D’Angelico USA to be Reborn, Unveiled at the winter NAMM show...

Local Music Gear Exclusive Interview 
Written By: Dan O'Donnell

When John D’Angelico opened his first guitar shop on Kenmare St., in lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village during the Great Depression, he opened the doors to a new era of creativity in guitar design and construction. His instruments became synonymous with the “cool” New York village jazz scene, and his guitars’ looks still serve as a reminder of what brash, art deco America was like.

Founded in 1932, D’Angelico Guitars have been a fixture on the record charts with guitar greats as diverse as Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler using them from their introduction to the present day. The innovative, stunning and highly sought-after guitars helped give voice to guitarists by increasing their volume while playing acoustically, and also gained a reputation for style because of their hand crafted artistic beauty.

They have been shown in at least two major museum exhibitions, one at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. and one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2011. In the New York exhibit at least, D’Angelico’s workmanship and tone were seen as on a level with that of late Renaissance violin maker Antonio Stradivari.

Luthier Bryan Jeppson Creates Tonal and Visual Beauty Through Innovation ...

Local Music Gear Exclusive Interview 

Written By: Dan O'Donnell

Bryan Jeppson has been playing guitar most of his life and, for the three decades or so he’s played in bands, he’s always been stumped in his search for a left-handed guitar that provided the tone and playability that he wanted. So the lanky, longhaired lefty decided that if he couldn’t find his dream guitar, he would build it.

“I was always frustrated by the scarcity of quality left-handed guitars,” Jeppson said. “By the mid-nineties I started to relieve my frustrations by making them for myself.” He said he had an epiphany while shopping at a music store in Maryland.

“I was in a store in Gaithersburg, MD, and they had a bargain bin of parts in the back, and there was a left handed guitar body for ten bucks,” Jeppson said, sounding like a Local Music Gear reader. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I could do something like that.’”

So Bryan put out the ten bucks, started making kit guitars and moved onward to necks and pickups. Now he finishes his artworks at his workshop, for appreciative artists. Each guitar is custom made, generally with his signature hand-wound pickups, and many feature intricate carvings and inlays on them all done by Bryan Jeppson.

Leslie West Talks About His Gear, and the guitarists he worked with on his latest album 'Unusual Suspects'...

Local Music Gear Exclusive Interview 
Written By: Dan O'Donnell

Leslie West is a guitar legend that time has been good to, probably because he refuses to live in the past. 

Sometimes called a pioneer of heavy metal, his band Mountain blew away attendees at the original Woodstock concert (it was their fifth gig), and established him as a hard driving, hard playing guitarist with a no-holds barred approach to his sound. It also made him celebrated for the uniquely rich tone he coaxed out of a single-pickup Les Paul, Jr., which was his preferred guitar for decades.

While he learned to play guitar at about nine years old, he first started playing on a ukulele. “When I got an actual guitar with six strings, I didn’t know what to do with the extra two,” West said. It was a happy accident that led to him wanting to play guitar.

Early Experiences Led MacPherson to Produce World Class, Hand Made Guitars ...

Local Music Gear Exclusive Interview 
Written By: Dan O'Donnell

When Dennis MacPherson, owner and founder of MacPherson Guitarworks in Ringwood, NJ, began working at the Oscar Schmidt company in 1978 among his first jobs was tuning marimba blocks. That experience--of shaping tone by shaping wood—served as a “grad school” of sorts and taught him what would become an invaluable skill for a luthier making his trademark “Black Pearl” guitars, as well.

The work done shaping blocks of wood to produce a specific note is painstaking and centuries old, as is the luthier craft. And when done properly, each can produce a breathtaking tone. MacPherson, a man with a ready smile and a workshop full of hand crafted artworks, said that his passion for woods and woodworking sprang at least in part from his experiences at Oscar Schmidt building not just xylophones and marimbas, but flat top Harmony guitars as well.

Guns N' Roses Guitarist Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal talks Gear, Guitar Making, and Music

Local Music Gear Exclusive Interview 
Written By: Dan O'Donnell

Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal is a guitarist with a lot going on. In addition to his main gig as lead player with Guns N' Roses, in his non-touring time he can be found working with a wide variety of artists in his NJ studio as a co-writer and producer of artists from Mexican female rocker Poc (pocnation.com) to New York City female rocker Alexa Vetere (alexavetere.com) to Houston rapper ‘Scarface.’

Besides working with these up-and-coming artists, Ron is releasing his own songs as they come out, complete with extras that include charts for the songs, mixes without leads so listeners can play along, mixes with only leads, so listeners can try to replicate what he plays, and “stems” or separate tracks for each instrument so listeners can adjust the mix to their liking.

“I know my audience, I know what they like, and I know what I like,” Ron said. “They are guitar players, and they ask me all the time, ‘do you have tabs or charts for your songs?’ And so I write the charts for the songs and put them out there.”