep, but in a chrysalis, shortly to emerge transformed and bigger and brighter and better than before. […]

  In 1952, Gibson’s President Ted McCarty approached a 42-year-old naval radio engineer named Seth Lover to design a new kind of pickup. Gibson and Gretsch had a problem with pickup hum. Both were competing with Fender’s brilliant marketing by producing big, powerful pickups, full of depth and character – put also prone to pick […]

(continued from previous post) Gretsch designs are suspended between acoustic and electric, between nostalgia for the cowboy past and indulgence in the high-tech (50s) present. And that link with the acoustic is reflected in the sound: The sound is tight and powerful, with an initial kick to each note: Gretsches can growl, even played clean. […]

In today’s world of digital effects, the sound of the pickup can be lost amid waves of delay and chorus. But it wasn’t always thus: in the 1950s, everything turned on the raw sound of the guitar. The sound had to lunge out of the juke box and grab you by the ears. It had […]