Guitar

Last month, Fender launched its third Acoustasonic hybrid acoustic, and we got to play with the Jazzmaster and interview the company's R&D chief. Now Master Builder Ron Thorn has given the Custom Shop treatment to the guitar, and it's a beaut.

Pearl Jam's Mike McCready is perhaps most associated with a Fender Stratocaster, and his vintage '59 model is his most prized. So it was this instrument that was chosen for a very limited Custom Shop replica run. But not all was as it seemed.

Fender conceived the Acoustasonic as the "modern acoustic" guitar. Slim, lightweight and super easy to play, it's a digital twist on a familiar organic form. We spoke to Fender's VP of R&D about how this "transitional" guitar works and what it means.

This tiny, $100 gadget plugs into your guitar where the lead would normally go, and gives you instant access to 12 beautifully modeled amp sounds and a range of effects through headphones, for super-portable practice and recording. Very impressive!

A world-leading guitar amp and effects emulation company has distilled much of its digital wisdom into a tiny but mighty sub-$300 practice amp that gives you one-touch, free access to more than 10,000 editable tones and some very smart learning tools.

10 guitars in one; that's the promise with Fender's groundbreaking digitally-enhanced Acoustasonic range, and the new Jazzmaster flavor pushes things further and harder than ever before. We've spent two weeks with Fender's brave leap into the future.

Klos Guitars has been making acoustics and ukes fashioned from carbon fiber for a number of years now, and while there have been instruments you can plug into an amp, the company hasn't ventured into all electric guitar or bass territory, until now.

Fretlight has been making guitars with LEDs embedded in the neck for a good long while now, but all of its instruments so far have been full size electrics or acoustics. Now it's going on the road with a travel version of its learning system.

With the release of the "Spark-O-Matic" Jazzmaster, Fender has completed its Parallel Universe II line up, an eight model range of limited edition electric guitars that combine elements of different Fender icons to create some interesting oddities.

After completing its third successful Kickstarter, Band Industries started shipping the Roadie 3 – a kind of electronic multi-tool for string pickers – out to backers in November 2020. As with the previous generations, we got sent one to try.

French sound design firm HyVibe hit Indiegogo in late 2017 with an acoustic guitar infused with digital smarts. Now the company has announced a kit that can turn pretty much any acoustic into a hybrid smart guitar.

Players looking to tap into the sweet sounds of a vintage AC30 amplifier while out and about might plug into an amPlug headphone amp and rock out. But now there's another option, with three Vox headphone variants that have guitar amps cooked in.