Santa brought me a Boss BP-1w 🙂
What do I think of it? Read on for my (lengthy!) first impressions.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Boss BP-1w Booster / Preamp Pedal”Tone. At Home.
Santa brought me a Boss BP-1w 🙂
What do I think of it? Read on for my (lengthy!) first impressions.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Boss BP-1w Booster / Preamp Pedal”Rather than do a ‘best of’ style post, every year I’m doing a rundown of what guitars I’ve had my hands on, and what I’ve learned from the experience.
This post covers guitars that I play at home for fun. I’ll cover the guitars that I gig with tomorrow.
Previous years: [2019] [2020] [2021][2022]
Continue reading “2023 Review: Guitars For Home Playing”Back in July, I picked up a Boss HM-2w Heavy Metal distortion pedal.
I’m finally getting round to trying it out.
Continue reading “(Belated) First Impressions: Boss HM-2w Heavy Metal Distortion Pedal”I’ve just finished writing up both my First Impressions of the NUX Sixty-Five and my look at Universal Audio’s UAFX Woodrow Tweed Deluxe amp simulator pedal. Seeing as both are on the board at the minute, I thought: why not get some Strat tones out of both, and see how they compare?
I think this is worth doing. As much as I love tweed tone, there might be times where something else is a better option for me. And clean-ish Strat tones just might be one of those times.
Read on to find out what I think (with audio demos!).
Continue reading “#TweedTone: UAFX Woodrow vs NUX Sixty-Five For Stratocaster Tones”This month, the second-hand market has completely taken off. After what seems like years of me saying that there wasn’t much interesting stuff out there (well, interesting to me, anyway), I saw at least twenty different pedals that I would have loved to experience.
In the end, I got precisely none of them. I’d already picked up a couple of extra items back in September that I didn’t get to use until this month. And they’re both pretty fine, in my honest opinion.
Continue reading “New Arrivals: October 2023”I recently picked up a PRS Silver Sky guitar: the full-fat USA version, not the Silver Sky SE version.
What convinced me to buy one? How does it sound? Read on for all of that and more.
Continue reading “First Impressions: 2022-spec PRS Silver Sky”Andertons are back with a world exclusive! After PRS took a Fender Strat and stuck a PRS headstock on it, Fender are hitting back with new signature models from Slash and Carlos Santana. After all, if PRS can take an iconic guitar and slap a new headstock on it, why can’t Fender slap one of the most iconic headstocks of all time on a PRS guitar too?
This is an April Fools’ joke from Andertons, based on how the guitar community has reacted to the PRS Silver Sky. The two guitars in the video do exist, and are currently being auctioned on eBay for charity. Full links are in the video description on YouTube, so click through if you fancy bidding on either of these instruments!
The first batch of PRS Silver Sky guitars is out in the wild. Tim Pierce has borrowed one, and he’s posted a comparison of the Silver Sky vs an original Fender Stratocaster from 1965 – a guitar that costs about 10 times as much as the Silver Sky.
Have a listen.
I couldn’t hear a difference between the two guitars, not in the mix at any rate. And, honestly, I think that’s impressive.
Folks have been trying to recreate the fabled 59 Les Paul tone for decades, and so far no-one – including PRS – has managed to do so. We’ve ended up with some really good instruments to choose from if we don’t want a Gibson, but that hallowed tone has remained elusive. (In part because no-one can agree on what it is …). The PRS McCarty 594 is a fantastic guitar, but it does not sound like a Les Paul.
With the Silver Sky, it appears that PRS have managed to recreate that 60s Strat tone, and then improve on both the tone and the playing experience.
Once people get over the headstock, I’m sure this guitar is here to stay.
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Tim’s video.
I promise that I’ll stop posting about the PRS Silver Sky soon. Before I do, I have to share with you John Mayer’s own thoughts on his new guitar.
He’s not pulling any punches here. He tackles the guitar’s Fender heritage, why he went to PRS for this guitar, what makes it different from a Fender Strat, and where the time went on designing the Silver Sky. If you want to understand how he sees this guitar, it’s compulsory viewing.
The key thing I took away from this is that this all started with tone.  He wanted something that looked like a Strat, and played like a Strat, but that addressed some of the things he didn’t like about the Fender Strat sound. Paul Reed Smith is all about tone in a way that few other guitar builders are. And things evolved from there to become the Silver Sky that we’ve all been talking about.
Whether you like John Mayer or not, he deserves credit for putting out a video like this. It’s not some slick PR video. It’s just John talking into his phone on a livestream. How many other mega-artists would do this?
Sadly, he doesn’t post directly to YouTube, and I don’t know where the original video was posted. I couldn’t find it on Instagram or on Facebook.
Today, we have a different kind of demo from Peach Guitars. They’ve done a shootout between John Mayer’s current rig – PRS Silver Sky and JMOD amp – and his old, pre-PRS rig – Fender 63 Stratocaster and a Two-Rock amp.
The PRS Silver Sky continues to be the most talked about guitar of 2018. I still can’t figure why it’s generated the reaction that it has – including my own reaction.
The more I hear it though, the more I’m interested in trying one for myself. To my ears, it sounds like a lot has gone into tuning it to be a great guitar for completely clean tones. That’s where I used to live before moving onto Les Pauls. I’d love to find the right guitar to go back to that style one day.
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Peach Guitars’ video.